i am looking to upgrade to a coilover system on my 03 s2k .... i got 18 inch wheels staggered and i want to improve handling but also be able to drive it in the street ... i was thinkin of tein flex or maybe KW variants ... my budget is about $1200... any thoughts ?

 

Unless you autox or do track days, you will be hard pressed to find a suspension set up that does better than stock.

But at your budget, look at the PSS9. KW v3 will be a bit out of your range and that is the KW you really should target.

 

Wait, save up your money, and do it right the first time.

With a name like Sideways, you have a standard to uphold.

 

is kw3 good for autox or track ? or how it comape to the PSS9 ?

 

kw3 are awesome... pretty much the standard. pss9 are awesome as well though.. monotube and are around $400 less....
For 1200 I would get TEIN flex's.... but really bump your budget up $300 and get the bilstein pss9's

 

You can get the PSS9's for $1300 from shox.com

 

Koni's and ground control for me. The koni's are awesome with stock springs so far. I really like how they did the valving. They took out some high speed compression so the car absoorbs hits better and is more confidence inspiring. They then made the rebound dampening adjustment range go from stock like at soft to about 3 times more at full stiff.

I have no experience with KW and I know for a fact that the Teins suck.

 

KW V2 would be close to your price point

Install them,drive around for a week, and then corner weight and alignment

 

I wouldn't worry about corner weighting unless the shop will do it cheaply. Proper corner weighting requires a lot time and adjustment as well as sandbags to certain areas of the car. Unless you're going to track often, I personally wouldn't have it done again on my car. I don't track my car. When I had mine done, all we were able to do was get the cross weights of the car similar. Unless I wanted to add sandbags to the car to offset my weight, the best thing I could have done was make sure the height of all four corners was as close as possible. I paid a couple of hundred bucks for the shop to tell me that my original settings were very close from the start.

 

Yes, if you are careful and match the ride heights on your coilovers exactly side to side (front to back does not matter as rake is a good tuning tool and should be adjusted to your liking) it will probably work out really well. Don't go by fender gap. Go by matching left and right shock heights. Honda did a great job getting this cars cross weights very close.

What the hell did you use sand bags for? Where you planning on attaching them to the car permanently?

Oh, I've got a set of scales at my house. I've cornerbalanced both my STS2 CRX and my S2000 and both needed no adjustment to get the cross weights near perfect with me in the car. I guess I got lucky?