2 years later, and we're back from the dead!

Come a long way since then...

TRD springs
TRD shocks
TRD sway on stiffest
Dezod endlinks
DME rear upper strut bar
... some front strut bar, coming soon...

Camber (Progress kit front, stock rear)
Front: -1.5
Rear -1.5
Caster: unadjusted (stock)
Toe: 0 all round.
I have the printout from the alignment program, which is where I'm getting my numbers.

Dunlop Direzza Star Spec tires.


Honestly, I wouldn't change a thing. It's tough to get an objective reading, but I believe it's capable of 0.98-1.02, according to the iTouch G-meter and "Dynolicious" program... for whatever that's worth. It doesn't give sustained numbers, and has recorded some crazy peaks at times. More importantly, the setup feels amazing... very quick and responsive, yet doesn't kill you on Louisiana's bumpy roads.

I've got some extra cash, so going to try out a front upper strut bar. Not expecting much, but it really couldn't hurt.
I would have done the ingalls rear, yet it isn't exactly STS legal. The addition of mounting points would kick it out, if the inspector really knows his stuff.

The tires made 50% of the difference, with the sway being 30%, and springs being about 15%... just in case people are curious. The rest combined would add up to the remainder. Just my opinion.

Other than stated... I won't be making much in terms of changes... I plan to race the tC for the next year or two, before moving into a stock-class in an actual sports car. I look forward to using autocross slicks

 

TRD Springs
Stock Struts
TRD Rear Sway on stiff setting
-1.76 Degrees camber in front
-2.0 degrees camber in rear
Front toe set out to max oem spec (forgot the exact number)
Rear toe set to 0
Front strut tie (does virtually nothing but look good on this car)
I autox on OEM rims with RT-615's on them.

Full throttle, running about 50 mph in 2nd, I can let off and sometimes trail brake if needed, into a tight corner and it will rotate nicely, I just have to modulate the throttle to keep it in line, which is just how I like it. On the more sweeping turns with it right on the edge, it will start to dip into oversteer, I can get into it a bit more and even it back out.. if it starts to push I can back out a bit and it will even back out again.

On some of the fast entry longer corners it will get sideways if you arent ready, but some heavy foot on the throttle will bring it back in line.

In other words, it is pretty well balanced Camber is just about perfect, no poor wear patterns, etc.

I would like to reduce body roll a bit more, but keep the same balance. However, I am starting to lean away from taking away any more independence from the suspension, which makes those bumpy corners pretty sketchy. So I am probably now going to keep the same sway setup and play with spring rates via coilovers when I make another big change. Also possibly going to go ahead and spend the money for the RE01'rs or the Star Specs next season as well for my autox tires.

 

looks like a pretty good consensus

i wanna try out those dunlops too, i hear they are amazing

 

The Star Spec is the king of the street tires right now, better than the RE-01R(which I have a lot of experience with), both are far faster than the now outdated 615's(which are very very heavy tires)

I would recommend a bit more front negative camber and less in the rear, maybe stay the same in the rear and try more up front.

With really agresive tires(I run 265 R888 now) the FSTB may actually do some good.

I am currently running -3.2 up front(the most I can get with the camber plates, camber bolts and fat tires for now and -2.2 in the rear, no front sway bar for more corner exit grip(less wheel spin) and a solid 25mm Progress rear race bar. All the castor I can get up front, 1/16th toe out, zero rear toe, 600 front, 900lb rear springs, custom valved Progress coilovers, soon to be 700lb front shorter springs so I can dial in more negative camber and run even wider tires next season.

Ride height is quite tall at 6.5" to the pinch welds, front and rear set the same.

I am going to work on the ride height this winter, extended ball joint studs(heim ends, modified control arms, bump steer correction, etc, to drop the car around 1.25" further. For the rear I will cut the top off the urethane subframe bushings to lower it 1" without effecting the geometry at all, nice and easy mod, free

I have just a bit of understeer out of tighter corners if I am realy pushing it, on high speed corners I have so much grip I have not found the limits yet! A real splitter, wing, canards, I have huge mid and high speed grip, enough to scare me at times!

Do not even consider a rear STB, there is absolutely no benifit at all, the top of the struts are at the crossbeam of the chassis, save your money for something useful;)

---------------

These cars can be very very fast when dialed in, I have shocked quite a few exotic car owners and with not much power, next year, big juice under the hood, already putting it together

Rick

 

WOW!!! i mean WOW. NICE setup! I'm having to do mine on a tight budget. But you have by the best setup on a tC that i have heard/seen short of Rado himself. It is very nice /borat

 

Thanks, Ptuning runs pretty close to the same thing as well as Dan Gardner used to before switching to Moton coilovers (I have a set of those for the Vette, ouch$$$$$$$)

Though I already knew a great deal about setting the car up I followed their lead to a pretty high degree as it made sense.

