**A Look Back at Our High vs Low Gr Corolla Video/Modification Guide**

One of our most popular series was the gr Corolla High build versus low build video, where we compared and contrasted two different versions of the Toyota Corolla. In this video, we explored how modification can take a vehicle from ordinary to extraordinary. We started by looking at the engine upgrade, which allowed us to run third gear in what was previously a second gear corner. This small change made a significant impact on our lap times, as it eliminated the need for an extra shift and reduced the risk of wheelspin.

We also did a shifter upgrade with a quick shifter, which proved to be a huge improvement. Before the engine power upgrade, we could use second gear in both cars, but once the power increase was made, we no longer needed to downshift into second gear. This simplification of our lap times was a significant gain, and it highlighted the importance of upgrading components like shifter.

In conclusion, our High build gr Corolla is a beast on the track, with incredible acceleration and handling capabilities. The engine upgrade and shifter upgrade have made it one of the most formidable front-wheel drive based hatchbacks on the market. We're grateful for the support of Autobon Country Club, who gave us a home to test our cars and provide feedback.

**Final Thoughts**

Now that we've completed this series, I want to give a shoutout to everyone involved. From the drivers at Autoban Country Club to Brit Casey, our in-house Pro driver, who has been with us for years and allows us to fully demonstrate what cars are capable of doing, thank you all for your hard work. We also can't forget about the companies that helped us make this series possible, like Ben from Limit Plus One, Wyatt from MCS, Grant who flew all the way out from Annex to show us on camera how they worked on the suspension, and Graham the engine tuner.

We're particularly grateful to Apex Wheels, Bridgestone tire, Jeff from S6 AP for big brakes, and many others who contributed to this series. The gr Corolla is a car that I've had some mixed feelings about in the past, but our experience has proven that with the right modifications, it's a vehicle that can take on any opponent.

One of the most impressive things about the gr Corolla is its ability to improve both street performance and track performance without sacrificing either. The fast roads from Annex did an excellent job in improving the overall character of this car, and we're excited to share our findings with you.

**The Next Generation of Gr Corollas**

Our next video will be a race between Mark's fl5 Type R and my gr Corolla High build on Autoban South. We'll be racing for position, and I'm excited to see how the two cars stack up against each other. The Type R has been modified with wheels and tires, brake pads, and alignment, making it a formidable opponent.

We're looking forward to this upcoming race and sharing our findings with you. If you want to learn more about track days or get tips from someone like Brit, we encourage you to check out Autoban Country Club. We also can't forget to thank everyone who's been supporting us throughout this series.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI hope you like gr Corolla content because this is about to be a very long video on this car we're hoping that this video is going to serve two different purposes first off maybe more entertainingly this is going to be a high versus low shootout we're taking two identical gr Corolla circuits the car behind me and another 2023 car and showing what you can do on the track and on the street with two different performance budgets the car behind us is our high car it's essentially a $65,000 Corolla and the other vehicle has a little under 5 to $10,000 worth of modifications trying not to screw up what makes these cars so great and that is their multi-purpose capability the other thing we're going to be doing in this video is essentially creating an aftermarket guide to this car you're going to be hearing from a bunch of different functional experts from Graham the biggest engine tuner of the gr Corolla platform arguably you're going to be hearing from Ben the owner of limit plus one one of the biggest shops who sells and builds G Corolla parts and makes customer cars go fast he's done everything you could possibly imagine with this car he's going to walk you through where this platform's at some of the pros and cons of it and of course what these cars I like to work on and you're also going to be hearing from Grant from anex suspension who's going to walk you through the pros and cons of the chassis of this car along with his engineering philosophy and of course Wyatt from MCS suspension the other thing is what about our experience with our own car so far so as a recap we own a 2023 gr Corolla circuit it now has over 8,000 miles for most of its life it's been mostly stocked minus a set of Apex wheels and brake pads from counter space garage and of course Potenza race tires the car has been mostly pretty reliable there are the typical gr curl issues which we've talked about so far like weak front bumper Clips to just weak bumpers uh the car has developed the Subaru smell meaning gear oil smell which no one seems to be able to find or address I've just learned to love with it but the car itself has been very reliable your mileage will vary with this product most of the people I've known who own this car don't have any problems that's largely due to their relationship with their dealer and luck of the drop fuel economy in this car has been low 20s depending on how you look at it either a huge disappointment or exactly what you should be expecting for a car that makes I don't know two 300 horsepower and his all-wheel drive but with all that said and that housekeeping out of the way it's time to put this car up on the lift and briefly walk you through the High versus low builds before we head