Hey, wanted to pick your brain on coilovers and spring rates. Been trying to do some research on the subject in general, happened to notice some recent commentary you've made on the subject over in your profile comment thread.
The stock suspension is now clearly too soft on the track for the way I'm driving and how hard the brakes are biting. I see it now in braking nosedive, and I see it now also in the car being too slow to react in transitions at the speed I want to make them (e.g. brake, turn-in, straighten, brake more, turn in hard - it's all happening lightning fast and the suspension hasn't even finished rebounding and settling from the first action by the time I'm wanting to do the 3rd, so I have to slow it all down just to keep the car under control).
I thought maybe I could fix that temporarily by getting better at progressive and properly-applied trail-brake-steering in some of those transitions, but it seemed to make things worse instead of better so far (probably just me sucking at technique so far, but I'll get there before I get any new coilovers installed regardless, at current budget rates).
So - advice on a coilover vendor, and more importantly a spring rate setup?
I really don't care about sacrificing ride quality on the street. The car does more miles either on the track or on the way to it than it does for my little trips around the corner to parts shops or whatever. What I do need to be concerned about, though, is my home track is rather bumpy (ripples, pavement seams, etc), even in some of the fast sweepers and such. I can't have a suspension that's just locked down for perfect pavement; it has to be able to react to the bumpiness and maintain grip. I think my super-soft stock sport suspension has probably been helpful in that regard so far, especially in the rear, and I'm a little nervous that if I go with a poorly-tuned coilover setup with a very high spring rate, I'm going to be skipping and bouncing and losing traction all over the place.
Sooo... quoting your TL;DR from your profile thread: "Tl/dr 18/12 spring rate for track cars, 14/10 or 12/8 for street cars... get adjustable sways and try different tire pressures... for street with some track, front -2 camber and 0 to 1/16 toe out".
I'm pretty comfortable now with adjusting my traction a bit via tire pressure, and at least my rear sway is adjustable (I run it on the stiffest setting for now, but I could soften that to offset traction problems if necc). What should I be looking at here rate-wise given all the above? Would you still recommend BC ER? The JRZ's look nice too, but outta price range at this point. KW V3? Tein Monoflex? There's a lot of other cheap options out there, but I'm worried a lot of them are just targeted at lowering and looks for street driving and may not really hold up in practice.
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