Koni Yellow Shocks with Ground Control Coilovers REVIEW

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso what's it like to drive with this setup now I've been driving on this for almost a week now I wanted everything to settle and I wanted to give you guys an honest opinion of What It's Like on the road okay so you will notice right away that everything is stiffer okay it is a slightly more jarring ride but it's still Supple that's difficult to explain unless you experience it yourself I had to actually experience it to be able to kind of see how it to believe that essentially so the BMW suspension system is very sophisticated there's a lot of bushings in the rear and there's a lot of bushings in the front and it's well insulated from those hard jarring crashes that you'd get in another performance car so what I have is I have a very stiff suspension but it's not crashing over the bumps it is way softer still than a stock Scion FRS or sub rubyr Z if that's a good comparison getting in out of this car into that car all of a sudden you'll feel yourself crashing over bumps like this you don't really get that I get a little bit of more up and down motion than with the stock Sports suspension but it's not bad stiffer but not bad okay so with the ride kind of out of the way performance-wise the first thing you notice is that the front to back motion is greatly improved so when you're accelerating and when you're braking you don't have as much dip you don't have as much dip in the back okay so that actually makes a big difference for uh shifting there isn't as much drama in between shif and you let off the gas clutch shift and get on the gas again you don't go like this back and forth nearly as much so that is up to the new dampers uh in the front and the back how stiff you set them and the springs and how stiff they are okay so essentially that is a combination of the entire kit put together however I did drive the car for about a week with just the rear con shocks in okay so I can comment on that that actually drastically changed the ride it made it feel a little bit stiffer in the back but it controlled that front dip quite substantially that was just with the stock Springs okay so if you were going to just do dampers I can comment and tell you that it does make a very noticeable difference I put just con yellow dampers in my soab with the stock Springs and it was like it was very noticeable you feel it in the corners You Feel It In accelerating and decelerating pretty much everywhere it feels good okay so now the rest of the performance aspect of the car what we have now is we have a car that is still kind of supple over bumps but it locks itself in in the corners so you've probably heard people describe BMWs as being on Rails okay so now with this setup I lowered it down you saw in the picture there I lowered it down uh a little bit not very much past the sport suspension ion and I've got the rear shock set at the medium setting and the front shock set at the softest okay and then what I did was I opened up my front sway bar so it was the softest setting and I've tightened the rear sway bar okay so that is just my current setup I have to test this on the track and I need a corner balance and all that stuff but it doesn't matter because right off the bat you can feel how much of a difference it actually makes so when you enter a corner first of all the turn in is much crisper okay so there isn't as much body lean when you turn in the front end locks itself in much more severely and then when you start to notice it the most is as you increase the speed in the corner it's almost like the faster the corner the more you notice it so in a high-speed sweeper on the track you'll notice that it really really locks itself into the corner okay you can feel it on just any conventional corner here so I've got a couple uh sweepers here and I'll kind of describe what I'm talking about so I'm in third gear so moderate speed around this corner yeah right boom right there it's it's lock locked in all right and it just kind of stays there no drama going around the corner I've got a little bit of lean from the front cuz of the sway bar setup here's another even tighter Corner heel toe into second me go around stuff's moving around in my car and there goes the tail a little bit okay so that is a complete different feeling stuff is just flying around in my car right now so that's a completely different feeling from the stock Sports suspension this is a a a highly recommended setup con yellows with ground control Springs when you buy ground control Springs as a kit they come with Coney yellows but you saw I had to modify mine right so these are meant to be together I have the uh don't quote me on this I think I have the 450 and 500 lb weight Springs so 500 lb weight in the rear and 450 in the front I'll put the actual numbers in the description because I don't trust my memory right now but that is pretty substantial over the uh stock Sports Springs but to be perfectly honest I I think I could deal with an even stiffer spring in this car so if you're really really looking for track Focus driving you could even go stiffer than that I'm not sure how the Coney yellows would match up with a stiffer spring because from the reading that I've done it seems like the Coney yellows are are a lot more suited to this spring weight this is what Ground Control sells okay so I'm going to go with these these sweepers again here boom right there it locks in and there's no more drama okay it feels very on