Quote:
Originally Posted by 3-240's-N-aMule
Are u kiddin me? Thats why coilovers usually come with different spring rates fool. You cant seriously expect to go to a circuit event on coilover made for track with 10/8 s/r and then go off and see how they handle when your off roadin on those same coils to determine if they are quality or not. Shits stupid son.
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If you think that it just comes down to spring rates, you have a lot to learn.
It's not about the car being able to go to a track and then go down a dirt trail or whatever. It's about going track-to-track or street-to-track. Different tracks have different conditions - bumps and irregularities, types of pavement, marbles, etc. If you have bad dampers, it's very hard to adjust them to get the best performance, as a lot of them don't really adjust much to begin with. Usually this is a symptom of not enough rebound and too much compression, with both of those curves being too linear. As a result, the only drastic changes are with higher shock speeds... so what you're really changing when you turn the knob is how much you want the car to jump over bumps. Japanese companies just crank the spring rates up to try to mask this problem. This is how it feels to me... someone like Wiisass can probably explain what's going on inside the damper.
Not all the Japanese coilovers are like this, though, but the ones that aren't dont use shitty dampers, i.e. Topline uses Aragosta, Ennepetal and Amuse use Bilstein... there are probably other, smaller companies, I'm sure.
That said, it's definitely possible to have a car be fast with shocks that have bad valving (Moonface, for example, to remain on-topic), but they could definitely be faster if the shocks were better.