Suspension Shootout
 

Has anyone seen a published article comparing suspension upgrades ?

It's great to see everybody praise so-and-so's products, but the most helpful thing for prospective buyers is to have a side-by-side evaluation done of several products. A real evaluation describing and comparing each setup, with an overall winner declared....or at least track and street winners.

CamaroFest seems like an ideal place to do this. Nobody would have to buy and install all the various companies' kits and components for the comparison since I'm sure at least one car with each major supplier's parts would be on hand.

Volunteers ?

Pedders
Pfadt
Hotchkiss
Eibach

Other popular setups woudl be welcome, but I believe all those companies supply entire kits (springs, swaybars, bushings, etc).

....
 

what's that?

wow ... just wow :) nice driving and a very nice car!

Another company that I am going with is Spohn

It was a very impromptu event at SEMA, where pedders got Paul Tracy to drive their car with 10xs the parts (and money) of several competitors heck...Hardly a challenge in reality, it was just a marketing event for company's with a good budget.

Are real challenge is a time attack event of sorts, with the same driver and conditions and power restrictions, and then we can test the real results of suspension engineering and product quality. Not the joke that was the optima challenge.

-Regards

Our Pedders Camaro is the best handling Camaro for the street in the USA. the Pedders Camaro is used for daily driving except when it is snowing. The outstanding Bridgestone RE11s are too wide for snow. Pete's girls love to be picked up in the Camaro. And of coarse, his girls have no problems spotting or hearing the Pedders Camaro in the school parking lot with all the other parents.

We have performed an extremely large amount of testing in dozens of stages of development, using telemetry equipment to g force meters, timing equipment,professional drivers, etc, etc. So we took our Camaro to the best we could make it, in the time frame we had, and monitoring the improvements, step by step. Our Camaro is now significantly better than it was at Sema and the Optima Challenge, and rides even better than it did last year.

Doing the process that we did, we know exactly what to expect in handling improvements with every component we have, as well as the specs we recommend for our setups.

With that said, when Pedders goes out to show and play, we go out with our best efforts. Some suspension companies are perfectly happy with getting their Camaros to a .97g. This would be a failure for us. Our Pedders Camaro can turn a 1.38g. We were over 1.0gs without a complete system. We know what tire combinations work the best. Many builders are into the looks of split configured, oversized wheels and tires for the rear. That may work for connecting better going straight, but is a hinderance thru the twisties and skid pad tests. Do to our testing, we set up our Camaro different than other companies as well. Why? Because we tested huge amounts of settings, and quantified the settings we have. They work! Maybe this is one of the big differences in the suspension companies and this shows everyone how serious we are. We brought people to Optima that could fine tune our Camaro to Paul Tracy's desires. Paul Tracy said "It's perfect, don't change a thing." With 3 professional drivers who have tested our Camaro, their only comments for improvements were better brakes, and R compound tires. We now have killer brakes, but since the Pedders Camaro is a street legal car, and a daily driver in non snow, R compound tires are not what we will do. but the tire experts tell us if we had the DOT R compound tires that many of the people at Optima were running, we would have decreased our track time upwards of 4 to 6 seconds.

We have some great things happening in 2010 and our plate is pretty full. We are applying the processes we developed with the Camaro development, to other US vehicle platforms. Lots of hard work, but it pays off in quality, reliability, and of coarse, results.


With respect to the Optima Challenge, most of the major suspension manufacturers knew they would be going to the Optima Challenge months and months ahead of time. If they knew they were going, and knowing the amount of automotive press that would be there, wouldn't you want your vehicle to perform the best you can make it? There were other 2010 Camaros there running equal hp, and full systems, yet they were 20-25 seconds slower. Is Paul Tracy a fantastic driver and advisor to us?? Absolutely. But the racing talent of other suspension owners is seriously great. Pedders should not be criticized for coming to the table with a properly prepared Camaro, ready to show off what we can do to the world and looking every bit as aggressive as she handles.

The only prep work we did to the Camaro was the exterior. We did esthetic treatments in preparation for SEMA because being on display there, we wanted her to look awesome, which is expected!


mike
dms

let go to the track and pruve this take off the blower and put the stock tires on and lets find out , my car air lift and your car:thumbup::)

Getting everyone together will be quite a challenge. the cost will be emense to do such a project. Plus there will always be someone to say they had more hp than me, or they had a better driver than me, or they had better tires than me.........

Everyone saw what the Pedders Camaro could do. It is seriously better now. So the question will be what will show up at the Optima Challenge this year?

mike
dms

it would be too expensive and too hard to make sure all cars were equal other than suspension...

just go with test results already available ....

imo for the ultimate suspension go pedders.. if you just want looks.. get a cheaper drop kit

It is challenging sometimes to make comparitive data anaylsis based on what is published. I.E. There is info that a suspension company has published about one of their parts in terms of strength that is mathematicaly impossible to achieve. So I can seriously understand the challlenges the Camaro consumer has. There are 3 serious manufacturers bidding for your business, and a half dozen other non serious companies doing a sudo attempt for the Camaro business as well.

So I do not know what the best solution is. Things to consider when making your selections are:
1. How well is the manufacturer represented on the forum
2. How easy is it to get technical data from them
3. Does the manufacturer own a Camaro for their own testing
4. Does the manufacturer offer complete solutions for the Camaro
5. Does the manufacturer offer you data on improvement. their product makes

There is more to this but it is a great start

mike
dms

We'd welcome a suspension shootout anytime. In fact, there are even a few major companies that offer parts for the 5th Gen that have no forum presence that we would like to see in the mix. Couldn't think of a better outlet for a shootout like that then Camaro Performers Magazine - and they have an excellent testing facility at El Toro Airbase. If forum members sent email to CamaroPerformers@sorc.com and asked for the shootout, we bet they'd do it.

I'd really like to see the test on a stock car with stock tires. What suspension components will be tested? You can't have one guy come with springs and sways and another come with coilovers, sways, and bushings...everyone needs to be on an equal playing field.

Thanks for keeping this thread alive !!

I'm pragmatic - I just want a subjective assessment by a couple of regular forum members after driving/riding in people's cars at CamaroFest next weekend. Ride quality/comfort is subjective by nature anyway, and that's one of my most important criteria. This is my only car, so comfort means more to me than 0.01 better lateral G......

Any takers ?

Of course a full-blown write-up from a published source would be fantastic. I'd love to see that too.

Any C-Fest observations on various suspension setups ?