Rick

 

I think I have quite a bit to bring to this discussion because over the previous year I have been auto crossing with different settings with my car and just recently I have found a great setup in the car. To get into the basics this was my setup while I was began this year along with my first event.

-225/45 615's
-Tein Super Street's with Pillow ball mounts

0º of Toe on Front and Rear
-2º camber up front
-2.5º camber in rear
Factory caster setting
.75" wheel gap all around

Effect:The car felt somewhat neutral but was still understeer biased. From factory I had better control of the rear end using the brakes and lift to get it to rotate. However the car was too low for auto cross and it felt that I could use more front suspension travel since I was understeering too much during turn in. Also because I was only running -2º of camber in the front I was getting allot of scrubbing in the outside edge, so I needed even more camber.

So for the following event I raised the front another .75" (giving the front a 1.5" wheel gap), to give it more travel. I forgot to raise the rear and that event was a complete disaster. Because the rear was lower the car had horrible understeer everywhere. One of the most disappointing days so far. So I read some articles and asked some Hpde racers and they all gave me the same advice to fix turn in understeer and improve front grip. Widen out the track in the front to increase the scrub radius thus increasing the slip angle, and take away some rear camber.

So I did just that. I purchased some 15mm hub centric spacers, heightened the rear another 1" (making it 1.5"F 1.75"R) Inverted the pillowball mounts to add 4.5º of caster and bought some Ingalls crash bolts (:p) to give the car -2.5º in the front and -1º in the rear.

Effect: The car was fantastic, it was perfectly neutral turn in with the traditional understeer push during exit. The rear rotated and did as I pleased with the control of the gas and I felt really confident in the car. Also because of the added camber the tires also wore down perfectly. The added front track also helped drastically with the steering, now the car liked it when I was more aggressive with the steering wheel and I found more grip even though I was steering more (greater slip angles ftw)

But I still wanted to go faster and I knew I was missing sway bars. So I went with the Hotchkis kit. I heard from various members and people that the rear should not be installed without the front because of excessive oversteer. But due to time constraint (and me being a hard head) I installed the rear (in race setting of course) along with some 25mm spacers in the front, and switched the 15's to the rear.

Effect: Wow, they were not lying about the oversteer, the very first turn at the following event was a pretty high speed turn. You would be coming in hot at the top of second, tap the brakes and make a 90º wide left hender. As I lifted and taped the brakes I just felt the entire rear end creep out then snap out on me. I ended up hitting a cone on the outside of the turn and the oversteer continued throughout the run. It was actually really great, it was scary at first because I wasn't used to it so I quickly deemed it an issue with the car. However the more I drove it the more I liked it, I was able to carry much, much more speed throughout the corner and it eliminated almost all of the corner-exit understeer.

What I really liked about this current setup is how it all works so well. The larger rear sway really fixed my turn in issues, it was a handful but nothing you can't learn to tame. The much larger slip angles also allow you to find more grip as you turn, meaning that while maximum grip would be at 10º-15º (example) it is now at 10º-25º, so the added front slip angles combined with the rear sway and stiffness of the suspension allow you to turn the car with minimal steering effort. But when you do need the extra steering input for low speed turns it is still there.

To answer your toe question, I would personally not mess with it on a daily driven car. The main reason being excessive tire wear. Now if i had a dedicated weekend/race car I would mess with my toe to really adjust with turn-in/mid-corner handling.

My current and best setup:
-Tein SSP's with inverted Pillowball mounts
-225/45 615's (2nd set)
-25mm Ichiba Hub centric spacers in the Front
-15mm Sportline Hub centric spacers in the Rear
-Ingalls -+2º camber bolts
-Hotchkis rear sway on Race setting

Alignment:
-2.5º Camber in the Front
-1º Camber in the Rear
4.5º of Caster
0º of Toe F&R

If anyone is wondering my tire wear is perfect with my current alignment settings. Unless you are running over 3º of camber your tires will wear fine.

Yeah balance is the key, but we do not own RWD cars so creating oversteer or getting the car to rotate is allot harder. If you find that you have unpredictable oversteer learn how to work your throttle lift to to use it as an advantage. Throttle lift oversteer is a good thing to have in a good handling car, as long as you know how to use it properly there is no reason why you should sporadically lift off during the middle of the corner.

Very true, a good Auto-X car would make a horrible daily driver.

With my current setup, before I went to the track I used to think my car's turn in was still pretty neutral. But it wasn't until I was really racing when I really found out how it drove. And I dive my car pretty hard on the street btw (no speeding, I just like to keep up the speed in the corners =] ) My point is that you will never drive you car hard enough on the street to know how it really handles, and if you are really pushing the limits of it then you shouldn't be driving it on the street. Spirited driving is far different than ***** out driving where you don't care about hitting the guard rails or traffic, and your little FWD econobox is sliding at 60mph on all four wheels and you have to make it turn the other way before you hit some more cones.



edit: lol I must of missed page 2.