to the track have Brit involved talk to all the experts and everything else you're going to see in this video so what are we trying to accomplish well we're trying to show you what you can do with two different budgets a lower budget and essentially a unlimited budget we wanted to build the best J C possible something that maintains the good points of the car meaning a daily driver that you can take to the track we want to improve ride quality we want to improve limit handling and the way the car is actually felt behind the wheel driving while we are going to demonstrate lap times is more than just numbers it's about how comfortable you feel at the limit now for this test we did keep some variables constant between both of these cars again going back to the fact that we wanted to build the best cars possible when it comes to engine performance both of these cars get the identical power output they both are tuned by Graham who you're going to hear from later they both have a 93 octane tune they both have an even chury intake which you're can hear from him on why that is the case and both of them have exhaust for the track portion of this video the low car gets an mbrp exhaust the high car gets an awe touring exhaust both improve the volume levels of this car but both are quite loud I will say the gr Corolla has an acquired taste when it comes to engine tone though both do visually look better than the stock exhaust but I'm going to be honest neither of them had really any vast amounts of power the other thing that's constant between both of these cars is they both have SPL rear camber arms the reason for that is that gr Corolla has essentially no camber adjustability whatsoever and that's the only way we could adjust the rear and they're both on Penza race tires however in different sizes we're going to explain why here in a second so let's start with the High car it is a 2023 gr Corolla circuit has about 8,000 mi in this video you'll see it in two different shades of green one was a vinyl wrap one was a ppf color change wrap doesn't really change anything about the car the low car is also a 2023 circuit which means again both cars get the differentials and the carbon fiber roof and the low car is white for the high car the primary changes are all in suspension as you're going to clearly tell very quickly in this video starting with the coilover setup in the High car we are running the MCS limit plus one single adjustable road-based kit you'll see the skew in the bottom it's running an 8 8K front 10K rear spring rate and it gets camera plates it is arguably the more aggressive of the two setups it's definitely skewed a little bit towards more the track usage case of these dampers while this generates a little bit more Envy VH than the uh Annex kit for sure and doesn't ride quite as well it does have quite a bit of track capability the other thing to talk about is the big brake kit this is running the AP S6 big brake kit this is the radical kit has the EMP finish I'm going to flat out say this it is the best aftermarket break kit on the market the radical setup is incredible they work very very hard on properly sizing these kits for the master cylinders they spend countless hours the R&D side of things you basically get no compromises other than nvh it doesn't weigh anymore despite being far bigger it has higher thermal capacity it doesn't have pedal knockback issues it has incredible pedal feel it is just the one con expensive and noisy and that again is the compromise we're going with this the other thing to talk about are the wheels the high car gets Apex wheels these are the sm10 rss's they're forged they essentially weigh the same as the factory wheels despite being wider and they are running a two 65 Tire it is a very wide tire and thankfully they don't rub the con of the gr Corolla which you can hear about probably later in this video is if you run a aftermarket wheel you essentially have to add $1,000 to the price tag particularly if you're not doing your own maintenance or you're doing your own Parts because to run an aftermarket wheel on this car you have to run extended studs which is expensive these are running the ARP studs it's the only way that's going to work and for the low car we're running the annex fast roads this is a slight Ely different setup they designed for this video this is a inverted monotube their Philosophy for this is flat handling with good ride compliance for the money we feel is the best coilover kit you can buy on purpose because this is a more Road focused kit we wanted to demonstrate what was possible so we're not running camber plates in fact we're running camber bolts so you don't have any of the nvh issues that come from the MCS for brakes we're keeping the stock calipers obviously we're running a higher temp brake fluid but we're running counter space garage pads as you're going to see they are still more than capable enough to do what we're doing in this video the AP kit is also running counter space garage pads we're running the factory wheel for the reasons we just mentioned with a narrower Penza race Tire to test both of these setups you're going to see a street drive that I'm going to do solo and then we're going to talk to Brit after he's locked both of these cars but before we do any of that let's talk to a series of functional experts we're here at limit plus one with Ben the owner of limit plus one he's been the man behind the curtain for a lot of these videos and without them this video series would not be possible just like we've done in the past with James I wanted to talk to Ben about where the market is as far as modification sure what you've learned about these cars you've you have a gajillion customer cars at this point doing everything from sequential builds to regular engine Tunes everything in between you've seen it all you've raced these cars let's talk about what's gone wrong what goes wrong with these cars engine costs you