So I have been wanting to autox my car and I got fortune auto dsg edition coilovers on recently. my car sits pretty low since I have a voltex style lip and splitter, I cant get my foot with shoes on underneath the front. What are the best alignment settings for autox? I have ****ty 245/40 all season tires on. tread is really good so I wanna wear them out before I buy performance tires. Any recommendation on alignment settings will help, also want to know if I should raise my car a little or if I will be fine as long as my tires don't rub against my fenders? thanks in advance!

 

I would personally keep at least 3" of clearance under the car. Probably equates to a 2 inch drop. What are your spring rates and do you have upgraded sway bars?

Different tires usually require different amounts of camber to perform optimally. Something you will need to test over time with different tire setups.

I think -2.5 front and -2.0 rear is a good starting point. It should allow you to run a slightly lower pressure for more contact area. If you don't run enough camber you will need a higher tire pressure to keep from rolling onto the sidewall. I would check your tire pressure after each run and try a few different settings.

You can really tweak the handling a lot through tire pressure alone. A hot pressure of 32-34 is probably a good starting point. Chalk your wheels and drop the pressure until the wear pattern starts to reach the edge of the sidewall but don't eat into the sidewall.

 

yeah ill have to raise my car up a little then, that's what I was thinking anyway. My spring rates are 9k front and rear, and no I do not have any upgraded sway bars. I will definitely can and will mess around with the tire pressure, and I'm going to go get an alignment soon and ill let them know what settings we should aim for. For now, I am just starting autox, so I want to figure out if I really like it before I dump hundreds more into suspension components. Thanks for all the helpful advice!

 

9K should give you a decent starting point. The stock suspension had a ton of body roll when I first autocrossed it. The coilovers should help a lot, it will also reduce the nose dive when you are hard on the brakes.

I did notice a pretty big handling performance increase when I added the adjustable sway bars, front and rear. They would cost you around $500-600 with endlinks. The car rotates very nicely now and you can adjust stiffness as well for extra tweaking. Having bigger sway bars should prepare you for stickier tires as well. Extra grippy tires will provoke more roll out of the car and the sway bars will counteract this.

Having your car lowered should allow you to run -2 camber in the rear easily due to the altered suspension geometry. The alignment guys shouldn't have any problems with that with the normal adjustment points. Do your coilovers have camber plates? If not your only way to adjust camber is by flipping the camber bolts where the strut body attaches to the steering knuckle. This will typically allow you to run -2 in the front. With good camber plates you can do just about any camber you want.

Autocross is a ton of fun. I've only raced in 7-8 events and I'm still very much a noob driver, but once you figure out how much you can adjust/tweak it gets pretty addictive.

The only other thing I would mention is the Evo X kind of sucks in terms of PAX placement. There are really no good classes for it. It is too heavy for STU, ASP and SM in my opinion. They are probably okay in BS but will still have problems with S2000's and Evo IX's. I just race in SM to have fun, if you actually want to be competitive you will want to mod the car to fit into a category. Any kind of tune will basically put you into ASP or higher. But really who cares, just compare RAW times and make sure you never lose to any STi's .

 

I will probably add sway bars later this summer if everything is going good and I am enjoying myself in autox. I feel like I would have a lot of fun, and enjoy it a lot. I don't really want to compete like go crazy, mainly just to have fun. obviously I still want to get the best times my car is capable of, and mess around with a few of my friends and give them crap if I beat their times. I do not believe they have camber plates, Im still a noob at all the suspension stuff. I will buy sway bars soon if I like it, before I buy some nice performance tires. Definitely looking forward to my first autox

 

If you have the fortune auto coilovers then you do have camber plates. A little off topic, but how did you mount your voltex lip? I only have mine with two self taping screws on each side of the fender well. I hope that's enough

 

yes that's exactly what I did!! I screwed the lip and splitter together of course but I put two on each side in the fender well and its been fine for about 2 months