centergravity by
hot 66, on Flickr
With some miles under its belt , the engine is pulling stronger & stronger and definitely feels gruntier than a few 1000 miles ago.... but having had all the suspension apart the handling was crap . We had done a basic alignment etc , but it just felt unstable at speed & unpredictable. I'd even got to the point in wondering what the point of having a quick motor in the back was & maybe I'd gotten too used to the handling of my Turbo .
So I took the decision to get things looked at properly .
Following on from recommendations by other DDK'ers I booked teh car in with Chris @ Centre of Gravity (
http://www.centergravity.co.uk/ )
After travelling down from North Yorkshire the previous night, in some of the worst condtions I've experienced on the A1 & feeling pretty despondent about my car , I turned up @ Chris's yesterday morning ready for him to condem my suspension .
You might have read elsewhere about how the day goes at Chris's, but basically he jumps in the car and 'test' drives it to see how it performs on his test route .. looking for things like the way it pulls, does it change direction on or off the throttle , can it cope at speed on bumpy b-roads etc etc . A few things showed up and I also explined the issues I was having with the cars handling & what I was wanting .
The car was then brought back to the workshop to be looked at.
1st test was a niffty little machine that oscillates each wheel to measure the effectiveness of each damper ( mine were all perfect as expected from new / nearly new bilsteins)
As I only drive the car quickly when I'm by myself , we decided to set up the car assuming just me in it, so my matching weight was placed on the drivers seat . Then up on the ramps for measurements etc . Although geometry was massively off , things were not perfect & my corner weights were way off.
With suspension , change one thing & something else changes as a result ... so although relatively straight forward, it took chris quite a bit of time adjusting , checking , re adjusting etc including reindexing my rear torsion bars to get to a point where he was happy
As it turned out, Chris was really happy as he got the cross axle weights spot on & all the geo perfect too. Car was set lower than stock.
So , I got there at 8.35 & left at 20:15 !!! It was a long day
End result ... my car has been transformed
I am REALLY pleased. In the twisties it is sharp & secure & I can attack teh corners with confidence .. on the A roads / motorways I can now travel at speed ... for the 1st time ever in nearly 10 years of ownership, ( on a private track ) I can comfortably take the car to some significant speeds and sit there feeling safe.
Chris is very thorough and has a great eye for detail . Really recommended
My Turbo will be going to him when the time comes.
Couple of interesting points:
I have had my elephant racing bushes on the car for over 6 years & approx 15K miles ... and they still looked as good as new
Car's weight , including 80Kg ballast, some spare parts etc , 6 litres of oil in cans + approx 50 litres of fuel = 1212Kg!!!! Calculating back, my car is approx 1110Kg with half a tank of fuel, no driver & with my spares taken out ( guessing 5 Kg of spare parts , 6 kg spare oil, 10 kg extra fuel above 1/2 tank)
Not quite sure how Porsche calculated their weight figures, but its meant to be 1080Kg. . Looks like I need to replace those extremely heavy recaros with something a bit lighter