A great way to immediately improve the handling of your car is to lower its center of gravity, which reduces the inside to outside weight transfer while turning. This allows the contact patch off all 4 tires to be used more effectively when cornering while also speeding up transient response. Lowering the center of gravity is the scientific, non-ricer reason to lower your car, not just because it’ll look cooler in photos, although that is a bonus.
To drop the height of the car, we turned the composite clad stainless spring perch that allows for continuous height adjustments clockwise until we go the desired ride height of 2” front and 1.5″ rear lower from stock height. By doing this we now have allowed the car to have a 1.5 degrees forward rake which helps aerodynamics. The ride height can be measured at the chassis side rail pinch weld, to the floor, or whatever level surface you are working on. Some people use the center cap of the wheel to the fender, whatever you use to measure, just keep it consistent.
Results show that we were able to fine-tune these KW 2-Way Clubsport’s using their separately adjustable rebound and compression damping and improve lap times. While testing at Gridlife South at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta, we were able to drop TWO seconds alone according to the Apex PRO (which you can read about here for more information).
Part of being a good driver is the ability to communicate with your engineer so effective changes can be done with your cars set up. KW Suspension was good enough to fly Mike Kojima out to help dial my car in for the track. Just simply adjusting the Clubsports correctly made a huge difference in how the car felt and the results showed in my lap times.
6 comments
Nice setup, I’ve always been a fan of that KW stuff.
The rear compression knob looks unreachable though.
Also, In my opinion it’s better to do the initial camber setup with the plates centered, so that you can still increase the camber yourself afterwards if needed.
The compression adjuster is on top of the shock shaft accessible through the trunk. It doesn’t get any easier than that! When the car has trouble getting enough negative camber using all the adjustments it has, then the plates are not centered. The author talked about not having enough negative camber in the story. Since I worked on the car, it used all of its adjustment in that direction and some modifications will have to be made in the future to get more because the car still doesn’t have enough front negative camber even when adjusted all the way in that direction.
Hi Mike,
I had V3s on my GD back in the days, and I’m pretty sure that on 2 way KW shocks the compression adjuster is on the lower side of the strut, as stated on page 3 of this story (but I may be mistaken).
Looking at the photos, it looks like the knob is stuck between the shock body and the lower arm and barely accessible, but pictures can be misleading.
Regarding the camber, if you were trying to get the maximum possible camber right from the start, then yes it makes sense, mea culpa. I thought you had set a target value then noticed it was not enough when testing the car on track.
I hope my english is not too broken. Posting from France 🙂
Greetings
That WRX looks like a monster. Great setup!
Hey Mike, What would be the optimal alignment settings (for the track with the VA chassis) front and rear if given full adjustablility?
that is a too general question to really answer. It has to be determined through testing.