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| If no one makes coilovers for your car, Pro Parts can make you a set of custom high quality coilovers using Koni universal racing shocks. |
When getting coilovers, it is best if you get ones with adjustable damping, as a warning the cheap Chinese coilovers often have adjustment knobs that do little to actually vary the damping and some are actually there only for looks! Feal Suspension has a revalving service where they can actually revalve some of the cheaper sets of coilovers to make them work better.
| Our basic suspension of choice is KW Clubsports. These flat out work and can see you from a beginning level all the way up to pro competition. Several top pros including Matt Powers use these off the shelf. If this sounds like a KW commercial, so what, they work awesome. The only drawback is being double adjustable, it is possible to set them up really wrong, so please read our tech articles. |
The main thing is that we really suggest for you to save your money and buy the best coilovers you can afford, you won’t regret doing so. If you buy cheap coilovers you will quickly find that they are hampering your driving and will end up buying better stuff soon enough.
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| Walker Wilkerson uses A'PEXi N1 coilovers, another good quality coilover. You might be able to buy copies of A'PEXi and Tein suspension for 1/3 the price, perhaps some of the copies are claimed to be are from the same Taiwanese suppliers that OEM these for the Japanese companies but you are not getting the valving and calibration that works well. Believe us we have tried to mess with a few of the lower priced shocks. Weird spring rates, poor damping and knobs that don't do anything are all really common. Save your money and get the real thing! |
For spring rate you want to choose something that will give pretty good balance while not being too stiff. Racecar stiff is out, for drifting you want to use spring rates that are only a little stiffer than typical high performance street coilover spring rates. For the super popular S Chassis that is something like an 8kg front and a 6kg rear. For other cars you might want to use what people are doing for track days with street based cars. Typically, you want a wheel rate slightly stiffer in the front than the rear. Wheel rate is the spring rate at the wheels. This is important because many cars, especially multilink cars have different motion ratios that put different leverage rates on the springs.
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| Pat Mordaunt rocks KW Clubsports on his 350Z. |
To determine what your wheel rate is, you can jack your wheel up through their stroke after removing the springs. Measure how far your wheel travels over its stroke. Then measure how much your shock moves over the wheel's stroke. Then divide the amount your shock moves by the amount the wheel moves. The resulting number is your motion ratio which you can multiply by your spring rate to get your approximate wheel rate.
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| Even when drifting for fun with your buddies, drifting pushes you and your car beyond the limits. It is much easier and fun with good suspension. Suspension makes perhaps the biggest difference of all mods you can do for your drift car. |
