gorganl2000
Lifer
As cool as slammed cars look, don't expect them to handle very well. The rear suspension doesn't much care what height it's at (assuming that you have an adjustable panhard rod and have re-centred the axle) but the front is a different story...
When you significantly lower a basic macpherson strut based car beyond a point (it's not very much lower than stock) you start to run into all sorts of negative effects. The biggest on a starlet is that the roll centre and roll couple are miles from where they should be. This means that as the car rolls the car will actually find it EASIER to roll further. This inevitably results in hitting the end of available suspension travel. Without suitable amounts of travel you're shock loading the tire on the bump stops and it's highly likely that you will lose control if cornering near the limit. As well as that, once your lower A arms get beyond horizontal to the ground, any further suspension compression will result in POSITIVE camber gain. That's all kinds of bad!
Although it as it may seem counter intuitive to 'performance car' people, higher = better when it comes to suspension performance with stock geometry.
There are ways to get around these issues, either via a quick fix (really stiff spring rates) or the 'correct' way which is actually resolving the underlying alignment problems. If somebody is interested I could do a write up that explains why lowered starlets handle like arseburgers and how to *really* fix it.
excellent post fatman...i know its important to keep those lower arms as horizontal as possible plus other variables within certain tolerances
could you please explain further if you can
i know a bit from talking to rally guys...but a good write up would be useful to the forum