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We sawed the hole from the bottom of the strut tower upwards. Although it is pretty scary to hack up a new car like this, it isn't all that hard to do if you are careful and take your time.
With the hole cut, you have full access to the camber plate for adjustment and the front damping adjuster. If you don't cut the hole, you will have to unbolt the strut from the car every time you want to adjust it.
The Suspension Techniques strut has a bracket so that you can reinstall the front mass damper if you want. We thought about it and dug the dampers out of the trash.
The front strut has a slotted tab for additional camber adjustment on the upper bottom strut bolt as shown here. If you use a slightly smaller bolt, you can get up to 4 degrees of negative camber, just the thing for autocrossers and track day people.
After thinking a little more we said screw it and the mass dampers went back into the garbage. For the record we did not notice any additional NVH without them in place.
We used a slightly smaller 10mm diameter upper strut bolt and were able to adjust the camber to negative 4 degrees by tilting the spindle inwards and maxing out the camber plate. The car was going to the track the next day so this was good. We would not run this amount of camber for long term daily street driving. We set the toe to 1/8″ out.Our Suspension Techniques equipped Fiesta ST is amazing. The car's ride quality is fine, hardly any rougher than stock and at the same time better in some respects. While keeping the ride good, handling has been improved dramatically. With an aggressive alignment, you have to try to get the car to understeer and the chassis rotates sharply under lift throttle, whipping the car around the sharpest of turns. This is easily counteracted by stepping on the gas and letting the Ecoboost engine pull the car straight.
Even better, at Willow Springs raceway, the car was able to lap two seconds a lap faster than the stock suspension, an impressive feat considering how good the car was stock. Good ride and improving already good handling, what more could you want?. We think with some time and some more adjustment, there is still about a half to another second a lap on the table. We guess having the car lower also means it looks better for those of you that care!
Stay tuned we will be adding more parts to our car in the near future to make this ground breaking car even greater.
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3 comments
What class is this being built to “race” in? Asking because I noticed you did not go as large of a brake kit as I would have thought (or that we went to) to truly upgrade the system. And I don’t see any brake venting. Are you not having heating issues with your brakes? We put the Wilwood kit on my son’s ’16 and are now working on ducting for it. After melting the stock caliper seals and dust boots twice, he decided to go with a larger rotor and caliper that gives him much more pad area. I must say I love the new brakes. Let just hope they last better then the factory ones did with Hawk pads.
At the time, there were not any other alternatives.
I am really glad I found all your articles on Fiesta ST race build as I am building an ST for rallycross here in the UK. Lots of great tips and things I hadn’t considered before. Thank you.