Ds3 suspension woes

[KieranHamilton]

Hi all,

Been a long time lurker on here but haven't posted a lot.

Having some suspension trouble on my 2011 Citroen DS3. Its the 1.6T Dsport model, 39K on the clock.

Over the past few months I've noticed that some days the car feels tight and the suspension is spot on - and then other days the wheel can be pulled easily by bumps and ruts in the road, and the wheel itself just feels 'rattly' - for lack of a better description.

it didn't used to bother me that much, as it would maybe occur once every week or so before going away again however it seems to becoming more frequent.

Fast forward to last week, snapped a front left spring. Not sure how or when, just came out to the car one morning and noticed.

Here's the big nono - only had the broken spring replaced as I'd been planning on coilovers in the new year

One of my neighbors has coil clamps, so when I asked to borrow them he offered to swap the spring over for me if I walk his dog twice a day while he's working down south this week. I agreed and he got to work.

When the job was done I took it for a quick run around the block with him in the car listening for any funny noises - nothing to report at the time. He left on sunday after me driving around for the majority of the weekend, and now I've noticed a gradually increasing knocking noise from the front left - sounds a lot like the droplink.

I'm going to jack the car up tonight and have a good look, however this morning when walking across the carpark at work I noticed the front left (the corner with the new spring) is sitting a bit higher up than the rest of the car - maybe an inch or 2. I checked by sticking my hand between the top of the wheel and the arch - so not completely accurate.

The spring is definitely the right one for the car - does anyone have any idea what its likely to be so I know what to look for?

Got that sheepish feeling I should have coughed up and took it to a proper garage and got both springs replaced.

Fully expecting a riling for only replacing the one side

[GreenV8S]

Before you start worrying about ride height differences corner-to-corner, make sure the ground is flat and level. The car body is very stiff, and the ground is obviously very stiff, so the only way to get a ride height difference side-to-side is for the vehicle as a whole to be leaning. In other words if you have a soft spring at one corner causing the body to roll at that end, the other end of the car would have rolled by a similar amount; you can't know which corner(s) are causing the roll just by looking at the ride heights. A ride height difference of only an inch can be very noticeable if you're looking for it, but it's practically impossible to judge whether the ground is flat to within an inch over the distance between wheels just by eye, so very easy to end up with two opposite corners riding high and the other two riding low just due to uneven ground.

I don't know what's causing the noises, but if the car has been run for a significant distance with a broken spring, it's possible that this has worn or damaged the anti-roll bar bushes and this has become apparent once you took the preload off them by fixing the spring.

On the funny erratic handling side, I don't know whether it applies to that car but I had a set of dampers in the past which had poorly designed valves which would intermittently fail to seat properly. Symptoms were that the car was absolutely fine most of the time, but sometimes one or more dampers would suddenly go soft (to the extent that I could easily bounce the corner of the car by hand) and then suddenly go back to normal. Dampers working intermittently might account for the occasional 'loose' behaviour and would be quite difficult to detect stationary.

Edited by GreenV8S on Monday 5th December 14:58

[KieranHamilton]

GreenV8S said:

Before you start worrying about ride height differences corner-to-corner, make sure the ground is flat and level. The car body is very stiff, and the ground is obviously very stiff, so the only way to get a ride height difference side-to-side is for the vehicle as a whole to be leaning

The carpark in my work is a multistory type so its pretty flat, coincidentally the first time its been sitting in the work carpark is also the first time I've noticed the uneven ride height.

GreenV8S said:

I don't know what's causing the noises, but if the car has been run for a significant distance with a broken spring, it's possible that this has worn or damaged the anti-roll bar bushes and this has become apparent once you took the preload off them by fixing the spring.

I probably did around 25-30 miles on motorway with the broken spring, and babied it around town where the roads aren't as smooth. I'll also give this a look when I jack the car up for a look at the droplinks.

GrennV8S said:

On the funny erratic handling side, I don't know whether it applies to that car but I had a set of dampers in the past which had poorly designed valves which would intermittently fail to seat properly. Symptoms were that the car was absolutely fine most of the time, but sometimes one or more dampers would suddenly go soft (to the extent that I could easily bounce the corner of the car by hand) and then suddenly go back to normal. Dampers working intermittently might account for the occasional 'loose' behaviour and would be quite difficult to detect stationary.

I may sound silly here but I assume the best way to check this would be to press down on the wings on a day where the car feels solid, and compare to a day when the problem I described is happening?