That's the beauty of this method...you don't have to crawl under the car to remove the shims, they're on the upper A-arms and easily accessible from the top after you raise the hood. For the rear toe adjustment, you don't even have to jack the car up...these adjustments are that easy. You could make some runs, let me have your car for 15 minutes, and then go back out and make about 5 runs (because it'll take you that many runs to get used to the new found grip and gain confidence with the increased stability). Your times will improve 1-2 seconds with this simple adjustment...it's essential for the autocrossers going after the best time. If you're just out for a little fun, then don't worry about it.

If you're not going over to the arrows, you have too much...especially at the camber settings you have. The more tire pressure you run, the less rubber you have on the pavement.

Don't lower the car too much, maybe 1/2" at most. There are factory "Z" and "D" heights measured from the suspension that are critical to proper suspension geometry relative to camber curves as the wheel goes through its travel. Get the biggest bars you can, they don't affect the ride significantly. It's curious you would want to go to all of this work/cost when there are actually small (but real) gains from these mods yet you aren't interested in a simple adjustment that returns large gains...to each their own.

 

Okay okay youve convinced me! I'll take out the shims and adjust my rear toe. Im probably not gonna bother lowering it either

 

If your car has Z51 with the FX3 shocks, you have FE1 sway bars.

 

Look on bottom side of the console door...

 

The rear strut rods (the ones that go from under the differential out to the spindles, parallel to the half shafts) are often overlooked. The inner mounting point for these is in the wrong location from the factory. Correcting this and using heim jointed bars fixes more problems that you would believe and makes a significant improvement in handling - mailing because it keep the rear tires vertical.


www.vbandp.com (Where you should be getting your sway bars from anyways) sells those brackets under the name "smart strut". Talk to them about what you want to do and they'll get you sorted out.

 

If you're already running 2° negative camber AND have a built suspension with a LOT of roll stiffness via stiff springs/bars/shocks, then the smart strut/heim joint strut rods MAY be a good idea...only if you know what you're doing. For a mostly stock base suspension with ½° negative camber, either one would be a bad idea and the combination would be disasterous.

The stock strut mount/strut rods were designed from the factory for a specific purpose. The strut mount location was picked with the expressed purpose of adding negative camber as the outboard suspension compressed in a turn to counter the positive camber added as the car rolled. (Lowering the car has the same affect of cancelling the negative camber gained which is why you don't want to lower the car much.) The strut rods have rubber bushings that compress during cornering and uses the toe links to make the tire toe-in as the suspension loads up, this is called compliance understeer...the front suspension has compliance understeer designed into it also and the combination is what makes the C4 chassis such a user friendly platform. Put the smart struts AND heim jointed strut rods on a mostly stock base suspension C4 and you just eliminated the camber gain/toe-in compliance understeer characteristics of the rear suspension and produced a car that is now a handful at the limit and is very prone to snap oversteer...disasterous for the novice.

To the OP:
VB&P has a lot of good parts available for the C4 but as always, ''let the buyer beware''. The write up for the smart strut contains incorrect and contradictory claims, it's up the the buyer to figure out exactly what each part does and how to use it because VB&P is in business to sell things to make money. My experience with them was they told me what I wanted to hear so I would buy a spring...when I got it, it was nothing like they said. Attempts to return it were ignored at first and then they wanted to charge me a restocking fee plus ship at my expense. At this point, I just turned it over to my credit card company and they denied payment for the whole order...VB&P came back to me singing a completely different tune and things were taken care of like they should have other than the fact they shouldn't have lied to me in the very beginning. If they had taken care of it immediately with no problems, I would've chalked it up to a simple mistake and forgotten about it but their poor customer service has had a very long lasting affect on me, this was like 4-5 years ago. Afterwards, I read similar stories at the time so it appeared to be the way they did business...who knows, maybe they've changed since then.

 

I removed my front camber shims for autocross tomorrow. The drivers side was easy but the passenger side was a PITA because its under the ac compressor. I had to tighten down the bolts quite a bit after because there was like a half inch of play after removing the shims. I didnt mess with the rear toe because its a million degrees out and i got lazy. Do i want to toe in the rear? Or toe out? I guess i just gotta grab the tie rod sleeve with a set of channel locks or something.

 

You do NOT want toe out unless you like oversteer. Set it for some toe-in. How much depends on a lot of things but you want toe-in. Makes the car more stable, and stable is fast.

 

Easy way to measure your sway bars is with an open end wrench. If you don't have one big enough, a crescent wrench will do the same thing.