Techno Duck

Springs will help big time. The cheapest route are Koni yellows and throw on some Weltmeister front springs, either 200 or 250lbs. Drop the rear using the camber eccentric (so you can even out ride height) and throw on the 19mm rear bar. with a 26.8mm front. I used this basic setup on my n/a for a few seasons of auto-x and it worked well. Just make sure you read the rules for the auto-x classes because you want to make sure you dont get bumped into a more competitive class. My local club basically allows any modification to the suspension, while another club i ran with had me in modified due to the suspension (where i got my *** beat by much better prepared cars..IE 914's!)

I would be careful with just throwing a big front and rear sway bar on the car with the stock suspension being that soft. You are going to put a huge amount of load on the control arms and frame rails in the front with such soft springs. Also too stiff a rear swaybar will only make traction in the rear worse, not so much an issue with the LSD on your '89 but peg leg burn outs and spinning the inside rear tire has always been an issue when i auto-x'ed.

My 951 was the exact same way except with Koni's front and rear with stock springs. The stock springs are just way too soft. My splitter used to scrape on the entrance to the bowl at Pocono raceway.. i thought my wheel bearings were going until someone got a picture of me with the wheel literally 1/4 of the way inside the fender and the front splitter scraping.

Here are some old pictures of my car using the Koni's with stock springs at an auto-x many moons ago..

black944 turbo

74, strut brace makes a huge difference in feel as well (at least on my car). I thought that it was a load of garbage and bought one for giggles and thought it won't do a thing. I stuck it on there and it made the steering feel a ton better.

jmj951

To decrease the body roll you will need to more than double your spring rate, upgrade the sways, and if possible, lower the car even more. In your case, if the ride quality for the street is already at the maximum stiffness you can live with, then there is no good compromise between street and track/course short of having two separate sets of coilover struts/shocks. You shouldn't upgrade the front sway bar without increasing the spring rate (though you could throw on bigger sway bars permanently as long as you only pushed the front suspension when you have stiffer springs mounted). As a previous poster mentioned, you will considerably increase the stress on the a-arms. I have seen an extreme example where the a-arm snapped in half at the mounting point of the front sway bar droplinks. Start with spring upgrades, then move on to sway bar upgrades. If you lower the front of the car more than a half-inch (which you'll need to do for significant improvements), you'll need geometry-correcting ball joint pins on the a-arms or you'll get binding, bent pins, and possibly a-arm failure.

If you can't live with a higher spring rate on the street and you really need to reduce body roll on the course, get a second set of struts/shocks (less than $2k to do this) for autocross or DE events.

On the front, you should get a package that includes adjustable struts with springs at least 500#, adjustable spring height collars, and adjustable camber plates. Your rear autocross shocks would include coilovers (again, adjustable spring height collar, with spring rate to complement your torsion bar rate), an upgraded rear eccentric bolt to allow for even more adjustment, and the upgraded lower shock mount. It's really not that difficult to swap out the fronts, but can be a little more painful on the rears to deal with the upper mount bolts. You will also need a camber adustment gauge when swapping out the fronts, since you'll be impacting the camber setting every time you swap them. The first time you implement this setup, it will take some time to adjust the stiffness and ride height to your liking, but after that, it should simply be a matter of swapping them.

I somewhat agree with a previous poster about the bushings, but only if the scope of the change is limited to body roll. Changing the bushings will have very little impact on body roll (except for some small improvement by changing the sway bar bushings to a solid material such as Delrin) -> However, suspension bushing upgrades will greatly enhance the feedback you get on the wheel and the seat-of-the-pants, but at the expense of a smooth/quiet street ride.

No comment on strut bars as I don't run one (yet), but I've never heard them mentioned in the context of reducing body roll, only improving rigidity for the purpose of improving steering.

chris951

Stiffer sway bar bushings and stiffer front springs will fix that, I had the same problem.

User 52121

That body roll looks similar to my friend's low-mile '86 the last time I autocrossed it. (It was his first event and he asked me to drive his car to "see what it could do.") He drove it like that for a while - then discovered the shocks were DONE. He updated everything to Koni yellows (from Jason @ Paragon) along with the M030 sways. Much better and not a harsh ride either.

I run a much stiffer setup (Bilstein "Escort Cup" kit with 300/350 springs and Welt sways) and get a lot less roll. But it's a pretty harsh ride, definitely not "soft" though certainly not as stiff as other setups either.

spencang

how do I check to see if my shocks are done?

74goldtarga

if they're leaking fluid they're done. Push on the corner of the car and make sure it doesn't keep bouncing when released. Realize the shocks will have only a transient effect on roll, so it is a separate question. To get back to some of the earlier suggestions, you'd be surprised how much you can increase the spring rates before it has a serious effect on ride quality. 500lb is a lot for the street IMO but probably pretty good for auto-x, that is about what I have on my track car and it isn't that bad on the street but it's definitely too much for a street focused car. You will hardly notice an increase to 250 to 300 lb springs on the street and that makes for a good pairing with the MO30 sways. Also, lowering the car an inch or so doesn't negatively affect ride either. Bushings negatively affect street ability big time but obviously help with handling precision and that is why I recommended you stay away from that (that and it won't fix the problem you presented). If you aren't sure about your shocks you can just have them rebuilt or replaced and then you will know, but shocks aren't' why you are rolling too much. You can also send them to Koni and I think they can evaluate them for you before you commit to having them rebuilt.

One of the biggest roll problems I had before was dive under braking, sways alone don't address this problem. If you do lowering springs it is pretty easy to reverse if you don't like it. If you get separate shocks and springs you can reverse it except it is a bit more costly - the only problem I have with this is you would have to have an alignment or do one yourself every time you changed.

Dave W.

Push down on each corner with all your weight, then release. The car should come back up and stay there. If it bounces the shocks are bad.

FYI I have a set of good Koni's with adjustable Ground Control perches and 225 pound springs/ 27mm torsion bars on my car. If you're up around Hayward let me know, you can try it out. I've enjoyed it immensely! They may not be on the car much longer since I just found a killer deal on a set of KW V3!