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Here is a before and after view of our test S2000 bone stock and lowered with the HKS Max IV coilover set. The new ride height is just right, not too low but looks good with plenty of wheel travel with our short body shocks.We test drove the S2000 around the rough streets of the Southbay. To be honest we were very surprised with how well the HKS Max IV coilovers worked especially considering the 16 kg spring rate. They did not contribute to any sort of weird noises, clunks, squeaks or rattles even over broken pavement with bearing upper mounts. Perhaps a slight bit of additional noise was transmitted into the driver's compartment over broken rough and granular pavement but it really was not that big of a deal. For supposedly being an aggressive calibration, the SP model Max IV shocks were very good, even with poor pavement conditions.
What really surprised us was how well the Max IV's worked in general. Even with extensive street evaluation, we found that the shocks were set about spot on right out of the box as HKS promised. Hats off to their development crew. The fact that they are set up so well right out of the box is a big advantage to the inexperienced enthusiast.
One of the most common mistakes we find when helping people set up their car is that inexperienced people tend to set up their suspension way too stiff. This causes the car to lose traction in the corners. If you just stick with HKS's default settings you can't go wrong here. It was good to know that when we bolt on bigger and stickier tires and go to the track we will still have plenty of adjustment in the stiffer direction to dial that in. It is also cool that we could go softer if we felt wimpy or lived in an area with really bad pavement conditions.
Even if you get lost, it is easy to remember that the default setting is 15 clicks from full stiff or full soft so you can easily return the the baseline setting if you screw yourself into a corner with no notes!
When it comes to suspension we are hard to impress and we might go and say that the HKS Hipermax IV is one of the best single adjustable off the shelf coilover systems we have yet to try. Several different staffers of various skill levels evaluated the dampers and we all agreed that these are pretty darned good, a whole heck of a lot better than the original Hipermax we tested 10 years ago. We are very eager to do some on track evaluation soon but we are sure these will work on the track well. Thank you HKS for letting us try these!
Sources
Motovicity – North American Distributors for HKS (Dealers Only)
