Pics & Review of My Bilstein PSS10 Lowered Red Turbo by cannga

3 minute(s) of a 612 minute read

Just an update: An important table with summary of alignment settings used by various people, as collected by Alex here.

Note that the 2 very critical changes from stock are at the front camber and front toe settings: More specifically more negative front camber (stock has less neg camber), and slight front toe out (stock is front toe in). 

In my car ("cannga") the settings are minus 1 degree 12 minutes front camber and minus .02 minute front toe out. With this setting the car has much less understeer, and has absolutely beautiful turn-in response and rotation in corners. The first few weeks after change, I drove slowly per my tuner's (Tom "the famous tuner"  of Lucent Motors, Los Angeles, (310) 231-3328) recommendation as the steering response was much sharper and more direct than before. Now I feel zero twitchiness, love the direct steering feel, & would never go back to the old setting of front toe-in.

And a couple of pictures.

5-26-2009

Sorry, what I really meant is Lucent would advise me to NOT push the car to its (and more importantly, my) limit until I have time to acclimate myself to the change in alignment setting.

For example, a front toe-out makes the steering response more sensitive (twitchy) at first. In other words, the car wants to turn once a turn is initiated, and turns more for the same degree of steering input. If you are new and therefore misjudge the steering response while driving 10/10 into a corner, the result may not be pretty.

Changes like more neg. camber and toe out reduce understeer, or increase oversteer. As such you just have to take it easy at first. Once you are used to it, you'll find yourself going through the same corners faster than before and the car again feels like an extension of yourself.

BTW, one way I test is to drive through 2, 3 familiar corners over and over and feel the car's behavior and check my max speed. I have 2 curves from the way home to work, one around 40 mph the other a combination left right at ... mph, that I get to test every day, day in and day out. I love it.