RedRSA

Thank you for your offer to share your experience. I agree with you regarding the future of suspension control and tuning; here is my post from a companion thread:

Digital electronic suspension control is the future, and Mike and TPC are leading the way. They already have wheel-by-wheel velocity control, it is a matter of sensors - they come stock on the 991 GT3 and Mike is investigating how to incorporate on previous models.

One of the next major advances I expect is adding 2+ way functionality with independent compression and rebound damping. The downside is that I think this requires the nuisance of an external reservoir until someone designs independently controlled variable bi-directional valving. Get cracking, Tractive! ;-)

C.J. Ichiban

I just took delivery of my Viper ACR and it came with the Tractive as an add-on from Viper Exchange. On the viper the tractive dsc box has multiple map settings even accounting for custom maps that you can load (aero dependent with speed tables for dynamic dampening) in 30 seconds. I'm really impressed with the car so far but need to get a windows PC myself to fully exploit (right now my shop has to do the map swaps since I am mac only) - on the road in "street mode" the car doesn't wobble or crash, just soaks up bumps like an SUV would I guess.

In track button engage mode you can feel it get more resistant to body roll, dive and squat. Pretty rad to retain that PASM type function with the tractive. I'll report back after my track day wednesday to see how it all changes live on track.

To me it's a small price to pay for extracting the full potential of your car on the race track.

Tom@TPC Racing

Good question. As data points, all of the GT3 inverted front strut issues I have seen first hand and heard of from reputable sources are either one of the following:

1) Failure of strut bearings, which doesn't affect shock damping in itself but causes knocking sound as the inner tube rocks side to side within the outter tube since the failed strut bearing(s) cannot provide support to center the inner tube within the outter tube. Below is a cutaway image showing the tube bearings-


On many inverted struts the bearings are serviceable by removing the bottom nut to separate the inner tube, and pending the availability of the bearings of course, but on the OEM 997 GT3 PASM struts the bottoms are sealed by potting. See image below, left is 996 GT3, right is 997 GT3 PASM. And good luck finding OEM strut bearings...



2) Failure of the wiring , which leads to open circuit. Below image shows an example of Ford GT500 Bilstein inverted strut.



Both failure type 1 and type 2 are function of general usage and/or defective components, not from electronic commands. I have yet to see an internal valving failure, which is not to say that it couldn't happen.


The build quality of Tractive inverted struts are superior to mass produced OEM counterpart. Strut bearing failure on Tractives is far less likely. On that note, OEM strut bearing failure occur on 997 PASM inverted struts even without DSC, can occur on low mileage OEM struts from defective bearing, and for that matter on none-electronic inverted struts such as on 996 GT3 and other vehicles with none-electronic inverted struts.

Larry Cable

No you dont! you can run the PC app on a Mac inside a PC VM...

PM me for more details... or go check the official DSC thread for my posting

Jake951

About 20 of the 70 track days are with the DSC module. However, the OEM shocks were already starting to go bad before the installation of the module. The rate of deterioration increased after the installation, but I can't honestly say the DSC module made it any worse than it would have been on its own.

The rest of my suspension is full monoballs with no more rubber bushings anywhere. That has to transmit quite a bit of road impacts for the shocks to cope with.

MJSpeed

Bingo!

Larry Cable

My FAL is on its way out - seriously thinking about replacing the OEM PASM+FAL shocks with Tractive DDA's