Winter Suspension Questions...

[snoroller]

Hey,

I'm leasing a 2011 and have decided that I will buy it out after lease end. Probably should have just purchased from the getgo but had a bad experience with the last car so I wanted to try this one out first. Love it.

So now I'm ready to mod the suspension and am looking at coilovers, sways, and maybe the alu kruez. Question I have is how this will affect winter driveability. It snowed around 30 ft at the house last Winter so I will be commuting to work and the ski slopes quite a bit in the snow. It seems like sways are a no-brainer so I'm thinking of Hotchkiss 'H' bars. Any thoughts on how much this will affect snow handling? Probably will lead to the rear end breaking loose faster but nothing really extreme right?

The real question is for coilovers. I'd love a Summer and Winter setup so the adjustability sounds pretty good but I'm under the impression that coils' height adjustment is not really for lowering/raising the car but truly for improving handling. Problem is that if I drop the height by an inch and a half or whatever, I'll be plowing the road a lot of the time in the Winter.

So the questions here are: Can we generally raise coilover height to get the car back to near stock if we want? and, is this the right thing to do?

Thanks for the help!
-Tim

[apexit1]

You can adjust the height on CO's but you'd need an alignment every time you mess with the ride height. It is true that ride height affects performance as each car has a point where the suspension handles best. That said I don't know if you would notice the difference as I doubt it will be drastic changes.

This past winter I was at stock height and didn't really run into any issues other than in unplowed areas. I'd imagine you would lower it for the summer and be right around stock height in the winter so I don't foresee any issues.

Different CO's will be able to go around stock height or a little lower/ higher. This is something that you'd have to look at for the CO system you're looking at. As for the sways and alucruze all I can say is that snow lowers traction so the sways will likely make the car a little more prone to over steer but I don't think there would be any change with the alucruze because it just removes some of the slack in the front end.