Here Shelby adjusts the rear rebound damping. It’s lucky that she is tiny and can fit in tight places. By messing with the shocks alone, the front to rear tire average temperature variation was brought to within 10 degrees. This is a good indicator that the car is using all four tires well and is well balanced.
The comfort level in steering, handling and stability through corner turn-in, apex and exit was a night and day difference. With no other suspension mods added other than the KW 2-Way Clubsport’s 70% of the understeer and body roll I was experiencing was eliminated! The pictures below show the difference between my off-roading Subaru and my road racing Subaru.
Before, body roll and understeer like a Mofo! The car is rolling over so bad that the outside wheels are nearly on the bump rubbers!
After, with KW, low flat and fast. There is now hardly any body roll and understeer is all but eliminated in most turns. I can also get the car to rotate with just a bit of lift throttle or trail braking were before I had to really do these tricks to get the car to stop plowing.
To get your own set of KW’s, head on over to KW Suspensions website and find a local dealer as well as the easy to follow instruction manual!
More is still to come, Mike says that my suspension still needs a lot of help. My rear camber is all wrong (way too negative) and not adjustable. My car needs more front negative camber with more positive caster and all my bushings are soft rubber. Mike says my car needs more adjustability and more roll stiffness via sway bars. He is confident that we can get another big reduction in lap time with these changes, so stay tuned!
Huge shout out to Mike Kojima for the setup specs, B3- Brandon Bachtel Built for the installation help and Mike, Shelby Crackston along with my IAG Performance Team for the trackside support!
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.