OK, one post and that's it, I'm getting out of this thread.

To your credit, Baller, you've been mostly polite this time. But you can't expect us (the R&C veterans) to change our advice just because you claim the stock suspension isn't good enough. In fact, you haven't even claimed that -- you're clearly just spouting whatever you've heard, or assumed you would hear, from your JDM Ricer buddies.

Now if you had come here and said, "I've done 15 autocrosses, 10 drift events, and 10 HPDEs on the stock shocks, and I just can't get the car to handle the way I want", and then you provided specific examples, maybe a video or two, well then we could probably help. Heck, the advice *might* even have been to get an aftermarket suspension. But you didn't, and you won't, because you can't.

So here's my advice, which I 100% guaran-damn-tee will work:

The S2000's handling can be tuned to either oversteer or understeer with just tires and tire pressures. That's not true of every car, and it's one of the reasons (along with the coilover design with remote reservoirs in the rear) that we insist the stock suspension is so good. So, get a cheap set of stock rims (will cost you maybe $250, less than a tenth what a good set of coilovers cost). Now do the following:

Want to drift? Throw some new 225/50 S02s on the front rims. Drop the pressures to 32psi. On the rears, mount some cheap-ass 600-treadwear all-season tires and crank the pressures to 40 psi. I recommend Federated Federals. If you can't drift with this setup, you're retarded.

Want to do HPDE/canyon/agressive street driving? Put your shiny stock rims with their stock tires back on, and you're ready.

That's it. Seacrest, OUT.

 

Seacrest

 

Don't see why you would assume that. My counter proposal is that you go out and do 10-15 drift days, then come back and tell us what works. Then we'll know, and the next time somebody asks the question, you'll be able to answer.

 

Agreed. I don't think I've ever seen an informative drift-related post on this forum (as opposed to a question). If any of the regulars had an answer for you, they would have posted by now. These two data points lead me to believe that that drift knowledge doesn't exist on this forum yet.

The same thing happened when the '04s came out; '04 owners would come here, ask questions, then a couple of days later yell, "WHY THE HELL IS NO ONE ANSWERING MY QUESTIONS?!?" The answer was that none of us knew the answers, and that remained the case until a few enterprising '04 owners found out the hard way (i.e. themselves) and posted their results here. I second mikegarrison's suggestion that you do the same. Read the FAQ and various track setup threads here, take your best stab at a drift setup based on those, and iterate until you find a configuration you're happy with.

Steve

 

Paul Van Valkenburgh did a very thorough "drift engineering" writeup in Racecar Engineering a couple years ago.

I don't remember too much of it. One bit was that he observed the maximum drift angle a car can achieve is limited to the front wheels' maximum steer angle, and (at that time) nobody had done anything to get past about 45 degrees. With lower offset wheels and modified steering mechanics he felt drift angles much higher than this were possible.

Since drifting is considered more an art form and less a science, you can't expect an abundance of hard-and-fast rules on how to "improve" one's drift setup. Your best bet would likely to be to talk directly to some members of a professional drift team for some Q&A. Knowing Japanese might be helpful in that regard.

Regardless, I think drifting a perfectly stock S2000 is possible. At the Mazda Rev-It-Up the championship finalists entered an informal drift competition with Mazdaspeed Miatas and with a combination of radical steering inputs and murderous clutch dumps, impressive drifts were possible. The S2000's problem is going to be a lack of torque, as it'll have trouble roasting all but the crappiest of tires outside of first and second gear VTEC.