Here you can see the range affected by a typical low-speed compression adjustment. As we noted before, low speed affects the resistance to body movement and is what the driver feels the most.
Many of our Project Cars also use the 3-way adjustable V4 Clubsport shock. Clubsports have higher spring rates and stiffer valving and are meant to be used as a shock that can work for daily driving to track use. Here are the 3-way Clubsports found on our Project GD STI.
Our Project FR-S also has V4 3-way Clubsports.
Here is the typical adjustment range for the high-speed compression knob. High speed affects the initial reaction to steering input and how the car reacts to hitting bumps. If the car is blowing through the travel when hitting FIA curbs or in water crossings in the road, you can control how the suspension takes up these bumps with high-speed compression adjustment.
Our R35 GT-R Project car also rides on V4 Clubsports. We were able to dial in a smoother ride than stock but with superior handling. These shocks were a few seconds faster than the excellent stock shocks on the Nurburgring Ring.
9 comments
“KW and ST Suspension also have really good baseline settings for all of their products in the enclosed instructions.”
I did email KW a couple months ago, to ask what were the default settings on my KW v3’s, and the response wasn’t that, but rather to just start at full soft and work your way up +2, until it’s too stiff, then back off -2 or -1. No defaults were listed in the manual that I could find. In fact, I found the manual of theirs rather lacking. I ended up crowd sourcing some settings, started there, and ended up with something that is 90% there to my liking… I just need more time behind the wheel now to fine tune.
That being said, thank you thus far for the excellent content on this topic and each part you’ve created. Super valuable.
Next article could be on re-valves or choosing spring rates, why you want them, and how it relates to road or track performance. e.g. I recall reading examples of “abnormally,” high spring rates that would hurt you back, but with proper valving, was perfect to match the driving profile of the car.
The reality is that on the street, you’re not tuning for a time, you’re tuning for a driver and a road.
If you have crappy roads, and an older driver, you are going to go softer.
If you have smooth roads and a younger driver you can crank up the stiffness.
One thing I will say, is chuck the sway bar on your driven wheels and do roll control through the damper/spring. Its going to really suck up the bumps that way. I think super stiff sway bars are the work of the devil.
You can also find that stuff online on their website. Usually asking people on forums, etc is less than satisfactory. What I think is odd is that OEMs think 10% more spring is a lot, I mean we can go 100% or more stiffer, and with the right stuff, it can sometimes ride pretty nicely, even on the street. I sometimes am reluctant to write about some stuff that I develop. It’s what makes me valuable and it’s stuff I have figured out. I don’t mind writing about standard best practices in racing though.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the information as always. Just one question and this might be a little off topic but when you tune your suspension bump , ride height and droop do you disconnect the swaybar? I have seen somewhere where they disconnect the sway bar when tuning and getting the measurements on these things but I can’t make sense of the fact why you have to disconnect it when you ran it on track with it on. If you can enlighten me on this please that would be great. Thank you so much.
No., only for corner weighting.
I really do appreciate these guides; I understand there’s a lot of nuance and tricks but for talking about your bread and butter it’s great that you’re giving good useful information other than “well more than one clicker and you need a data system” or “I’d be happy to help for my hourly fee”
On the second to last and last pages, I notice you had some histograms built in Motec’s software and then others in Excel – do you have any other data analysis software packages you prefer, or do you just have some macros and workflows in Excel? I tend to live in Excel for data acquisition analysis on my day job, but I can easily see how there’s, at least in theory, faster and smoother ways to do things.
Actually it’s not excel, its AIM race studio 3. Motec seems to be less glitchy. AIM always had tons of updates and patches and stuff not working.
Oh, I see why I assumed Excel… OK thank you.
actually race studio 2