,
The Tein Flex Z coilovers really dropped our ride height, by at least two inches making the car look great.For our initial review, we were very impressed with the Tein Flex Z much to our surprise. To be honest, knowing the suspension's price and its low budget design intent we did not expect much. The ride is nicely damped, not harsh or floaty. The ride is not worse that stock at all but has a well managed firmness that gives improved control but absolutely will not be annoying in daily driving. There is plenty of wheel travel and the car does not crash on the bumpstops even when encountering large bumps at fairly high speeds.
The best street suspension for the money? If it isnt, we would like to know of a less expensive system that works better.What really impressed us was the suspension's performance when we loaded Project VA down with 4 people and a week's worth of luggage then drove the car to the airport. This sort of thing gives many performance suspension packages a fit. At near the vehicle;s gross vehicle weight, the Tein Flex Z impressed us by maintaining its composure providing a very smooth and controlled ride, even on high speed freeway transition roads with huge expansion joints.
With great control and daily driving comfort, the Flex Z has thoroughly impressed us. We are pretty jaded when it comes to suspension since a lot of our project cars have high end stuff. We would even go as far as saying that for this application the Flex Z is one of the best street suspensions we have yet to try and for the price, it is even more amazing.
The other surprising thing was that their was no creaking, pings, squeaks and rattles that usually accompany a set of coilovers no matter how good they are. The Flex Z's are totally silent and unobtrusive, the quietest coilovers we have ever used. We have been running the Flex Z as is right out of the box without attempting to adjust them and they are very close to perfect!
If you have been tempted to buy one of the cheaper Chinese made brands due to your budget, remember a couple of things, many of them work worse than stock and for very little more money you can get a set of Tein Flex Z's and actually make a big improvement in your cars handling. We can confidently say that the Flex Z is one of the best suspension bargains on the market.
Stay tuned, in our next edition of Project WRX VA we will be installing our final suspension parts by Superpro and setting up the chassis. We will also tune the suspension and do some serious evaluation of the Flex Z's capability at speed.
Read more about Project VA WRX here!
Sources
8 comments
By chance do you have any content where you compared shock dynos of various coilovers for a specific application? Maybe showing say $500 up to $3500 offerings, comparing the linearity of their adjustment, etc. etc. I’m too much of a layman to make actually look at the dynos themselves and make the comparison, but it would be great to read your takeaways/insights from an expert like yourself.
Cheers.
That would be pretty expensive to do, costing about $1000 per set of shocks, and dyno’s don’t tell you everything. Especially with cheap shocks.
Regarding the coilover install, did you guys adjust preload or ran it how it came out of the box? And Are Rear LCA recommended.
Thank you!
We did some minor adjustments of the ride height but did not preload the suspension.
Regarding the install, did you guys adjust preload or ran it how it came out of the box? And Are Rear LCA recommended.
Thank you!
We don’t tune with preload, I don’t agree with that. Preload doesn’t increase the spring rate, it just increases the initial force to move the suspension.
Can you confirm that the new Flex Z’s are made in China. I just bought a set from an authorized dealer & i’m looking at the box & they say designed by Tein in Japan, Assembled by Tein China MFG. Which is odd since they’re advertised at the time of writing this as Made in Yokohama Japan.
Seems they do have factories in both Japan and China. Flex Z’s are majorly produced in China according to their blog page. (https://teinusa-blog.com/made-in-japan-or-china/)
I bought a set of Flex Z for AE100 for a surprisingly expensive price of >$1200 back in Oct 2021. “Made in Japan 日本製” was printed in big letters on the packaging.