Ride height and geometery

[cerbfan]

Car is going in for full geometery setup and corner weighting etc tomorrow at the local motorsport garage. What is the latest thinking on the optimum settings? Its running Nitrons with Eiback springs that are slightly stiffer than come with the standard Nitron kit and its fully polybushed.

Ride height standard seems to be 130mm from bottom of rail to road, however wondered if I could get away with a bit lower given the upgraded springs.

Alignment wise has anyone found any better setting then factory standard or is this still what most people are using?

Car will mainly be used for spirited road driving and maybe the odd track day next year.

[fatjon]

I can't comment on how height affects the handling but how low you can go does seem to depend on the tyres fitted. With my 255/35/18 on Spiders I get a problem with the tyres touching the rear inner arches on the extremes of travel. Not a problem in general driving but speed humps cause a bit of a graunch at the back with standard ride height on standard springs and shocks. I suspect that 255 is not actually the standard width though?

[C3BER]

if your not smelling burning rubber then your not driving. :-) but yes i agree all depends on your tyre size and the type of roads you drive on. Low and hard is fun but for how long.

[Pursyluv]

Mine was set too low and a 1" strip on the inside of the fronts had worn to the reinforcement; also don't forget that Nitrons need to be re-built every few years.

[Ireland]

My car was lowered about 1" when I got it and it drove fine on glass-smooth roads but on anything else it was a pig as it was twitchy and the underside of the car kept hitting off the ground.

As for the geo settings, I had mine set up by a guy who worked on suspension set-up and fabrication with Toyota F1, Arrows F1, Toyota WRC team and the Dieselmax team and he couldn't get it better than the factory standard settings.

He could make it turn-in better at high speed but this resulted in a dangerous amount of over-steer at first and second gear speeds (the car wouldn't straighten up after a corner).

For safety sake we returned it to "the book" settings and I'm using standard settings all the time now.