know what you've seen so far since the last time we've talked yeah first Jack thanks so much for for having me on of course I I think he gave me too much credit there but that's that's okay so all-wheel drive has been talked about a lot with that overheating obviously you've experienced it a bunch uh how many laps are you seeing until it overheats around Autobon South with someone who's going pretty quick so myself or Brit or marker or yourself it's like two three laps of going flat out the car goes in a front wheeel drive same thing maybe 10 to 15 minutes of use yes right um yeah kind of a kind of a bummer um but there's it it doesn't necessarily ruin the car right you can still get around it by doing a cool down lap uh you know in between or not even a cool down lap you have to cycle the ignition um so pull into pits turn the car on and off and then you get another couple laps out of it um there's been a a ton of different variants of of trying to fix this issue uh it kind of started off with uh what wrapping the exhaust uh the theory was that exhaust was transferring heat uh into the rear clutchback and the pinion side of the differential uh that was proven to be false um we we tested that well over a year ago now um and had just no change whatsoever uh it didn't last any longer uh and there's been a ton of iteration since then of of trying to solve this issue um we even worked with uh varis engineering on uh building a uh aftermarket housing for the rear clutch pack uh that basically has a a large Reservoir underneath uh with two ports that allow for uh for cooling as well uh you could then run the fluid through a cooler uh and back in um to hopefully resolve the issue uh found out that doesn't work either so not ideal uh why doesn't it work I guess is my question so we there's a temp sensor uh on this housing uh and it actually doesn't really read anything uh it might put a value into the computer somewhere uh but that is not the value that the computer is using to open up the clutch pack uh it's actually a calculated value what he means open up he means turn off the all-wheel drive system turn off all-wheel drive yeah and put it basically put it in a limp mode or front front wheeel drive mode after those couple laps um so yeah this this value that we're seeing at the temp sensor uh on uh on this housing um you know isn't used at all from what we can tell um and believe it or not once you take apart uh it doesn't actually sit in fluid so it only sits in open air um so uh it it's probably not the most reliable reading anyways uh the design of the sensor looks like it would be a sensor that would that would sit in fluid um but it's just not the case so I'm not really sure what it's reading exactly um and that value is being used somewhere but definitely not uh for opening up uh this clutch pack and allowing basically putting the car in front-wheel drive mode and you've gone further than that in between all of our various tests Ben disconnected my trans temp sensor which is the other sensor we were looking at and the diff sensor we ran a different sensors that sat in open ambient air correct and still after two is laps it went into frontel drive the same amount of time yeah we yeah we like you just said we had those sensors in open air uh under the vehicle picking up fresh air the entire time and uh and no change whatsoever and there's no other temp sensor uh that could be that could be causing this necessar uh in the drivetrain so between engine transmission or I'm sorry between transmission uh transfer case in differential uh there's there's only the two sensors that it could possibly be uh neither of which are causing uh the clutchback to open up so it's a software issue that hopefully after market tuning we're going to talk to grie about that a little later we'll address that is sort of the big elephant in the room with this car I guess the other thing we want to talk about is some of your solutions to oil Cooling and radiator temps yep uh oil cooling is pretty basic it's just the oldfashioned way of doing it uh add a sandwich plate add a cooler uh and we're seeing about a 25 degree drop in oil temps uh I think we were running two cars on the exact same day at Autobon uh and we saw about a 25 degree difference in oil temps uh in adding that oil cooler did not uh play a negative factor in coolant temp either uh a lot of times when you add an oil cooler stacking that in front of a radiator can raise coolant temp uh but we're actually seeing a 5 degree decrease in coolant temp uh as well as a 25 decrease uh uh decrease in temperature for oil temp and this is a there are various kits but you guys have designed your own in-house one that we're running on my car yeah correct all C trb components uh super high-end stuff kind of uh the standard in the Motorsports industry the one thing I will say as well is if you are driving this car reasonably hard you probably won't run into the oil temp issues but once you start tuning this car or driving it fairly hard both the low car and the high car running the same engine tune and after I don't know four laps you were getting 250 260 on my car and you were basically overheating the oil on the other vehicle yeah uh me driving at Road America last year with no oil cooler uh I even crept up towards 300° oil coming from racing BMWs in the past that's a very common thing I mean I've I've run uh endurance RAC is sitting at 300° the entire race um but it's not a turbocharge application uh and we'd like to see uh definitely cooler temps just just for peace of mind yeah and that car runs like an ow20 or ow6 yeah which I don't recommend for track use uh if it's a he heavily tracked car 540 all day um you know even heavier sometimes um but 540 is a good good middle point if it's just a spirited driving car you're going to beat it up on the weekends through some back roads uh 540 is a good option for that you have also seen what it's like to deal with when