Quote:
Originally Posted by DocWalt
Thoughts after the weekend on track?  |
I have many thoughts on these right now. Let me think about how to describe them.
On track at Shenandoah, I left them set to 8 clicks from full stiff and they handled everything fine. First session I cooked the brake pads and had pad fade after about 15 minutes of the 25 minute session. They were incredible at handling the bumps in the track and helping me navigate turns.
I could have gone up in stiffness a little bit but not sure it would matter at my skill level. I did two sessions total and on the second session, the instructor had me driving a lot slower to focus on my steering a bit more. He also had me lay off the throttle
On track, the R cooked the PS4S tires on the back straight and the XDS system would tap each individual corners brakes to try to stop the spinning, and so it created an odd ride sensation up to the 100mph limit I set to keep the pads happy. Looking at the inner tread later, the tires were definitely overwhelmed by the power of the EQT tune. The car has graduated to needing Wave Trac LSDs, so that's nice.
On the street, I came back to Charlotte's horrible roads and immediately started hating the Ohlins. They're just too stiff. I took the 19" wheels off and swapped back on the 18's, which has helped and have also adjusted stiffness down to full soft (too uncontrolled/bouncy on high compression), to one click off full soft (better but bottom out the shocks here and there).
The car is also sitting 20mm lower than stock, which was already 20mm lower than the GTI. It doesn't look slammed, but it's obvious the car is lowered a bit.
If I had to describe the ride on the street, it's firm, controlled but closer to race mode DCC without the bumpstop crashiness thanks to the DFVs.
While this is suitable for road, the Ohlins just aren't suited for the roads around here. With the money invested, I'm not sure what to do now with the car other than hoping my wife doesn't complain too much.
Longer term, as we do plan to move out of the city, they'll be absolutely great on less travelled roads with less construction and better maintenance. The roads here are just some of the worst i've ever experienced and frankly, they even give the Range Rover problems from time to time.
Now you might ask, then why the heck did you get coilovers? Well, after 43k on the OEM shocks in these roads conditions, they were nearing end of life and the ride had started to deteriorate on them as well. To replace them with OEM would have cost me $560 per corner ($2320) plus new tophats, install and alignment ($1600). So for roughly $1k more, I got Ohlins R/T with fresh top mounts. You could argue I could have just gotten some B4-B6-B8 shocks but they're out of stock nearly everywhere in DCC form and having had Bilstein before, I wanted something different. The reviews online really made this sound like the silver bullet and i'd say for 95% of the time they can be. I just happen to live mainly within that 5% right now.