"A super-low, super-stiff car might feel great on the street, but it will have a tendency to understeer or oversteer when driven aggressively."
Agreed. Unless you're drifting you probably don't want either understeer or oversteer. That's always been my goal when setting up my car. When I exit a high speed turn and am trying to accelerate as hard as I possibly can out of a corner, my car drifts sideways reliably and predictably out towards the edge of the track. The Torsen T2R differential fighting for every bit of traction it can find the whole time.
I'm a big fan of adjustable shocks & struts. They allow you to get the handling closer to neutral, and to compensate for future mods. You can also easily adjust the ride quality.
I'm also a huge fan of adjustable suspension, but I somewhat disagree with this. Perhaps it's just the way it was worded. Yes, as WH mentioned, adjusting suspension for a car that is both street and track driven is a compromise unless you adjust it back for the street after a track event. Most don't want to do that. Yes adjusting your compression and rebound dampening can improve things like turn-in and comfort as mentioned, but optimizing for traction with both low speed dampening (for turn-in) and high speed dampening (for comfort) requires dampeners that have both high speed and low speed dampening adjustability. I don't know of any mainstream manufacturers who make dampeners like this for installation on stock SN-95s with the exception of MultiMatic ($$$$$) and those will put a hole through your hood (They were on the Jason Priestly #46 car (#191/250) when I bought it).
Toe-in, caster, camber, anti-roll bars, tire pressures and roll center have a tremendous affect on achieving neutral handling characteristics. The first four of those are easy to adjust if you have adjustable shocks and C/C plates. To adjust the roll center you need either a selection of roll bars to choose from or an adjustable panhard bar. Raising and lowering the car also, of course, affects the roll center, but that requires an adjustable ride height like coil-overs.
Whew! That's a lot, and I'm sure others may disagree with me, but that's my experience.
I made the decision to go all-out with my car with
Griggs Racing's best World Challenge frame and suspension system ($$$$$) which is not only configured completely different from stock, but has no rubber or polyurethane anywhere (all tubular chrome-moly with aircraft quality Heim joints), and is highly adjustable. This is how I've achieved both neutral handling and prodigious grip, but ride quality is somewhat brutal (it's NOT a daily driver).
BTW I have the original Koni yellow adjustable front and rear dampers from my '95 Cobra R for sale if anyone's interested. Less than 20K miles, no leaks. Griggs fitted Fox body Koni yellows because they are slightly shorter and won't bottom out when used with the Griggs setup. Mine is, very admittedly, an extremely expensive setup (around $15K in 1997) which took Griggs eight months to install. On a road course it can't be beat though. Bruce Griggs went undefeated in NASA American Iron Extreme (AIX) using his own products.
Going with progressive rate springs would be better for your application, but you will be waiting a little bit for front of the car to "plant" when you're using the car for performance driving. You can drive around that issue. I don't daily-drive my SN95 Mustangs, but I wouldn't go lower than a 1.25" drop for a street car. Lower springs are often stiffer, which means ride quality/handling can suffer.
Agreed, Bruce Griggs made it clear to me that over-lowering a Mustang can and will hurt the handling. I believe Eibach makes good progressive rate springs. They made the stock '95 Cobra R springs which are progressive (I don't believe Eibach sells that exact spring because they manufactured them for Ford). Griggs recommended I move to constant rate with their coilover setup. I no longer have my originals.
Griggs recommends using only a slight amount of compression (like 1-2 clicks) and a lot of rebound dampening (like 75-90%). That seems to work well for me.
YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary)
CobraRGuy