these cars lose an engine which is very rare y uh the one you dealt with or the couple that you've dealt with have all been either user error money shifting a car and that car ended up here um yeah the dealership wrote a massive quote for it I think it was nearly $40,000 uh it was definitely in the 30s if I recall um which is which is crazy but uh unfortunately that's just the cost of Toyota parts right now um this engine uh I think they they priced it at about $16,000 uh which is which is wild you see long term you foree that price coming down though of course yeah I think it's a supply and demand right now um but you know I can we can get a bare short block I think for about the $6,000 range uh so that's the whole rotating assembly in the bottom end uh from there the additional cylinder head is that extra cost uh and just the turbo itself too if you have a blown up engine you have to replace the turbo due to metal contamination uh that's $5,000 in Toyota so um it it just adds up you know but the failures are all either user related or pushing the car to a point where you you're making far more horse power than you probably should out of a three-cylinder with Factory internals totally yeah it seems fully reliable um unless you just put it in the wrong gear to 120 mph uh you can't which would happen to any manual car exactly yeah any manual car at all it's not a gr uh Corolla specific issue obviously um you know you could do it on a new M2 even and I guarantee the repair bill for that will be more than the Corolla you have dealt with thousands of customers at this point with this vehicle and my sorry ass trying to trying to make this car or both of these cars better than they are yeah where is the market now when it comes to modifications and parts available ility versus when I started this almost a year ago now well obviously it's developed fully almost um you know we've discovered the limits of a stock engine uh that being valve springs um we've got a couple engine builds here in house uh where we can solve that issue uh and then reliably make 400 horsepower um so I think most of the bases are covered we're still waiting for a lot of Manufacturers to actually release the parts they've developed um but there is an option to do almost anything you want with this car um so the aftermarkets kind of come to fruition and uh you know we can we can basically tune a stock car now uh make 315 wheel horsepower a 93 octane all day long it's reliable drivability is great uh there's now awesome features like I think Graham's going to talk about uh launch control uh flat foot shifting stuff like that um so this car has developed more than I ever thought it would have uh and once this problem is solved with the uh with the rear clutch pack uh in the in the pinion half of the differential uh this is going to be uh really brought to the next level uh and I think it's really just up to uh to eutech to figure out the coding for it and hopefully it's as easy one day as check in a box while tuning and uh now your problem is solved so I think that's what it's going to come down to it's only a matter of time so this is our Engine Tuning portion of our video I'm here with Graham Graham you are the in-house tuner here for limit plus one obviously you work with Ultima race works you work at Paragon you tune Subarus I've known Graham longer than Savage geese is existed said you tuned one of my wrx's and you did FaZe garages R SDI if you've watched that video um we go back a long way yes yes we do which is when you came in here and you said hello to me and you're like remember me I'm like yeah and then Ben's like that's Savage Beast I'm like no way no way I feel awful right now I did not know this connection existed but it's super cool no this is a it's a very small world apparently it turns out it is so let's talk about what you can do with this car so far you sort of the deao tuner for the gr Corolla where does this car sit as far as what you can do with the ECU what you can change what are the parameters you're working with so far sure so um we are using eutech Technologies tuning to do the tuning on these cars they have been they picked this car up right away they have a yarus over there but as you know the yarus and the the gr yarus gr Corolla have a lot of parody our cars have a few little differences for the us but for the most part all the development work they're doing on their in-house yurus applies to these cars so they they hit it really hard from the beginning um we got right on the beta program with them I've been one of their beta tuners for a very long time for other platforms so we had some early access to it and yeah we Dove right in we did a lot of um testing with them and we're still going ongoing testing but at this point we have a ton of control over the engine it's a extremely complex ECU in here and tuning one of the most complex I've ever seen for like a production Japanese car you know kind of almost on par with Audi Volkswagen and how they do things but eutech has done a really good job of mapping out all the important stuff to the point where on a stock Turbo you can do full boltons we can do ethanol tuning so we have really good engine control at this point what are the added complexities Graham if you've if you know Graham it's probably from your Subaru or your your your Corvette stuff what is the added complexity that the ECU and the Corolla has over say a regular car sure best way I can compare it especially if we're talking in the Japanese realm of cars because as I as I've done tuning I've done every type of platform American cars kind of have a style that they follow and German cars have a style that they follow and Japanese cars have always kind of had a style that they follow so as far as Japanese cars go and Subarus that I've done you know 5,000 plus of they're very straightforward it's it's just for example let's just talk about a turbo car and boost if you want to