Lowering Your Car Without Wrecking It

Lowering a car is one of those jobs where the parts are the easy part and the setup is what separates a car that drives well from one that eats tires and rides like a wheelbarrow. First decision: springs or coilovers. Lowering springs give you a fixed drop, usually an inch or two, at the lowest cost, using your existing struts. Coilovers give you adjustable ride height and usually adjustable damping, and they're the right answer if you want a bigger drop than stock struts can live with, or if the car sees track or autocross time. The classic mistake is lowering springs on tired factory struts. A shorter, stiffer spring works the strut outside the range it was designed for, so the strut wears out early and the car rides badly in the meantime. Either buy a matched spring and strut kit, or plan on struts as part of the same job. Here's the step people skip: alignment. Changing ride height changes camber, toe, and on some designs caster. It is not optional and it is not a "sometime soon" item. The symptom of skipping it is the inside edges worn off a brand new set of tires in a few thousand miles, and by the time you can see it, the tires are done. There's a wrinkle worth knowing before you buy parts: plenty of cars have no factory camber adjustment at all. Getting a lowered car back into spec often needs camber bolts, adjustable upper arms, or camber plates. Which one your car needs is entirely specific to the make and model, so ask before you order. Then there's the part that's specific to driving here. Driveway aprons, gravel-to-pavement transitions on county roads, unimproved shoulders, and railroad crossings. A two-inch drop that's fine in a city is a scraped oil pan and a torn front lip in central Kansas. We would usually rather talk you into a more conservative drop that you can actually live with than sell you the aggressive one and see the car back with damage. Last thing: springs settle. Plan on rechecking the alignment after the first few hundred miles, once the car has found its real ride height.