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Spring rate and how stiff you can go on a given shock depends on the shock valving. So a Koni yellow for the s13 may be valved differently than one for the s14 and the valving of the shock and the weight of the car and some other factors determines what spring rate you can run and what damping ratio you will end up with. Damping ratio is the normalized way of looking at how the car will settle after an input and how the damper will absorb the spring energy.
And you guys should keep in mind that ground control isn't your only option. Unless I'm wrong, ground control just sells sleeves, perches and springs, which you can get many other places. Of course you have to get the right diameter sleeve for whatever shock you're going to run. Koni makes sleeves for their shocks, Bilstein does as well and there are tons of circle track places that sell sleeves that would probably fit a lot of these dampers. I'm not say that I'm positive that a random spring sleeve you find somewhere is going to fit whatever shock you want to use, but there will be a lot out there that will wor for what you want it to do. I don't have any problems with ground control, I just wanted to point that out because it seems like people think it's something different than just a "coilover kit" with an eibach spring. But I do like hypercoils better than eibach just from personal experience and from feedback from other people.
As for a coilover being matched with spring rate and valving. Everyone likes to forget that mass has a lot to do with what valving is needed for a given spring rate on a given car. So a 2400lb car will need different valving than a 3000lb car with the same springs. And from what I've seen a lot of the JDM stuff isn't valved that great to start.
But back to the Koni's, to know what spring rates you would want to run, you really need to get a dyno plot. Or at least call Koni and talk to someone in their motorsports department. They should be able to give you an idea of what you want to run. And if you want to run something out of the range, there is always the option of sending them out to get revalved. This does add to the cost, but in the end you will have a better suspension setup than you could've bought off the shelf.
Tim
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