Part of the Phamily

Those of you who have followed me and my builds for a while know that I have BC Racing coilovers on my MR2, and I have mixed thoughts on them. They’re pretty decent on track actually, but even at the softest settings the dampers are way too harsh for street use. This is regardless of springrates, I’m only talking about the effect from damping. I had them adjusted about as perfectly as I could, I like to optimize everything I have before moving to something else. I messed with the spring preload, ride height, camber setting, basically everything I could short of rebuilding anything. They weren't old, only a few years, and they've acted more or less the same ever since I first got them. I always hated where the coilovers sat, it required me to run so much additional spacer compared to stock struts. I had to add about 25 mm more of spacer to make the wheel fit with the same clearance to the shock. This then required me to max out my camber in order to fit under the stock fenders. A previous blog post, Tires and Tribulations, covers this more in-depth. I guess the one thing I never mentioned in that post is that I installed the geometry correction kit from Wilhelm Raceworks at the same time. That was a huge improvement in and of itself.

Here’s a quick refresher for those who missed my last blog post. These wheels fit with stock struts. Why did they not fit with coilovers, when on most cars that opens up a lot more room? and notice how low the knuckle bracket is sitting on the coil, how much body is sticking out beneath it? The front end of my car was still sitting much higher than the rear, and the rear coils on my car were barely threaded in all the way. Honestly, I really heavily considered running the brackets upside down on the opposite sides to get around this. I didn’t end up doing this though. That was the one thing I didn’t try.

I've heard a lot of people say upgrading to Swift springs resulted in a huge improvement in feel, even if increasing spring rate. I decided to get a set, they're relatively cheap, and it would have been an easy upgrade to test that theory. Then they sat on a shelf for 8 months, though that's pretty typical for me. At some point while I was contemplating when to install them, I ran into a set of Wilhelm Raceworks extreme top mounts. Not exactly used, but secondhand and cheap. That should solve the camber issue that I dislike so much, by moving the top of the strut further inwards. These too sat on a shelf. A side note here, the swift springs I got were 5” for the front instead of the normal 6”, as an attempt to give myself more room to lower the bracket.
A big part of the reason why I didn’t install these upgraded parts I bought was that my MR2 was, for a good while, my only functional vehicle. It served every purpose for me while I was building my RAV4. That was around a year worth of time. So I really didn’t want to spend much time dicking around with my suspension, it worked well enough, leave it alone. Drive the car. Get to work and back.
Of course, most of you know at this point I have finished my RAV4, and it’s actually been my daily ever since. For several months I didn’t even drive my MR2. But, the weather is starting to cool down, I have at least one other functional vehicle at my disposal, it’s time to install those parts.
But why settle?
Enter Bob Pham, and his recent venture with 808 Motorsports. Some of you already know where this is going. His stuff is really promising on paper. Many people have ran his stuff with great success. I’ve heard everyone rant and rave about it. Well, let’s see what the hype is about.
A series of events landed me in LA at the same time Bob was hosting a track day at Streets of Willow. Of course I went.

I won’t dive into that much here, I explore that more in my post [a future post that’s yet to be written]. The important thing is that I rode in and drove several cars that had Bob’s coilovers. Knowing what my own car felt like on track, that was the secret sauce I needed.
After a few months of debating past that, it was time. If you’re interested just message Bob, he’s a super friendly guy and will happily talk you through the options available. I’m testing something slightly different for him. Two things, I have different spring rates than he normally offers for street/split duty setups. I believe he goes with 4k/6k, I went to 6k/8k. My previous setup was 7k/9k, so I wanted to go a tiny bit softer to boot. The second thing, I am not sure how extensively, if at all, anyone has used his coilovers with Wilhelm strut mounts, specifically the “extreme” option. That will give a better camber curve, more static camber available too, not to mention the extra clearance to the wheel.
Assembly was fairly straightforward. I have some experience setting up coilovers so this was just another day. The only thing I ran into, and to be clear this is no fault of Bob’s, just the exact combination of parts I was using, the front coilovers have more than 5” between the spring seats at full extension. That’s no problem, I can just grab helper springs to make this work. One thing people tend to misunderstand about helper springs is their purpose. They are always much lower springrate than the main spring. Their entire job is to just take up slack at full extension, then collapse as soon as there is any weight on it. This is also how you adjust the height on non-adjustable body coilovers. By changing the lower spring seat, you are changing the total stack height of the compressed suspension, and therefore ride height. But that’s not a problem here.

Although I definitely have room to run a 6” spring and keep the ride height I want. I’ll stick with what I have for now.
I did not run into this problem on the rear coilovers, as I had chosen 8” springs.

Did I mention these were inverted? More on that in a bit.