achieve a Target boost there's just simply a Target table okay you type in a bigger Target you go to the wastegate control table you use more wastegate control boom you've got more boost it's that simple on these cars and a lot of German style cars they call them torque-based so it all starts with your pedal goes to a driver demand goes to a theoretical torque to the engine and that goes to an airflow that you're looking for and the airf flow is met with Boost so the Boost is indirectly targeted through your pedal so it's it's a very complex mapping that you have to understand all the way to get to that Target boost Point are you are you actively changing timing at the same time and how are you mapping that with keeping a linear pedal as well so right now honestly the the stock pedal mapping on this car is phenomenal there's really not much reason to change it it has three Drive modes the Eco you probably notice Eco kind of takes a little bit off the normal daily driving the normal mode is really smooth and very linear and then sport gets kind of touchy and Sport's awesome when you're on the track you know that's what you want so honestly I haven't had any desire or need to touch those modes even though we have access to them so when it comes to the actual performance of the car before we get into some of the finer details what have you seen as far as the numbers obviously you've tuned both of the cars in our series and I think they're making high 200s and that's off a 93 octane tune with an intake and that's it where are sort of the levels of power and where do you start to see the limitations of both the cooling as well as the fuel sure so um base power wise they're usually about 260 in that realm if we do to the wheels yeah 260 to the wheels if we do an intake and a tune um we can generally get that up closer to 300 um especially if you're adding a downpipe to it that helps it breathe a little bit better to inter cooler will help get those charge temps down so we can start to kind of approach the low 300s as we talk about putting ethanol in and we do like an e50 blend tune right now and that will get you up into the you know middle 300s you know my car with just an intake exhaust intercooler and that's a caded exhaust on this Dyno produce 340 at the wheels when it comes to intakes obviously we' we've added an even chury to both uh Vehicles why and do they actually work so from my testing we we tested evenu very specifically on the dyno it on the on the low end it really didn't do a whole lot for the car but that's not too surprising with a turbo car they're not really they don't really need that much extra you know Air volume down low but on the top end we did see some performance gains some of it was it will sometimes create some more boost pressure which can create more power kind of be sort of a false negative of is it doing anything but genuinely when we tested it and we saw exactly the same boost levels same timing same fueling there was extra power there the thing that I looked at as on the data this car has a turbo um Inlet pressure sensor so it actually knows how much vacuum is being created after the air filter and I could see that there was less restriction in other words less vacuum a lot closer to to ambient pressure with the evenu intake and most other intakes show that same thing so the stock airbox at high RPM at higher boost levels does create a bit of a restriction so after market intakes including even tur reduce that and get more air flow into the engine and that's not always the case for most cars these days to be inter not always yeah a lot of times intakes especially naturally aspirated cars do yeah they do almost nothing but turbo cars a lot of times can benefit from you know even just filter element changes you know sometimes you know a race air filter in a turbo car can make a difference because again you're you're reducing those Inlet in that you know Inlet pressure drop essentially and the downpipe is just helping with flow downpipe is helping get the exhaust out exactly back pressure an engine is a pump right is pumping the you know pumping the air through essentially and and if you can pump it out a lot easier then you're going to have more actual power getting to the wheels and not going through your pumping losses where do you see limitations is it cooling primarily is it Inlet temps and what is sort of stopping you to make more power so if we're talking on the street yes there's really no limitations on the street you can you can drive these cars pretty hard now maybe if you're on some like back roads where you can really give it the beans for a long time you might drive your oil temps up but on the street honestly you really can't overheat these cars that I've seen um if you're really staying in it you might see High intercooler charge temps it'll pull some power back the biggest limitation honestly is the valve flow I don't know how much you've talked about that on your series yet but we've left this for you sir so anybody that knows about these cars there's two big things there's the front-wheel drive mode of course which we've talked about a lot you guys have covered that so the valve float is my department so basically the valve float is the biggest thing we have to watch out for if we try to raise the boost pressure at higher RPMs where are you peaking where's boost Peak now currently for the cars so boost boost Peak um about 3400 RPMs to what PSI um depending on the fuel 28 up to 30 yeah so Jesus and to give you so and so Toyota tuned in well quick sidebar we'll come back to Bell Flat Toyota tuned in a really flat torque curve on these cars um potentially just for longevity for drivability for whatever reason if you look at the Boost curve on these it's really interesting they at at about 3,000 they start off near 18 to 20 and by 5400 they actually ramped to 25 so that takes this climb to 25 then they drop straight down to about 17 or 18 by Red