Hello! Sorry if I'm screwing up, I'm brand new.
TL;DR:
Put brand new Cayman R suspension on my 987.1. Took it to the track and now front left is riding half an inch lower than front right. These aren't adjustable coilovers and ride height before track was equal on left/right.
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So, I bought a 987.1 Cayman S in July of last year with the intention of using it as my first track car. Previous owner had some lowering springs on it that I didn't like (and I wanted to slowly build it up on my own after track days). Plan was to replace all the control arms, shocks, springs with all stock components to make it feel as "new" as possible (had some squeeks, rattles, etc, so I loaded and fired the parts cannon. No more squeeks, rattles or money!). Decided to go with the Cayman R retrofit springs from Suncoast because finding a new OEM setup was proving difficult.
I install all this stuff about a month ago, got an alignment at Porsche, and put maybe 300-400 miles on the car before going to the track. I've never done any work like this before but the car was feeling awesome!
I attended my first track day on Friday the 6th (PCA event at Blackhawk Farms in Illinois). It was raining the whole time, had a blast.
Today I finally got the car out of the garage to wash the track day off of it and noticed the front left is about half an inch lower than the front right (measuring from ground to fender up the center of the wheel. Gap between top of wheel and fender is also clearly tighter). A few days after doing the work I had measured the height and both rears matched and both fronts matched, so I know this is a post-track thing (the rears are still identical). Blackhawk is primarily a right-hand turn track, I don't know if this actually matters in a practical sense, but I feel like it's worth mentioning. I've been told suspensions can sag a bit after installing them, but doing some research it sounds like this isn't really all that common and even if it was, half an inch seems like too much either way.
Thoughts? Should I take it out and try to do some hard right handers and see if it evens out (this is mostly a joke)? What could I have screwed up during the install to cause this to happen? Or is this just a normal thing that will work itself out over time and I'm just over-thinking it?
Were the shocks brand new? If used - to me the lower height could indicate the shock has sprung a leak and the gas pressurizing it has disappeared.
Interesting. If that’s the case would you expect it to keep lowering over time or stop at a certain point?
I got the setup from SuncoastParts. The “
Cayman R Suspension
Retrofit”. The page doesn’t say anything about them being used (it doesn’t say new, either). They certainly looked brand new but they could just be refurbished I guess.
I had that happen in an MR2 long time ago… the strut let go… seems odd that it would still sag but something looked a little off to me… the real drag is the disassemble of all of it
I’m on
Eibach springs
and notice the same. It’s more around .25 inches for me though.. the car drives well though.
You need to measure the ride height properly before doing anything.
This should be on a flat surface and (if I recall correctly) from the floor to a point on the subframe.
Mine is 2mm lower on the nearside (measured during a proper alignment) but the fender gap etc often looks lesser on the offside (my driveway is not totally level).
Funny you mention that. I jacked up my car and checked out the suspension and everything was looking good from what I could see. When I dropped it back down both sides were dead level again. After going out for a ride (did some quick stops on some empty roads to put some weight on them) they ended up being off by about .25. I'm thinking I need to put some more miles on them before deciding if there's something actually wrong or I'm just over-analyzing.
I'm a dumb American and had to convert 2mm to inches and it's apparently only .078 inches. I've been looking at about a 12+mm difference. I actually did measure from the floor to the frame and got the same difference of about half an inch, but ever since then I've been doing floor to the top of the fender because it's more convenient and I'm getting the same difference between both sides anyway. I'm sure my garage floor isn't perfect but it's not
that
bad.
All that being said, I think I just need to put more miles on it and see if it gets worse. Not really sure what my other options are.
I've asked others in a fb thread.. they said it wasn't normal. But I'm not sure.. There's no leaking etc, I've inspected. My car has 22k miles.
Just a FWIW - the real measurement is from a point on the RIM to the wheel-well center above the rim. Doing measurements from the ground brings into play possible tire differences causing a different height. You want to measure and compare from known fixed
points
. I'm sure if you have the factory manual that's exactly how they want you to do it.
