Just bought set of Tein Coil Overs and will install them this weekend. Installing them is the easy part, how do I set them up for proper weight distribution. I Plan to go to my local speed suspension shop that has the a scale at each wheel, but what should I be targeting as weight distribution.

Since the car has an inherrent understeer, should I move the weight more to the front? say 55 front /45 rear for autoX? Should I fix the understeer with tires and run a 50/50??? For drags, run more weight on the rear?

Secondly, what do you do to index, or baseline the setting? That is I plan to have an autoX setting, Drag setting and street setting. I was going to mark each setting on the shock with something , or take a measurment for each setting.

What have you folks who have coil overs done?


__________________
Drive a tight line


Mark

 

Have you taken your car to the track to make sure it has understeer? I just came from 3 days at Putnam and I did not experience understeer. The car went where I pointed it. To set your weight distribution look at a site called turnfast.com. It talks alot about different car set ups, brakes, tires, suspension, corner balancing, ect.

 

Thanks Clyde, yes I have taken it to the track and yes the front end washes out. I would rather have the car be a little loose than tight.

 

If you experienced no understeer, you were driving WAY under the limit.

 

I'm not too familiar with setting up suspensions, but from a purely scientific standpoint, I don't think you will be able to adjust the overall front/rear weight distribution significantly by adjusting your shocks. That is determined by the position of the CG of the car relative to the wheelbase. While the turnfast.com article does say the CG can be manipulated by raising or lowering one side of the car, it is very unlikely that you will be able to change the CG of the Z by a significant amount, since the car is already pretty low and has a pretty long wheelbase.

What you can do, is adjust the corners of the car by "lifting" one of the wheels. If you lift the right front wheel for instance, you will put more load on the left front and right rear, and less load on the right front and left rear. However, when you add the total load on the fronts and the rears, it will still be very close to what the original loads were.

For "right turn racing" there might be a good way to load the car for turning on one direction (which might also get the suspension the the optimal angle with the road more quickly), but if you are doing AutoX's my understanding is that you would want the weight as balanced as possible.

If I am wrong, can someone please tell me what I am missing?

Thanks,
D'oh!