Line to kind of again create this flat torque when we get in and tune these a lot of the power that we're adding is in the mid-range we can we can run that boost up quite a bit farther in the mid-range um on my car on e50 by 4,000 RPMs I'm at 28 29 PSI and so it has significantly more torque than it does you know we're talking 260 torque up to about 350 torque on mine and that's kind of my race my tracks back to and there's more if you really pushed it but I'm trying to be nice to the engine let it last for for obvious reasons for obvious reasons kind of expensive so but yeah we can put a lot more boost in the mid-range even on pump gas and the punch of these cars is significantly different as you as you felt were are you feeling so when are when's the valve float coming in what horsepower figure what boost valve float is high RPM it's above 65 you it's and because valve float is coming from basically the exhaust valves not being able to close and the reason why exhaust valves can't close is there's too much exhaust back pressure working against them so you're trying to pump the exhaust into the into the manifold but if there's too much pressure in there and the valve springs are not strong enough it's keeping the valves open so um the problem there again is just simply soft valve springs now to some degree if you just put valve springs in it and Hammer it with a ton of boost up there the back pressure is still there you're still making the engine work harder it's not necessarily good just to put valve springs in and then go willy-nilly on Boost you still have to respect the turbocharger efficiency Li what's that power figure at what point are you basically forcing the car to have that Val FL problem is it 400 wheel 500 well that's the thing it's nothing to do with power you can put a bigger turbocharger on here and keep your back pressure within the limits of the stock valve springs and and you put a big enough turbo on there you might be able to make 500 before you get Val flow so it's not a power thing it's a it's a turbo efficiency these turbos are kind of small that come on this car because it's a tiny little engine trying to spool it up so with a stock turbo then were you getting that number is there a what what boost LEL Bo level right so typically from my from my experience and kind of mod dependent 22 23 PSI if you're trying to carry more than that I I I went chasing Val FL on my car on purpose both on pump gas and E85 and I found it by 25 on my car sometimes 26 also depends on ambient air conditions so I had it to a point where I thought I was safe and I tuned it here on the Dyno in warmer weather I went to Mid Ohio one year ago with that map first session out instant valve flow at the same boost pressure because it was quite a bit cooler morning denser air so as I've tested this car I've learned that there's a lot of variables and you need a pretty big cushion and then ethanol you would think maybe with ethanol you can run more boost pressure right and get away with not seeing Val float other way around interesting we actually have to be a bit more careful with ethanol because ethanol is amazing it's an amazing fuel it makes more power but it uses a lot more fuel to do it which means more exhaust density and when you're putting more exhaust density into your manifold your exhaust back pressure gets higher sooner so that's basically a parameter though if you wanted to just keep most of your internal parts stock stock Turbo stock valve springs you could tune around that issue theoretically you can yes so when we tune these cars we make sure that that upper upper RPM boost pressure stays well under the the valve float limits no matter what the mods no matter what the fuel and we don't have any issues with it we also warn people what it looks like what it sounds like what it feels like so they can let us know hey my car is it's basically it's like an artificial rev limiter coming in earlier than you expect so in our case when we ran this car it was worst case scenario for both vehicles like 108 reel feel neither of those cars felt like they're making Peak power for obvious reasons when do you start noticing timing getting pulled and how can you get around that in these cars so that's a temperature component so there's there's oil temperature can pull timing coolant temperature can pull timing and also your charge air temperature can pull timing and that's probably what you were running into was because you guys are Factory intercoolers on those cars Factory intercoolers they after a couple laps the charge temperatures start getting pretty high and when those are high enough that'll create more knock so we have to pull back timing and pull back boost so that's what at what point does that happen typically about 120 to 130 is when we kind of start getting a little bit of uh you know timing reduction and if it starts getting past 140 to 150 160 if it gets that high we got to get pretty aggressive on pump gas fuels that can knock pretty easy when you're but if you move to an ethanol tomb you can get around that a little bit absolutely so we recalibrate all those timing compensation tables for ethanol you don't want to zero them out a lot of tuners will think oh ethanol is Invincible it can ever knock but we can reduce it quite a bit so through through my testing like when I'm out at the track and like Mid Ohio last weekend I'm playing with that and kind of watching it seeing seeing how things look sometimes pull the plugs read the plugs see how they look and we can we can reduce those compensation so that ethanol even as your charge temperatures might be the same as on your pump gas tune we don't need to pull as much timing and the car will still run happy and safe I'm at limit plus1 with Grant from Annex suspension Grant gets to be yet another half asian technical expert I interview on this channel Grant please introduce yourself to the boys boys and girls at home hey guys I'm Grant