Setting up you shocks for road racing
Perhaps one of the most important adjustments you can do to your car to improve handling is adjusting your shock absorbers bump and rebound settings. Adjusting the bump controls the upward movement of your suspension. Adjusting the rebound settings controls not how much your car will lean, but how fast it will lean. How much your car leans is more determined by spring weight, roll center height, and roll bars.
Adjusting bump
Adjusting your bump damping, controls the upward movement of your suspension when you hit a bump in the road surface or track. It doesn’t control the downward movement, just the upward.
A common mistake people make is thinking that adjusting the bump setting to full stiff will improve handling by making the suspension stiffer. Remember that the “amount” of lean your car has is more determined by the springs, roll center height, and anti-roll bars.
- The best way to set your bump settings is to first set them on full soft or the minimum bump. At this time, go ahead and adjust the rebound settings to full soft.
- Drive a couple of lap and get a new feel for the car. What your looking for is how the car “feels” through rough turns. Is the car bouncing or hopping through rough turns?
- Increase your bump adjustment a couple of clicks for all four wheels then take it out for a couple of more laps. Remember that to adjust for the proper bump settings, don’t pay any attention to body roll or lean. Pay attention to how the car feels through the rough turns. Repeat these steps until the car feels like it’s hard or stiff through the rough turns.
- Now back off the settings a few clicks. Your bump settings are now ready to go. You may notice that one end of the car may still feel rough. Go ahead and adjust just that end of the car by a couple of clicks.
Adjusting rebound
Remember that rebound controls the transitions of your turns. It doesn’t adjust the total amount of roll going into a turn, but it does control how fast the roll angle takes place. If you have your rebound set too stiff, the spring does not have enough time to return to the neutral position, then when you hit another bump, the shock and spring is compressed even more until it gets to the point of bottoming out. At that point, you will have a great loss in traction.
Adjusting the rebound
- Just as with the bump settings, you want to start setting the rebound settings set to full soft. Drive a couple of laps and now pay attention to how the car rolls into the turns.
- Increase the rebound dampening a few clicks or about a turn. Take it out for a few laps and note how the car rolls into the turns. You want to repeat this step until the car enters the turn very smoothly with no drastic or sudden leans to one side or the other. Once you get to that point, your rebound is set. If you increase rebound any more, it may actually cause the car to handle worse.
