My First Road Racing event @ Streets of Willow Springs!

[jmakado]

Thanks for all the info guys. I still have a couple weeks of work to do before the car will be ready. I need to get the coilovers on and get the alignment set.

I also need to spend some more time tuning. It's really tough out here to tune on the roads! Not like Colorado where I can just hit the hiway at anytime and do some 3rd gear pulls.

 

[my_precious]

I'm so jealous.

btw um.....is that dave coleman behind you? I know he's been to willow springs before

You must be logged in to view this image or video.

 

[matthewdesigns]

Yep, this is an old thread, but that's what I was looking for. I was digging around for info on coilovers a couple weeks ago and wanted to get some input from someone who is racing with them, and who had been using them for a while and could comment on reliability as well as performance. I messaged the OP for some follow up info about the Megan Racing setup he mentions in the first post. Here's his response (with his permission...thanks Beau):

Hey Matthew, sorry for taking forever to reply, I've been in Canada for the last couple weeks at races for Formula 3.. All in all, for the money, I'm quite happy with the Megan coilovers. The spring rates are aggressive and are decently well thought out for a 2g. A 2g has a funky front motion ratio and needs a more aggressive front spring than you'd normally think. I still feel like a better spring rate setup instead of the default 14kg/mm front - 6 kg/mm rear would either be 12/6 or 14/8.. I went with the latter. M-R offers replacement springs in all kinds of rates for pretty cheap.

The damping of the coilover is up to the task to handle the weight of the car and the spring rates, but the damping curve is pretty standard for a cheap-ish single adjustable coilover. Compression and rebound adjustment range are both good, but for any particular setting I think they're not very well matched, but this is pretty standard once again. By the time you get the compression damping on a good setting, the rebound is too heavily damped. This is ok for a track, but on the street, it's pretty rough and doesn't keep the tire on the ground very well over rougher road.

The problem lies in the high vs. low speed damping. An expensive coilover will provide little damping resistance during fast shock shaft speeds (i.e. hitting an apex curb, bumps, hard street driving), but provide stiff damping during low shaft speed conditions (turn in, corner exit, transitions etc).

To explain it another way, with a cheaper coilover set to a stiffer setting, when you hit a bump mid-corner, the suspension will compress, but not quickly enough to absorb the impact. This will cause the car to "jump up". Immediately after, the tire should come back down on the ground to provide grip, but the damper is too stiff and doesn't let the suspension extend back down quickly enough. This means that there is a decent period of time where the tire isn't in full contact with the ground and can't provide grip. Of course, this whole thing happens on a very tiny level and is almost undetectable by eye, but it definitely affects the car.

The coilovers are very fun on the street, the response of the car is awesome, if you crank up the damping you can turn in as hard as you want and the car feels completely flat. Don't expect the car to corner much harder on the street though, if anything you might lose a little maximum lateral grip on unprepped road due to the stiff high speed damping.. Once again, you can soften up the damping for the street and then the damper works quite well, I just love the response and feeling of a stiffer compression setting than what works well with this damper for the street..

I have almost 70k!! miles on these coilovers, mostly street driving with several track days. At about the 50k mark, which is a LOT for any stiff coilover, one of the shocks went out. Considering what the car went through a couple months earlier, I was impressed. I hit something BAD on the freeway.. I'm talking ALL 4 tires blew out, 3 wheels had rim lips that bent and actually cracked in one place, and the 4th wheel was literally tweaked at the hub, to the point where it would wobble BAD when mounted the car. Amazingly nothing else was hurt. A few months later, the shock blew on one side. I called up M-R and for around 200 bucks I had both front coilover dampers replaced and they're back up to 100% again.

I have not had any other problems with them.. no rusting, broken or worn parts or anything. They're actually quite high quality. If I had the extra money, I'd still go with a KW or other higher end damper for the improved damping curve, but for the money these are hard to beat. In my experience with race cars, the difference between a good coilover (M-R, Tein, JIC) or a great one (KW, Ohlins, Moton) is not so much on-track as on the street. It's not too hard to make a coilover work well on track (at least for the levels we'd be using these cars for), but to find one that also rides comfortably on the street is difficult.

I could go on talking about this crap for hours, but I know there is a text limit on PMs... Let me know what other questions you have if any and I'll try to answer them

-Beau

 

[kpsc93TSi]

great read and i cant wait to get back to the states so i can ghet out on the track... my poor TSi is in a storage unit