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Originally Posted by 86MLR
Incorrect spring rates, dampening, travel, and alignment settings can, and does effect stopping distances.
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There is no "correct" spring rate. The #1 thing that affects stopping distance is tires. Lowering springs won't affect stopping distances hugely and given lower c.g. and less overloading of front tires, should slightly improve stopping distances.
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Lowered springs, with high spring rates, on OEM, or, not matched dampers is engineering poor handling into a car.
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A given set of dampers can deal with a quite wide range of spring rates. In fact you only would need to change damping by the square root of spring rate, so if spring rates are 25% stiffer (typical for lowering springs) you'd only need about 12% greater damping to have the same %age critical damping. But anyway the stock dampers can already deal with total spring rates much higher than stock spring rates as the bump stops are contributing a lot of stiffness a lot of the time.
I can promise you that the overall handling performance of my car was greatly improved with the lowering springs I am on and braking did not suffer at all as near as I can tell...