They are but they are also a great beginners tire to see if Auto X is really what you want to get into. I started off the season on these and am on my 2nd set. I do plan on keeping these as a daily tire and find some extra rims to either do the Star Specs or the Reo1r's. The Toyo's love that camber though, I read the brochure and they recommend you to run at LEAST -3 to -5 degrees.

You have a great setup btw, are you running custom front camber plates or are they the ones from the progress unit? I also heard that the Tc's used in the Celebrity Charity event where using custom Progress units as well as the Sport Compact Project Tc. Would you care to elaborate about the pricing of the units you have? If you don't want to discuss this publicly you can pm me. I've been really thinking about ditching the Super Streets and going with something a little more dedicated and so far I have come up very short with available coilovers.

 

subscribing

i havent auto-x or anything yet but i am trying to start off ok

i have Ksport Coilovers
TRD rear sway and i am workng on getting dezod endlinks...

i dont necessarily want to win against other drivers but i just want to improve myself...i want to see my times increase(or decrease)...but i have the TRD set to race and the coils set to full stiff but that is because i want to baseline at full soft and then max out and then go from there...

 

What is your ride height, and alignment settings? Also what tires are you using?

 

I still can't believe I started this thread 2 years ago, and it's still going.

 

this is some serious discussion...gonna have to read through the whole thing later...

 

lol I would of replied sooner but I just found it last night

 

tell me how to measure the ride height....

i havent gotten on an alignment rack yet...installed them thursday...i cant see the fronts being more than -2 and the rears around -1

im on Nitto Neogens....i want to autocross in my daily set-up so that i know my car in the form i will always be driving it

 

Only bad thing about that is the fact that you will chew through tires fast daily driving and autoxing them. I autox'd my daily's the first season, bought a set of scratched up OEM wheels for $150 the next season and dedicated them to autox. If you only hit a few events it may be ok, but if you do it much more, then you will be buying tires a lot more often. Now, I hardly put any strain on my daily drivers (And run all seasons due to the climate here) and just buy a set of autox tires for each season. It spreads out the spending a bit better that way. My Azenis were brand new for the first event in May. 9 events and 2 test n tunes later (And only being used for events) they are toast

A lot of people measure their height to the pinch welds. If you measure a stock tC, you want your ride height to be at about 1.4 inches lower than a stock one. That is about optimum for a tC's geometry. Unless of course you start playing with custom mounting points, spindles, etc to make it work right.

 

I agree this is a good thread to follow up on.

Im also wanting to get better handling out of my car but im also on a budget. Right now i have some tein H. Tech and i dont really know how well these would handle and im deciding on which struts to get its between trd and tokico right now and for sure i want some hotchkis front and rear sway bars. Any opinions welcome on the stuff i want to get any advice is welcome also.

 

Honestly, the h-techs are a not the best choice all around for handling. They are too low (lower in the front as well.. which is not a good thing on an already nose heavy car) and the rates are not high enough for the drop. To give you and idea, TRDs settle to about 1.25 - 1.3 inches lower than stock. Rates are 168, 324 for F/R. The front to rear ratio has a big effect on understeer and oversteer, and the TRD's have a pretty good ratio. The only thing they could be is stiffer.

The H-Techs are 1.9" lower in the front (too low to be optimum) and 1.5" lower in the rear. So lower than the TRD's, but the rates are 185F, 308R. Being lower, they need to be much stiffer than the TRD's. Also, the ratio between the front and rear is not nearly as optimum.

They are better than S-techs (which are just outright horribly designed for any sort of handling), but still not the best choice.

In my opinion, with stock mounting points for the suspension, the springs should drop it 1.4" all around, but have rates of around 250F, 500R. Of course, this starts really compromising ride on the street, but would be a good setup for handling. Any higher (And maybe a little even at those rates) and bumpy surfaces may start getting a bit sketchy in the corners.

 

watching*

 

^^Thanks for the information for someone thats not going with coilovers whats the best springs and shocks to go with. Do you know anything about the tokicos hp series?? And should i get rid of the H. techs and just go TRD's all around??

 

If anything, we're seeing that there is not simply "one best" setup for handling.

People are just as happy with hotchkis sways as TRDs... with coilovers as with springs... etc. etc.

So, perhaps the conversation should focus on... what to do, and what to avoid ? As in, avoid S-techs. Avoid slamming. DO get sways. DO get the best tires you can buy... etc.

 

Engi, do you know of any springs like this on the market?