Wow, i havn't read one person who answered this guys q!! Maybe i missed someones post somewhere, but wow. Ok. You have oversteer. Oversteer is the rear is slipping or letting loose before the front. You need more bite, or traction in the rear to counter the front. You could also stiffen the front more, and you would get the same thing. Your looking to get the ratio of front to rear stiffness higher in the front than at stock. Cars with stiff supsensions have less bodyroll, but also tend to glide across the surface more than those with more give, hence your problem. If you change the factory setup, you may or may not loose the cornering abilities the car already has, but there is definetely room for improvement if done right. I suggest 1.5'' lowering springs, koni shocks, and a larger front sway bar. The front swaybar alone will give you the desired effect of less oversteer, but the springs and shocks will allow you to become even stiffer, thus giving you better handling. I realize i'm just rambling... i'm sorry. I'm not done yet though!! On my car i did something kinda nuts, but it works, and with R compound tires i have pulled 1.04g's on a Gtech. I have front and rear sway bars, and eibach lowring springs.... but only on the front! I also have koni shocks all the way around. The springs in front are stiffer and lower than the springs in the back, giving me less oversteer. The back factory springs still do the job great, and with the new ratio of front to rear stiffness, i very rarely find myself loosing control, usually only on purpose..... but then again i wouldn't consider that loosing control. I'm sorry to anyone who read this and realized i only needed to write a sentence or two to explain what the hell i'm talking about!!!!!!!

 

brandon, you don't wanna get rid of too much oversteer in this car. any well designed track-going car will have oversteer purposely built into it. one other reason why the S is nice on the track

this is why it's best to learn how to use the oversteer characteristic to your advantage. mentioned a million times before, good ways to do this are advanced driving schools, track and autox time

 

I realize you can utilize oversteer to your advantage, hence the comment i made above about only loosing control when i want. The fact of the matter is, the 2002 S2000 (mine) comes from the factory with too much oversteer for me to push to 10/10's of its capability. Reducing some of the oversteer has allowed me to retain its inherent RWD ability to kick the rear end around, while feeling confident enough to take a turn at high speed on a track without the fear of snap oversteer because of dust, dirt, water or leaves that may give my car just enough trouble to loose control.

 

how much do normal driving training(school)/autox cost?

 

how much do normal driving training(school)/autox cost?

 

how much do normal driving training(school)/autox cost?

 

Just about everyone who responded to this post gave reasonable advice. When someone says "the back end is easy to kick out" it sounds throttle induced to me. I have a MY 03 and I have no such problem. I have 8,700 miles on my S and believe me, 8,700 hard miles. My car is balanced PERFECTLY. Everyone I have talked to with a MY04 talks about big time under steer.

Sorry, I just don't buy into Tuneds200's MY04 having a oversteer problem. The only way I can force my car to oversteer is to crank the steering wheel at about 25-35 mph and nail the throttle. The only other way my car will break loose is if I go way to hot into a corner, and if I did, I would go into a four wheel drift.

 

My 2001 has the most firm OEM rear suspension of all succeeding S2k models. It's easy to control on the street and gets hairy when driven hard during auto-x. There's a major learning curve beyond the 80% mark of its performance. There are things you can do to make it more forgiving but as a driver, you need to master and learn the basics and do it well. You really can't use any special tricks to drive this kind of car fast. There's countless remarks about the best improvement you can do for the car is to work on the loose nut behind the wheel, and I support this remark 100%.

Too much or too little of anything is no good, and while oversteer can be good, too much isn't. The key is to find the right balance. Japanese Gymkana drivers will tell you that if the driver can extract clean, almost beautiful lines in the S2000, you'll be incredibly hard to beat. Oversteer is characteristic of the car wanting to turn which is good. The potential to make incredible runs is there, but the driver can't be a run-of-the-mill jack off the street, and like I said earlier, you must learn and master the basics in this car. If you can shift perfectly and steer well but can't use the brakes effectively, it's not enough to drive the S2k well.

From a tuning perspective, I used to wonder about why you'd want to tune the S2000 to understeer using a stiffer front sway bar? Wouldn't that make it less nimble? As I found out, it does understeer a tiny bit, but not much at all to affect it's ability to make the sharp corners. I believe that the affects of understeer are minimized due to it's 50/50 weight distribution.

I occasionally get involved with conversations comparing STI's to my car and almost everyone agrees that the STI is the better car... except me (I'm biased). To be fair, from a power and traction point of view, it's superior, but considering it has those advantages, I still think the S2k (during auto-x) is the superior car.

Since the STI has better power (displacement and turbo), and AWD traction, it has just as good or better grip than a stock S2k on R tires under most conditions. If the S2k should make a mistake and go too slow in a particular section, it doesn't have the torque or turbo to push it through (esp on the uphills)... the STI does. If the S2000 loses grip, you can't jump on the throttle like the STI and regain traction, so you need to learn the intracacies of throttle control/balance. STI's can go all out on the corner exits since it can put more power down while retaining traction. Do that in a stock S2000 and you'll likely to lose the rears even on R compounds, so as a driver, you must find speed in areas that most other drivers won't pay much attention to. As a driver, you need to be more aware to all of your senses in the S2000, which isn't as forgiving as many other cars... which brings me to believe that if you're fast in a relatively stock S2000, it's likely that you're a better driver than most, since you are driving a more difficult car to control near the limit.

 

Sorry bout all the reposts. When I tried to submit my original post, I kept getting "web sit not responding"

I said the hell with it and decided to sign off and download mozill. I signed on with my new browser and all the repost's were here.

I can not delete or edit my posts

Weird

Something mighty funny is going on

 

[QUOTE=TunedS2000,Jul 8 2004, 10:09 AM] I bet you guys are right about me not being familiar with the car.