Due to the… “extreme” nature of my setup, though as with any coilover, this required a fair bit of test fitting. The fronts were no problem, I spoiled it in a previous picture. Well, that wasn’t a complete picture. With camber bolts in both positions on the knuckle, and camber as far positive as I could go, I was at around -3.5 degrees of camber. That’s pretty typical of track cars, but I’m trying to make my tires last a little longer. -3.5 is way too much. So I pull another trick out of the Wilhelm Raceworks book.

I replaced the top camber bolt with a class 10.9 M12x1.25 bolt. This allowed me to move the knuckle further out by a few mm, and thus a few degrees. I ended up at around -1.5 on both sides. In the end, I’d like to eventually weld a washer to the coilover bracket to more permanently set this angle. This is not super necessary for me, but it would limit motion of the wheel if I ever knock these loose. Much more important on track where you might be bumping curbs. Though, when torqued correctly, these do hold surprisingly well for a friction fit. This gets somewhere in the 10-20,000lb of clamping force range.
I ended up removing my 10mm spacer. So now, I only have a single 25mm spacer, and all the clearance in the world. The closest part of my tire to the strut is around 1”. In all reality I could probably remove the 25mm spacer entirely with clearance, which would mean I could potentially do so with stock fenders… anyway. So that finishes off the front.

That’s a little more tucked than the rear ended up. I may switch my 25mm out for a single 30mm, which I have on the shelf. I might lower the front end a few more turns as well.

The rears I ran into a few more issues than the front. Now, an important note here: again, this is neither Bob’s or Alex’s fault. This is just a side effect of the exact parts combination I chose. Most people that run the Extreme top mounts do so with “short-stroke” coilovers. Bob’s coilovers are fairly long stroke. What this means is that at full droop, the shock sits nearly upright, and with the top of the coilover pushed pretty far inwards, hits the frame. This is not a problem as soon as the suspension is compressed at all, the control arm pushes the knuckle and therefore the strut body further away from the frame But I need to be able to install these, so time to get out the big hammer.

I promise, it’s not as bad as it looks. I just went full caveman on the thing. If you have an air hammer or even a big planishing die, this would look a lot better. I was just swinging away with my 8lb mini sledge until I had clearance. Once I finished that, there was no undersized bolt shenanigans on this end. With OEM camber bolts in both positions, I was able to get down to around -0.5 degrees. I don’t plan to run quite that low, but it’s nice to know that’s my limit. Besides that, there is nothing really worth noting about the rear. You can see below that once assembled and at ride height, there is plenty of room.

Now, remember what I said about these being inverted? well, something really cool comes with that. With these extreme top mounts from Wilhelm, one typically needs to drill or notch a small hole in the strut tower, to access the adjusters. Below you can see Alex’s own car, as well as mine. It’s actually kinda funny, you can’t really see what’s going on anymore, since the strut top nut is no longer visible.

Because these are inverted shocks, the adjuster is actually on the bottom of the coilover, instead of on the top. That means that I don’t even have to drill the holes to access the dials! That’s pretty cool, and in my opinion, that makes these a great combination.

Now that I have the car fully assembled, it’s of course time for the first test drive. I started with the shocks on full soft, to see what that was like, and then go up from there. I must say, I’ve never seen shocks with this wide of range of adjustment. There are 30 clicks, just like the BCs I just took off, but each click actually does something. With the BCs, you had about 5-6 clicks before they seemed almost rigid from then on. With these, it’s nearly flipped. It’s only at the last few clicks where they start to get too stiff. I’d say 10-12 clicks or so is about the max you’d want to run on a street car, but that full range is usable depending on track setup.

My first drive was to work. I go on a few roads that semi trucks frequent, which leads to certain spots being really rough. Some butt clenching stuff with BCs. With these, they didn’t even wince. Not perfect by any means, they’re still race shocks on a 30 year old sports car. Honestly, it felt about as smooth as stock shocks. Freeway transitions were imperceptible, and manhole covers and minor potholes were just little bumps. Overall, I’m seriously impressed with these. They’re practically OEM level comfort.

Here’s something that I wasn’t expecting. The absolute best part of this conversion for me. For the first time ever since owning my car, I can turn all the way, lock to lock, without rubbing. I don’t know if that’s a of the now higher offset, higher kingpin inclination angle, lower static camber, finally hammering the wheel wells just enough, or some combination of those, but I can finally do it. Even on stock suspension, I rubbed at full lock. It got worse on BCs and worse with more wheel spacers.

So. A complete improvement in my car. I want to drive it everywhere again, and I don’t give it second thought anymore. The perfect balance between OEM comfort and sports car feel. A man in dandism. Now that it’s so great around town, I just need to really push these. See how they do around a road course. Well, that’s for another time.

Seek kaizen.