I have adjustable shocks on my car. Left them on full soft for my first autocross. Should I start playing with them a bit for the next event?

I'm unsure what the car needs.

 

It looks like it needs torsion bars and sway bars! There's no harm in playing with the ***** you have. I assume rebound only adjustment? if you get the rear cranked up too high, it will likely increase the feeling of tendency towards lift off oversteer. If you get the fronts too stiff it will probably make the transition to push quicker when you get back on the throttle. If you end up wildly over damped on both ends of the car, it will end up getting stuck down on the bump stops because there isn't enough torsion bar to overcome the damper. Likely you don't have that much range of adjustment. As you bring the dampers up in stiffness look for some benefit in the transition / slolom feel. If the stopwatch tells you you're not making improvements then you can always go back to full soft. My aircooled car has the konis on the rear where you need to push a button and twist to adjust, but you really needed to take it all the way off the car to accomplish the adjustment. I ended up cutting off the lower part of the metal dust cover so that the adjustment could be made with the top of the shock still installed.

 

I like to stay on stock class......and punch above my weight class.....with FTD (I will catch Justin's BMW)

I have Hotbits shocks on it. Hotbits use to supply them for a lot of the Targa Newfoundland cars. One **** on the top of them with about 40 clicks.....they are really firm.

 

Oh cool I have double adjustable Hotbits on the rear of my car. They're pretty great, HUGE range, so don't get to chippy with the rebound.

Anyways, as noted above, the photo means nothing - terminal condition is dictated by springs / bars. The shocks are what's doing the work in transition. So they don't control how much your car rolls, but instead the rate that it rolls at. Shocks are most at work at corner entry and in a slalom. In sweepers / mid corner they aren't doing much.

Totally play with them and see the effects but keep in mind what they have control over. So if your car is great in sweepers but super loose in slaloms, for example, that's something you might be able to improve with shock tweaks. If your car is a push monster on corner exit, shock changes aren't going to be as effective at changing that.

 

Peter from Hotbits had a set of shocks on the shelf that he made up for a competitor that was going to the Targa NL rally but never picked them up. So I got them really cheap.

 

I had to look up Hotbits. Looks like the single adjustable shock changes compression and rebound simultaneously, so keep that in mind. Just guessing, but long before the suspension starts jacking down due to too much rebound you will probably feel the tires begin to skate and lose grip from simply too much total damping. Don't get sucked into how responsive and tied down the car feels (which will feel great) to the point where you are slower due to impaired grip. Let the car move around some.

I had QA1 single-adjustables on a car that worked the same way.

Experiment by making big changes at first that you can definitely feel. Remember, with adjustable shocks, at any particular set of conditions, every setting except one is wrong.