legacycentral bbs

I did a suspension upgrade a few months back that included:

-2005 Legacy GT front struts
-2004 Sti springs on all 4 corners
-2004 STi rear struts
-1997 Legacy GT front sway bar. (20mm)
-1991 SS rear sway bar (19mm)
-1997 Legacy GT 16" wheels with 205/55/16
-stock brakes

The rear sits a little higher than the front but less than an inch. I may relocate the rear mounts a bit to compensate.

I set the front camber to maximum on the stock parts.

The control and cornering is WAY better than stock. I get just a little bit of oversteer in hard corners after I load the suspension. I haven't taken it in yet to get an alignment (and I know it needs one) because I first want to see what you guys think is the best for a car that frequently sees WOT corners, 120mph+ and heavy braking. I don't participate in the rallyX anymore due to the lowered ride height of the car (and the way the local rallyX is managed) but I would like to get involved in the autoX and roadracing.

Tire wear is not a major issue for me.

What do you guys think?

You won't get the alignment setting you really want without some more modification.

I'm running camber bolts in the rear and have slotted my front struts. With that I was able to get about -1.2 Front and -0.9 Back. I want to upgrade to adjustable rear laterals and do some work on the front. I'd like to have about -2.5 Front and -2.0 Rear. Right now I can fine tune my rotation with my rear sway bar and the car with the current settings is fairly neutral and responds well to proper turn entry if I want rotation.

Cross-camber I keep limited to less than .1 deg. Toe is at 0 deg. Caster you can't do anything about unless you go with camber plates.

Jamal has done some work on his to get the camber settings he wants.

Some of the tweaky Auto-X guys run upwards of -4 deg camber.

I will say, and you probably already know this, if you want to get into road racing you're going to be doing something with your brakes. Stock are good but they do have limits .

I will also note, and again you probably already thought of this, but you will want to be aware that your front and rear have different rebound characteristics since you're running different strut types. This can make a difference if you hit a bump at speed and in a corner.

A good alignment for auto-x is not a good alignment for a DD.

For auto-x you want a whole lot of negative camber up front and some toe out. Like -3+ degrees. turns good but isn't nice on tires.

I toed out the rear on the auto-x car and it helped w/ rotation/understeer. I wouldn't do it on a DD though, tires are too expensive.

For a good DD and AutoX car you want to keep your toe at zero but go ahead and run some negative camber. Neg camber wont wear out your tires if the toe is correct, its toe that leads to bad wear.