What to look for and WHY: Coilovers

Chuck33079

I'm of the opinion that any of the top-tier brands of coilovers will give you pretty much the same results. There's going to be differences in damping and adjustibility, but for the non-track user it's almost an academic difference. In my opinion, for someone who doesn't want to track their car, a good set of springs and struts will be more in line with what you need. If that won't lower the car enough, then I'd argue that you want to lower it too much and throw the suspension geometry all out of whack.

Budget coilovers are a different story. These all seem to be made in China or Taiwan, with little or no quality control. Material quality is suspect to say the least. I've seen shock dynos of cheapo coilovers and none of them matched each other, not to mention that each "click" of adjustment was not consistant between units. This is going to cause issues when one corner of the car reacts differently to inputs than another.

My recommendation for coilovers is to buy ones that use damper brands you've heard of. Many of the JDM coilovers use brands like KYB, Bilstein, etc. Make sure that you can easily have them rebuilt without shipping them halfway around the world and waiting on them for months. I'm not too crazy about the coilover setups that relocate the rear spring, but others have had no issues with it. I'd expect a set of known good coilovers to start at $2000 on up. If you want to go really crazy, go see if Moton or Penske makes a set of coilovers for a Z.

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2011 MB Touring-Sport-6sp-Nav/GTM TT/FI TT TDX/JTran/Kosmic/Eibach/Hotchkis/SPC/CSF/RPS/SoThatsWhereAllMyMoneyWent