This is single handedly the most infuriating part of owning this car. I tried so many different options to get this car to a ride height I was happy with and every time I thought I cracked it it would laugh at me... It's still laughing at me, it's still not where I want it...
When I was running on 16's it didn't count, so I'm not even going to bother talking about that. It was easy enough to achieve what I wanted which wasn't really much at the time.
This was the day I picked up my 17" Gram lites and I didn't realise that this was the start of a long list of issues...
So this is sitting on +20mm LCA's, Apexi Gen 2's with 10kg/8kg setup. Front coilovers were wound all the way down. Rears were slightly higher as I just chucked these on with the ride height still set from the 16's.
So with this being savagely high in the front I decided to take the coilovers off and play with the locking collars.
(Yes I know those offset spacers are backwards, my spare tie rods were too short and I needed to get to work.)
Then for the rear I just wound the coilover right down.
And the result wasn't great.
I later ended up adding about 10mm of spring droop to the rear which got it down a bit more but the front still needed to get moving.
It didn't really have that much of an effect.
There wasn't much the Apexi's gave me to work with but it is what it is. Thats me pretty much topped out with what I can get out of these Apexi's on standard length springs and the car was run like this for quite some time. Knowing that I needed to upgrade my coilovers to something I know I could get lower with. Like HSD's everyone in the UK had no problems getting low with.
I left my car like this on the Apexi's for ages but how my car sat in this photo motivated to get this ride height sorted properly again.
To avoid buying a whole new coilover setup when I liked how my car was handling, I bought some -25mm Tein competition springs to fit and get an extra 25mm of travel on the coilover adjustment. The problem was that I googled what the inner diameter of Apexi coilover springs were when I was working in London and made a purchase on internet information which turned out to be wrong. ~ There is a LOT of this being a problem in this build.
So I ended up waiting and buying HSD Mono's which had 7kg/5kg springs, thankfully the shorter 10kg front springs fit. So I fitted the fronts with the 10kg shorter springs and moved the front 7kg springs onto the back to almost match the rates the Apexi's were at.
Threw these onto the car along with the rear's set to full droop and the coilovers wound all the way down.
The rear was sitting how I wanted but completely destroying the ride quality from the fact the shock was bottoming out. So it came up 10mm and has been fine since.
The fronts were a bit closer to what I wanted but still not really there, so I flipped the front collars like I did with the Apexis.
Now this is the problem with the rest of these tweaks. The smallest adjustment on a 10kg spring makes absolutely NO difference. This is a 10mm drop on the coilover from the above photo and theres really not much difference.
So with me being almost where I wanted to be on 17's and my whole build being inspired by the Enjoy 180 I decided to go up to 18's and buy some Minervas. Although the car wouldn't be getting any lower, bigger wheels would have it sitting better and where I wanted it to be.
So after building some 18x10 e22 and 18x11 e22 Minervas with bigger lips...
I hated the car. The 18's looked so out of place on it, especially since it had big lips. It also didn't help the front arch was STILL about 10mm off where I wanted it to be.
Back to 17's and short of changing my suspension (again) or going to drop knuckles, which I didn't want to do. I thought I'd try something different.
Changed up the LCA's to +40mm's. Which finally got the car closer to where it needed to be...
So thats that, apart from swapping out my wings to undamaged ones which has it sitting better. At this point if I re-visit trying to get the car that extra 10mm lower to be happy with it I'll just go get some -75mm springs. Just be done with it.
Cheers