Hendricks I'm the uh founder and product manager at anic suspension and also half asian all right so Grant you guys are a small company as we've we've Grant and I been talking for months about this project is youve kindly helped us develop a I hate to say the road and track alternative to a damber kit it's not purely street it's not purely track it's for someone who's looking for that weekend warrior approach and they don't want to sacrifice ride quality tell me about or tell them cuz I know about it but tell them about sort of annex a story how'd you guys start and how do you guys Place yourself in the segment because as you and I have talked about you have cheap shitty Chinese eBay coilovers already for this car and then you have very very price prohibitive dampers as well you guys are trying to sit in the middle of price but obviously deliver all the quality you could possibly ask for I mean that's worth mentioning cuz there's like a ton of options out there like the suspension Market itself is extremely saturated um so why do we get into this right so uh we started I had the idea around 2016 2017 but basically what it stemmed out of was um I couldn't find something that I actually wanted for my own car you know back then my friends and I were driving like you know 240s and you know cars like that and just like hot boy car yeah exactly right um but like I just I couldn't find something like I've always been pretty technical so like I cared a lot about suspension my friends just want to be you know slammed and have a good time but I wanted something that would like not be super harsh would have good like uh uh reduced nvh would be comfortable but also wouldn't cost a million dollars at the time there really wasn't anything in that space the two extremes right yeah it was either super cheap stuff or even not so cheap but I'll just say it like Japanese stuff but it was Al kind of harsh or you had the really nice like European Brands and you especially when we were younger it was just kind of Out Of Reach so I was like why does it have to be this way cuz you know I I understand kind of what's going on in the shock even back then conceptually so it's like I'd like to take a cracket and that's kind of how we started so you guys are a small shop in Northern California yeah um how I guess let's talk about the design philosophy you don't build car you don't build dampers for every single car but the Cora specifically the base coras come with a twin tube damper obviously the maros get a monot tube that's much more expensive shock and better but still not perfect how did you guys design your damper kit for this car what parts you using are you making the housings in house can you walk me through all of that so um you know in the P I'm sure we'll talk about this more like later on the video but uh or in the interview but wow break this chair yeah hear saying but uh yeah I mean we really wanted uh for us like I I was really interested in the GRC when it was first announced so I actually tried putting a deposit on one I was going to dealership so early that they were like what are you talking about I was like dude please like just talk to someone I want to put deposit on this car long story short I ended up not getting one but I really had my sights on um making something really awesome for this car since day one so we took a completely ground up approach you know um like in the past we'd use maybe some off-the-shelf components or something like that and kind of optimize and really focus on internals to build for the car when this car I wanted to do a clean slate approach and you know as the GRC has a little bit of like a rally pedigree and background I knew that we'd want this to be an inverted monotube setup and that was a big part of the project that we did for this so um so like you know for us we we knew that after looking at the car we knew that it was going to be very hard to access the either the camer adjustment or the dampers uh from the front cowl area and also on the rear there's no access for the rear dampers so we literally did everything upside down so we have upside down rear shocks we have inverted monot tubes and also on the table over there we have some upside down camera plates that you can adust adjust From Below as well so like a lot of this was all new to us and for the car um but it was like a great uh I don't know excuse if you will for us to do a deep dive um so I mean just to speak a little bit more on that like we have personally spent about like six months straight just developing what we have to get to this point maybe even actually no it's probably been about a year um so it's been a long development process but it's really pushed us so before we get into the actual construction of the damper kit and some of the the technical bits of it you guys spent a lot of time developing these cars obviously customer cars you've worked with the speed Academy folks what are the inherent deficiencies Mark and I talk about it all the time that this thing does not ride particularly well which you've experienced what are some of the inherent deficiencies that your damper kit fix in a car like this yeah well I mean aside from the obvious like you can't really adjust the dampers like you would on a normal car uh yeah I mean the car is like it was actually kind of shocking how like loud it was in the interior and then also how harsh the factory dampers were they don't in my opinion they don't really do anything very well like they're not compliant they're not really good for performance so it's I I felt I felt like there was definitely a lot of room for improvement and actually even the marizo um was a lot better from a performance point of view but it's also very aggressively damped so like if people are thinking they might want to get some Rizo shocks to have like you know a more Superior um you know ride quality I don't think they're going to have it so let's talk about some