Rails what that means is it's almost like I just start turning the corner and my car is now hooked up onto a rail system and it just keeps it going around the corner without any issue there's no extra lean there's no jumping and chattering it just locks itself into the ground okay that's why dampers are important they they're what keep your tires in contact with the ground and give you the most possible grip around the corner if your dampers are worn out and you have just Springs any little bump will upset the car okay that's what you don't want especially if you're driving aggressively that's how you get yourself into trouble really quickly so as I said overall this is a very very good package and I can definitely recommend it now I looked at billstein billstein um as well and they're very good but I like the adjustability of the cone yellows for that price point um so a big shout out again to Northern Performance in uh the Toronto area who hooked me up with these um and gave me lots of good recommendations and they're very quick with their service right so I've got again nothing but good things to say about them and I I'm going to go back there I think for maybe some new brake pads when these are when these are done okay so here's accelerating second gear I'm going to shift into third okay so there's a pause and a thump in the back but I don't I'm not going forward and backward very much which is quite notice as actually very noticeable that's the first thing you notice right now as for ride height I don't want to go much lower because I heard uh of a of a guy who went over a speed bump too quickly when he had his cone yellows drop down and it damaged them to the point where he couldn't adjust them anymore we don't want that right so I'm going to keep the ride height as low as I can without thinking that I'm running out of travel room on the shock and I'm going to get it Corner balanced again a corner balancing is very important if you are serious about balancing the car properly okay so I'm going to drive this C I'm going to track it right now cuz I can't get a corner balance appointment until like the end of this year year maybe even next year right the guy that I want to go to um is very busy right now because Fair he's very good so I want to make sure that I get this done properly so I just got an alignment done to make sure everything's going straight and it is everything's fine now I'm running zero toe and like negative 1.6 de of front camber okay which is about the same as my rear camber I want more negative camber for more front grip but I don't have the ability to do that right now because I'm I've maxed out the the built-in adjustments by the way when you lower the car you get a little more negative camera just cuz of the suspension geometry so that is about all I have to say about the Coney yellows and Ground Control Springs um I think that if you are considering doing this and you don't do your own work it's not a bad idea to save up and do the whole package at once because then you don't have to pay someone labor on two separate occasions to put the your your regular Springs on your new shocks and then take the shocks out again and put the ground control Springs on so I know it hurts save up a lot of money and do it all right at once because it's it's just going to be a better overall thing for you it's going to cost you less in the long run I've been where you are before I know what it's like he like oh but I just want to lower my car a little bit that's fine but if you put too stiff of Springs and too low of springs on the stock shocks then we have the potential issue of blowing them depending on how old your shocks are obviously and those Springs probably won't be matched for the the damping rate of the shock okay so you want to sport shock with a sport spring make sure they're match talk to both manufacturers and make sure that your Springs and your shock Choice match with each other so that's about all I have to say about this um I've got lots more reviews coming on performance parts okay so over the winter I'm going to be doing a lot of maintenance on this car and I'm going to keep up with my car reviews we've got lots of cool stuff coming in that front by the way so ideally I'm going to do just off thought I'm going to do Vanos seals for sure I'm going to do a window regulator do the zip tie method show you how to do that I'm going to maybe do spark plugs I'm going to do some there was something else I don't remember what it is I'm sure you'll see the video at some point um also big news apparently I got approved as a tribe leader for driv tribe no idea what that means exactly yet they're going to tell me really soon and I don't know if I'm going to be allowed to post content from here on there and vice versa I don't really know how it works but hopefully you can follow me on drivet tribe as well um because that's going to be pretty exciting if you don't know what Drive tribe is that's uh Jeremy Clarkson Richard ham and James May's new uh online motoring platform uh which should be pretty big apparently they've got millions of subscribers to it already so I made a bid to be the E46 BMW drivet tribe guy and they accepted my bid so I'm now the tribe leader for E46 BMWs I guess which is pretty crazy didn't think that was going to happen so I this is a bit long-winded I'm sorry um I will talk to you soon about more mods coming I'm going to do a review of my rear trailing arm bushings as well which I just installed and uh lots more to come see you later\n"