The Ultimate Guide to Suspension and Handling Part 4: Reduce weight transfer

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You could lower your car cheaply with lowering springs but typically these end up hurting your handling as almost every set we have ever tested is too low and too soft and the car bottoms under roll causing irregular handling.  The proper way is with a shorter bodied shock which usually means a set of coilovers.  This way the car can get lower with out loosing bump travel.  These coilovers are made by the Progress Group.

Lowering the center of gravity or CG for short is best accomplished by lowering the car’s ride height. It’s best because you are lowering the entire mass of the car. Lowering the ride height also has the side effect of improving the car’s aerodynamics as well. Lowering is usually accomplished with shorter springs. The smartest approach is to use shorter springs and shorter bodied shock absorbers or struts which maintain stock compression travel at a lower ride height.

You can go too low. Last year Formula D pro drifter Matt Powers was the hero of the hella flush fanboys.  In last years trim, Matt’s car was leaving a lot of performance on the table.  Photo by Larry Chen

There is a point of diminishing returns though. Excessive lowering can change suspension geometry for the worse, including such bad side effects as causing positive camber under roll, causing excessive gain of negative camber under roll and contributing to increased bumpsteer.  Over lowering can also cause more body roll by screwing up roll center location.  We will get more into the details of what can happen in future editions of this series but lets say that most cars should only be lowered 1-2″ because of these mitigating conditions hella flush or not.

This year Matt had to up his game as Formula D is getting a lot tougher.  Matt raised his car up and it’s working better.  We are helping him with his set up too.  Photo from our buddies at Speedhunters.

The easiest way to increase track width is to use wider wheels and tires that fill out the wheel wells. This also increases the amount of rubber on the road improving mechanical grip. Using wheel spacers and wheels with a more positive offset can also increase track width. Too much of a positive change in track width can increase the scrub radius.  This is the distance from the centerline of the tire’s contact patch to a point on the ground where an imaginary line drawn through the ball joints of the suspension meets the ground in the case of a multilink suspension.