Alright enough about Kanye, time to get on to what this post is about, suspension upgrades. I have acquired some suspension components from the very friendly company Eibach. I have the Pro-Plus kit. This kit includes a stiffer front and rear sway bar, and a set of springs that lowers the car 1.3" and has a stiffer spring rate. Right now I have a full stock suspension setup. I also have a handy little accelerometer that I made using and Arduino. At my last autocross I used it to collect my max cornering and acceleration G's.
The data can be found in this photo album:
http://imgur.com/a/4oOUV
So we have some stock data, now what? Well I don't really want to put parts on, take parts off, put parts on, take parts off. My intent right now is to put the parts on one at a time and autocross/track the car and see if the max G's change at all. We are mostly looking at corning G's, but it will be interesting to see if accel or braking ones change with the changes. This is also a very simple A to B comparison. At some point I might be smart enough to get my code to do yaw rate and things like that (not even sure right now if the accelerometer that I have will even support that). So take what I do with a grain of salt because it isn't showing the whole picture, but I figured it would be awesome to collect some data and actually show people if any differences occur.
As of right now I have swapped out the front sway bar as that seems to be what everyone says the first suspension upgrade should be. I am a sheeple so that is what I have done. I have autocrossed with the new sway bar, but due to my own stupidity I forgot the SD card to log data. So that will have to wait till I get a chance to find an empty parking lot or another autocross. The sway bar has definitely decreased the body roll of the car in cornering. At some point I will do some math for you guys to get roll bar spring rates of the stock and Eibach one. I will likely do some other math down the road to do with springs and what damping rate I want. But I gotta learn how to math again first.
One caveat with the springs is that the higher spring rate is likely too much for the stock dampers (not to mention the dampers have 120k miles on them). So when that upgrade happens, there will likely be a damper change too. So count it, that will be TWO things that change at once. Maybe I will put the springs on with the stock dampers for a run just for the hell of it, who knows. I am making it up as I go as always.
Alright enough blabber, time for me to brag about my girlfriend who I forced into driving for the first time at the last autocross. Her times were closer to mine than mine were to the next guy in my class...crap (for me that is). Her fastest run can be found here, look for the pretty and brand new Jag:
Zahra's First Autocross
