I'm fairly new to the S2K, and I've been doing a lot of lurking on this forum, so hopefully this isn't a rehash of a topic that's been covered a bunch already.

Basically, I'm loving my 05, and willfully admit that I have yet to push the limits of the stock suspension. I've had one trackday with it, and about 30 minutes of misc. track time, so I'm still feeling things out. The only things I'm changing/will change before the next track day are brake fluid, pads and getting the Euro alignment.

All that said, I'm curious as to how track driven S2K'ers go about eliminating roll. In my last car, a WRX, I had shocks/springs, but it wasn't until I added F/R swaybars that the car really started to handle well, and really felt nice and flat through the corners. I'm tempted to approach things the same way with the S, but the swaybar options out there seem to be much more focused toward autocross. This leads me to assume (falsely?) that most of the track tuning is donw with spring rates/shock tuning. It would seem from this that a pair of coilovers will be in order in the future.

In terms of what I'll do with the car, it will be occasionally track/HPDE driven, and I'm still too young and stupid to care about driving a super stiff car around on the street, so I'd be fine with all but the most bone-crushing coilover setups. I don't have any plans to autocross, so I'm not shoehorned into a specific mod path.

 

less roll doesn't necessarily mean that its handling better. more spring or sway bar on a corner can actually reduce the amount of grip on a corner.

That being said, sway bars or anti-roll bars will reduce the amount of lean without increasing (significantly) the overall spring rate so that the car still will not ride as harsh as it would with stiff springs.

But eliminating roll doesn't mean that your car will magically handle better.

They change the front sway bar in auto-x because that is all that they are allowed to. If there could change springs they would be doing that first IMO.

-Ry

 

krazik - thanks for the reply, though maybe I didn't give you enough information. Most of what you posted seems pretty common sense to me, so I'll assume that my original post/goals weren't clear.

I do know that decreasing roll won't "magically" make the car handle better, though I would argue that it's a good start with most four-wheeled track-bound cars. My question was more of a philosophical one - if decreasing roll is the aim, how would you do it?

This question is partially based on the fact that I have had little problem finding posts related to autox with this car, but not a ton of info on HPDE/track driving. For sure, I'm not building a race car, so the higher-end coilovers are unnecessary. I suppose I'm looking for the advice of serious track drivers that have yet to convert to full race cars, and still want some measure of civility on the street.

I'm looking for a starting point, and my first observations with this car on track, and on the street, were that it rolls quite a bit. My second observation was that you really can't get on the throttle very early during corner exit, though I assumed part of that was the fact that it's a fairly powerful, short wheelbase RWD car, so maybe some of that comes with the territory.

I then assumed swaybars would be a logical jumping off point, but was surprised to find very few widely-accepted sets. Most of the bars appear to be very much designed for autox, which requires very different suspension tuning philosophies than track driving does (sure some of the stuff carries over, but I'm talking about high-speed stability without as much focus on being able to rotate the car at the drop of a hat).

So that's a little more info on where I'm coming from. I'm familiar with common parts and what they do (i.e. increase r swaybar stiffness to dial in oversteer, super stiff springs can bounce and decrease pavement contact, etc.). What I'm looking for is more along the lines of "I drive on the track all the time, and XXX really worked for me." That's where I got the idea for the Euro alignment, and I'm looking forward to trying it out. I might be barking up the wrong tree here, but this seemed like the logical place to ask the question.

 

I think this was the answer he was trying to convey

I agree with that too. The real advantage of having an independent suspension is to have each wheel just that...independent. If you have a lot of grip for whatever reason, exaggerated lean from soft springs can hurt your traction on the inside wheel for obvious reasons. Lowering the car = lowering the roll center so that helps up to a point. Stiffer springs also help, but again up to a point because you still need the springs to handle mid-turn bumps adequately, so they can't be super-stiff. That's when swaybars can help, by helping distribute the transfered load to the inside wheels.

I think of springs are the real suspension "tuning" portion of the equation: get them right and all is well. The swaybars are essentially the tweaking portion of the equation.

Bassem