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How does all of this stuff work? Well on this particular car since it is a wife driven, family daily driver we decided to forgo our normal stuff like hard bushings or bearings in the suspension, marginally streetable alignment settings and much stiffer springs and really low ride heights. Does the car still deliver without all of this stuff?
We think it does. The stock IS-F was no slouch and we feel that we enhanced the suspension while improving the streetability. The 2010 IS-F was known for its harsh stock ride and ours was no exception. In 2011 Lexus took some steps to improve the ride and softened things up but our car rode, well, like a high performance sports car.
In our car the KW Variant 3's are amazing, they ride much smoother than stock even with higher spring rates yet our car has good low damper shaft speed control so chassis responsiveness is also improved with much less body roll and quicker transient response. We stiffened our shocks slightly from KW's base settings going up two clicks in both compression and rebound in the rear and one click in compression and rebound in the front. to crispen up the chassis a little more. The ride is still excellent and there is still plenty more adjustment if you wanted to stiffen things up even further for a little track use.
In our case, the KW's sophisticated valving and flexibility in adjustment really allow one to have his cake and eat it too! This makes the KW Variant 3 an almost must have for the IS-F owner.
The Sikky antisway bar in the middle position eliminated understeer and in fact made the car a little on the tail happy side. If oversteer scares you put the bar in the soft position. When the wife drives the car, the stability control takes care of the tail happiness as long as it is not put in sport mode. The middle setting really makes the car fun even though we are running a greater, more rear biased tire stagger than stock.
We were worried that the Figs Engineering rear lower arms would contribute to noise and harshness with its monoball bearings. In actual use it was hardly noticeable. You could hear a slight bit more road noise transferred into the cabin but you would have to really be trying to hear and feel it. If you are super picky this might bother you but then your are probably not the type to buy an IS-F either. In the meanwhile we will take a better rear camber settings and enjoy longer tire life with a lowered car!
Our Project Mu brakes have a lot of bite and really good pedal feel. The improvement in the pads' bite is immediately felt. Like we said for track use you would be swapping them out for something more aggressive. Project Mu has a wide range of more aggressive compounds from the slightly more aggressive B-Force to the street/track HC plus which can also work as a pure track pad. There are three higher rated pads in the Project Mu lineup if that still isn't enough!
The best thing about the NS pads so far is that they make about 10x less dust than the stock pads! This makes housekeeping much easier. The dust is less corrosive as well. The pads seem to be really non abrasive and after a few thousand miles, you can still see the machining marks on the rotors! We think that rotor life will be greatly improved with the NS pads. About the only drawback is that the pads have a slight squeak while cold but this quickly goes away after a few stops in the morning, a small price to pay for the improved performance and cleanness!
We think our mods give the IS-F the stuff to be able to go toe to toe with any sports sedan on the market as it currently handles better than other stuff we have sampled, including a Jaguar XF, a RS4, a M5 and the venerable class target the M3.
Stay tuned, we will be testing a set of headers from Sikky soon and some other stuff from FIgs Engineering.
Read More About Project IS-F Here!
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