People claim that mag ride controls body roll but I’ve always questioned how much body roll is possible to be controlled given the sway bars and springs don’t change in stiffness. This is something I questioned on forums before getting my car and the common answer to how this was possible is “it just is”. Now I have it and low and behold it does exactly what I thought it would do. Shame on me for trusting the internet.

For my car, body roll feels identical in tour and sport which makes sense given only the damping rate can change. I suspect that at no point does a Z06 in tour ever feel like a Cadillac despite sharing the same mag ride technology.

In a regular sports car suspension setup the shocks, tires and roll bars are designed to be stiff and hold tight to the road surface at all times as the wheel follows every pebble in the road. This gives good feedback and maintains 100% contact with the road surface but at the expense of a jarring ride when rolling over a rough surface.

In a standard luxury car with no mag ride everything from the roll bars to the dampers and springs and tires are designed to soak up all the bumps but at the expense of losing contact with the road surface as the rebound rate can’t react quickly with the road without making a jarring ride.

The answer to the “but I want it all” problem in the past was Selective Ride Control type technology where the dampers were adjustable but was left to the driver what mode to set it in, based on the drivers detected feedback. What mag ride is supposed to do is do that job in real time so the driver doesn’t have to keep swapping between different modes as the road surface changes. However we’re now up to the 4th version of mag ride and we still have to select what mode to use based on our feedback from the road. In other words we’re asked to do the computer’s job which was the entire point of mag ride in the first place.

I suppose I could say it’s actually so good on my car the differences between tour and sport are so neglible we’ve actually reached that perfect suspension utopia of a fully automatic suspension that is both comfortable and sporty at once on any road which has been the goal for the past 30 years. Maybe we’re down to two modes (sport and track) and tour was just added as a placebo to feel like we’re in control.

 

Just get it. Can't add it later.