Rough Ride on the street

[katman]

"Couldn't get the AD shocks to work worth a hoot on the ITS car after the panty wearing loosers lobbied SCCA to ban remote reservior shocks, and had them on the ITS E36 Bimmer and they were total JUNK. I love Jay's other parts, but I'm not impressed with the AD shocks."

 

What specifically I didn't like abou them was this: On the Z, no amount of adjustment could settle the car. Seems to have enough bump, but not enough rebound. We surmised there wasn't enough fluid on the rebound side due to the amount of space the main shaft takes up. However, since the time spent with AD shocks on the Z was limited, and we liked GC's other stuff, we bought a complete GC suspension for the 2nd ITS E36 BMW we were campaigning. The first one came with GC all around. After a year+ of trying every spring and bar combo known to man, and every conceivable adjustment on the AD shocks, we could not give either car any "feel". Yeah, we were still winning races, but the cars were scary to drive. The drivers' report was: "When we have full lock we know we're understeering and when we're looking out the side window we know we're oversteering, but otherwise we have no idea what the car is doing." When I disassembled the suspension of one car to replace the shocks I noticed I could not compress one of the shocks, and another one rattled. So to sell them in good concience we sent them back to Jay to rebuild. He dynoed them and sent them back- "they check out fine". Still rattled and still couldn't compress one. Regardless, neither car responded to adjustments even when the AD shocks were new. Once replaced with revalved Bilsteins they were totally different cars. Very BMW like feel, faster, tunable. As they should be. So that's what I meant by "junk"- two applications and no apparent adjustability and lousy feel at the limit. I know other people swear by them but our experience has not been positive.

[OlderThanMe]

On my Z I have 225f/250r 10" springs with the stock length illuminas(2f/3r or 3f/4r). Once I tuned the front a notch softer than the rear the car handled very neutral and with a little throttle it would oversteer a little. This was with a front swaybar and the rear one removed. I can only compare it to the only other sportscar I have driven: My Dad's 944turbo. It has a slightly stiffer spring rate and bilsteins that are rock hard. between the harshness of teh suspension and turbo lag (3200rpms) I don't like hard cornering. It gets a little scary when the turbo kicks in on cornering with the elephant of a sportscar. My Z is soo much lighter and the suspension is really close to being right so that I can fly into turns and know it won't go tail happy on me.

The springs are a bit soft for full on racing but are great for the street and carving mountain roads. For the highway I set the illuminas to 1f/2r for a very comfortable caddy-like ride.

When I pulled out my old shocks the rears were completely gone and the fronts were going bad quick. They were some blue metalic painted unnamed shocks.