Most enthusiasts have committed this one; you want to modify your car and immediately hit the essentials first - wheels, tires and a drop to fill in the gap in the wheel well nicely. Now there is nothing wrong with this, often times some of the trusted names in lowering springs offer aesthetically pleasing and better handling spring options to get your car riding and handling beautifully. Now the problem comes into play when we just are never happy with a certain ride height and feel we can always go lower, not taking into account the level of engineering entailed in designing and fabricating safe and reliable springs (insert cut spring, helper spring deletion story here).
Now I myself cannot pretend to say that I have not seen some "stanced" vehicles that looked absolutely stunning, but we all have to understand how nonfunctional this level of a drop can be and/or dangerous it is to the rest of a cars suspension. I can't count how many cars I have seen with damage to the chassis from overlowering and the countless amount of premature failure I have seen on suspension parts - control arms, bushings, links (the list goes on an on) from out of whack suspension geometries and extremely negative camber . Personally for me, if I have to go low I will only go as low and a set of performance lowering springs will take me, but to some others its how close to the ground you can be!
In your opinion, how low can you go?
Image courtesy of Stanceworks
About The Author: Mike Rivera
Mike Rivera is an ASE Certified Technician and Senior Sales Account Executive at FCP Euro. He can be reached at mike@fcpeuro.com
