What brand of shocks to replace stock with?

Your suggestions and experiences. Not looking to change ride height, also not tracking car. Just looking for a better street shock. Looking for less sway and improved ride. Already have Z51 sways on board.

Thanks in advance!

 

do you have a base model? If so, I would consider upgrading to Z51 shocks. I have a base model and upgraded to Z51 shocks on mine. Much stiffer ride, but not overkill. They are just right now.

 

Base model.

Glad to see your adventures are all done. Even I was getting anxiety.

 

yea me too. Hopefully no surprises! Lol

 

You did not say which Z51 rear sway bar you have? There are two; one with the 26mm diameter and came the Z51 without the mag ride, and the other is 31mm with the mag ride. IMO the 26mm bar allows too much sway and far too much understeer. It is a significant upgrade to move to the 31mm rear bar. It is only $71 + bushings from GM Parts Direct.

The Z51 shocks (non mag ride) is a nice upgrade to the base shocks, easy to install but, it will not improve "ride quality". If will improve the handling of the car by providing tighter dampening over the base. The shock selection, BTW, do not have much effect on "sway". That is the role of the swaybars. My recommendation is to get the 31mm rear bar/bushings, install them, and see if you still want something more. I think you will see a fair amout of improvement in sway reduction and general handling without significantly compromising ride comfort.

 

I've ordered a Z51 coupe without magride. This is the first I've heard of the different swaybar. Will the larger swaybar move the car toward neutral/overstear?

 

The car will be much more neutral with still a mild degree of understeer. I have not experienced any oversteer tendencies up to 90 MPH cornering. At those speeds the handling was very neutral. Have not had a chance for trying higher speed corners, yet.

 

 

Bigger Swaybars reduce grip to the wheels they are being added to, thus a putting bigger bar will reduce grip to the rear wheels. Why do you want to reduce grip to the rear wheels of a 460hp car? If you think the car has to much body roll, incense the spring rate to the front wheels and use the non drive wheels to control body roll.... but thats just if you want to be fast

 

 

Bigger front = more understeer
Smaller front = less understeer

Bigger rear = more oversteer
Smaller rear = less oversteer

Bigger in general should increase stiffness and result in less sway (like adding stiffer spring to side outside of the turn)

 

That is a LOT OF BAD info!

First the correct one (kind of). Yes, larger rear bar reduces traction. But, the advantages it provides if it sized correctly FAR outweigh the negatives (reduced traction). A car that is allowed to sway much will be very difficult and, potentially, dangerous to drive fast when quick cornering transitions are required. Why do you think most race cars and top street performance cars come with large enough front and rear sway bars to nearly eliminate side-to-side body roll? The bar I recommended (31mm) is used on the highest performance C7s, the Z51 Mag Ride and the ZO6. Not by accident...

You recommended increasing the front spring rates to eliminate sway. Very bad advice. Two things: spring rates primarily are NOT designed to control body roll. Swaybars supposed to do that. Second; by increasing the front spring rates you reduce traction at the front wheels, making an already heavily understeering car understeer even more while doing next to nothing to eliminate the roll that originates from the back.

Suspension settings, just like so many other things in life, are compromises, such as traction vs. predictable handling. If you had more exprience in suspension tuning, you would likely know more about where and how much to compromise.

For me the ideal street suspension setup is with the 31mm rear bar that gives me predictable, safe, slight understeer in slower corners while becoming very neutral in higher speed corners. It is a FAST setup while still providing a degree of "forgiveness" for making slight mistakes, such as entering a corner too fast. Also, makes steering the car a lot less work, raising the driving enjoyment level a great deal.

Win - Win!

 

post the part numbers for the bigger sway bar and bushings please. for 100$ ill give it a shot and see how much better the 31mm bar is

 

Check back in a bit more than an hour, now I got to run. I'll look up those numbers for you then and post them.

 

Found them real quickly:

31mm bar: 22936510 - $71.83

Bushings (you need 2) 22950837 - $5.02 each, $10.04 total.

 

I know this thread started with shock info and then steered (see what I did there?) into sway bar territory.

For what it's worth, a larger (admittedly, much larger) front bar made my car driveable again by killing the massive oversteer. I can create as much oversteer as I'd like by feathering the throttle mid-turn.

The larger Z51 is certainly a cheap test to see if you're satisfied before laying out the money for shocks or coilovers.

 

Thank you, i emailed GM parts direct any they wanted the VIN off of a car that had Mag ride before they would confirm the part numbers were correct....

Will this mess up my alignment?

 

While it's never a bad idea to have an alignment done after any suspension work, I would say that the difference is rather small to cause any significant changes.

Even after putting on very different (and very large) bars, my alignment barely changed (which was rather surprising).

 

Speaking of alignment I'm posting one that knows no oversteer, I do run the 31 mm bar on my non mag ride z51 and will go to my grave believing tons of rear tow in is the safe smart fast way around a track/autocross.

 

WOW!!! - Savage. That is a WHOLE LOT of toe-in. I am running the factory recommended 0.05-in at each corner and have zero oversteer issues. The car works for me beautifully with -1.3 camber at each corner.

One question to Savage or anyone; my car lowered fully on stock bolts, which means only 0.5" lower at each corner. Prior to installing the Z51 shocks I bottomed out at the rear at my local secondary roads when I hitting road dips at 70 MPH. Once I got the Z51 shocks no more bottoming at 70 when driving alone with less than full tank of gas. But, today with a full tank of gas and a wife sitting next to me I bottomed at 63MPH. Bottoming sounds like a "plastic" touching something, perhaps the tires go up against the rear linings? A quick look under told me nothing. The car has stock wheel offsets and plenty of camber to avoid the tires touching the fenders.

Anyone else bottoming and found the reason?