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We're coming to the end of our intro phase for these coilovers and we're beginning to get more of the SS1s out in the wild. A few people have asked me to post more detailed thoughts on the coilovers after having them on my car for a couple months. I work for RCE (duh) but I try to be as honest as possible. There's a limitations section at the end. I'm almost always available to give a ride in my car if you want some first hand impressions as well.
General component thoughts
These use a lowering camber plate that adds a lot of bump travel. The pillowball is sealed from below and to be honest I haven't heard a quieter camber plate. They're high quality camber plates with minimal day-to-day NVH increase, which is not always common.
These use the KW "race" coilover springs and helpers front and rear.
Dust boots, locking spring perches, bumpstops, etc. all are the usual good KW quality.
The finish is shiny. They clean up easily. I'm not too concerned about salt, but will keep em clean and wipe em down after snowstorms.
Ride
The ride is really good. The comparison to stock is always tricky, but IMO they ride better than early cars and close to stock for the later cars. It's not a coilover that makes you want to apologize to your passengers. At low drops (1.5 inches or more), you'll feel some bigger bumps in city driving but it's well within daily driveable and easily passes both the mom and the not-a-car-loving girlfriend test. At a 1 inch drop, it's just plain great with boat loads of travel to spare.
Overall, it's very impressive and compares favorably with more expensive coilovers. No bounce, and no crashiness. Controlled and settled in a way that's difficult to get with just lowering springs. The adjuster works really well and is IMO one of the most impressive parts of the shock in this price range.
Handling
With a good alignment and good tires, the car is so much fun and fast. The spring rates were chosen to match well with tires ranging from OEM to Michelin Pilot Sport 4S to GT Radial SX2 and Hankook RS4. More tire grip will require more camber to make the most of the suspension, and those on R comps may want to consider adding larger swaybars. Obviously we see lower lap times in our testing with a skilled driver, but we also saw very consistent lap times and improved driver confidence with a less experienced driver. That's something that's important to us...we want these coilovers to open up the potential of both the car and the driver.
Also, it's a lot of fun. The ability to kick the back end out is still easily accessible, but not in a way that will catch you off guard.
Other damping related thoughts
The damping is a level above what you would expect at the price point, and that includes the adjuster. One of my big gripes with some coilovers is the adjuster isn't very useful. For too many coilovers, the stiffer settings give you astronomical and almost unusable forces from low to high piston speeds. Yes, it's digressive, but it's an insane amount of nose force and then still way too much high speed. At softer damper settings for some coilovers, there's so little force anywhere and the car is just bouncy. Somewhere in the middle it's OKAY, but not great, because really it's just the high speed that's okay but it's really progressive and soft up to that point. So they end up not great on the street OR the track. The SS1s are different...by focusing what the adjuster changes to the low and mid piston speed, you end up with a more usable range of adjustment.
Limitations
While you can certainly track these if you run R compound tires and they'll do well, that level of grip is better suited to a stiffer set up. Also true if you run real aerodynamics. There are other coilovers out there (more expensive) that will fit the bill nicely for those users.
There's a lot of travel and these can get pretty darn low (2 inches) but they weren't really designed to be slammed.
Also, you probably shouldn't rally-x these...
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So, we've been around for more than 15 years and have had multiple opportunities to release a "cheap" coilover. But there were always compromises we just couldn't let ourselves make...namely we didn't want them to suck. So we're pretty excited to finally offer a relatively inexpensive streetable and trackable coilover that checks all the boxes for our users. It's a pretty great coilover with some cool features that just happens to be relatively inexpensive.
- Andrew
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