basic principles in in dampers you have compression and rebound yeah how do your your profiles obviously you know we don't necessarily have the internal information on the toyos field but how do you s differ that approach in how you control compression Rebound in your damper versus say a factory Twin Tube you know what's interesting is um we have we have the factory dampers uh speed caby was also nice enough to give us the marizo dampers um we haven't actually DED them uh yet just because we knew right off the bat this is not what we wanted so but I can just tell you just from like my experience like you know tuning shocks the uh let's say the the the GRC it definitely feels like there's um uh there's definitely a lot of ramp up on the high-speed compression and rebound and that's what's giving it that kind of harsh feel um when it comes to actual spring rates how did you determined what worked for this car was it purely mathematical yeah yeah so I mean we've we've pretty much um maybe if I could talk a little bit more about our our beginning but before we started building any dampers for any customers we really took like a physics based approach at first cuz like I did not want to just start yet another like you know BS coilover company right like I just because that's what I that's that's exactly what I was trying to get away from right so we we spent a long time like just developing like internal physics models and stuff that we validated uh you know my my dad's actually he's a he's a nuclear physicist so um my my dad and I work together on this model and like he he did some crazy math but he basically helped me to like just come up with an entire model for a vehicle a lot of it with my input but also with his like mathematical like validation he's smarter than you are I understand yeah that's what I'm trying to say a nuclear physicist right so but then like it was pretty wild because like once I strung together the pieces that like I had studied and you know you know I've taken Cal and stuff like that so I have some math understanding but like um once I got together the pieces and he validated it he was like you know son I think this is going to work why don't you try it out and then you know we my myself and the team we uh we built our first set of you know uh dampers using the model and it was just like eye opening it just like bam like holy crap this is working so that being said we've used this model internally for years and it allows us to pretty much take any c that we work on and as long as we take very careful measurements and get the right math setup we can just tune by frequency so now I know that on a passenger car like this um and depending on like for your use case right um for someone that just wants like a weekend warrior wants to have a good time these are not race cars yeah I'm sorry if you are watching this and you have a cur like it's a race car it is not a race car yeah I mean it's got rear seats like you want to be able to take people around um in most drive on the road yeah so like on like this or like a sedan like a WX on that kind of product we might shoot for around like maybe like 1.95 Hertz and so that's around what we set up for uh this car so you're are you running a softer so you're running a stiffer spring in the rear a softer spring in the front to give it a little bit more rearward rotation still though correct yeah so we start off first by trying to build in flat right are you familiar with that term no I'm not actually um so it's the concept where you have a little bit higher rear frequency than you do on the front and so it's more about a like like oem's pretty much build this into all their suspension packages so what they want is when you hit a bump uh the front is is has a lower Herz or which is basically like the the relative stiffness of the the you know the suspension package but they'll have a softer frequency on the front so that when you hit the the bump with the rear wheels the rear is actually catching up so as as so if you're an occupant you're going to feel this like uh like the car is rising and lowering it at the same rate so we try to shoot for that first there are definitely some cars where that just cannot be done with the factory sway bars the BRZ is an example if we built in flat ride into that car it would be um terribly terribly over steery so like it we can't safely release that okay so on those cars we have to make a compromise but um hopefully that answer your question no no that that's actually perfect but the the traditional thought process we at least we've had or been toped by the engineers we've worked with and you know our my you know my engineering background is that typically the the belief with spring rates is if you have a lower spring rate you are sacrificing a little bit of body control for technically a little bit more mechanical grip then if you raise the spring rate you theoretically gain some body control but you lose mechanical grip is that a general way that that's a that's a a great point and for us it really comes down to like the the tires that are used so interesting okay so um we have a we have a a free suspension consultation that we recommend everyone take before they make a purchase or even before like just do the consultation we'll do all this math for you for free so we've talked about your basic company Philosophy how you guys picked ride frequency for the car but when it comes to damp in and your actual internals of the shock other than obviously it's inverted monotube construction how do you pick oiling paths and how the actual internals of the shock are designed yeah so um for us we you know we we're very transparent about this we'll use like components that are like catalog items that we can buy from various companies so as long as it fits the car and it's it's safe and it does all the things that we want we'll just go and buy that item because that it it saves cost basically right cuz that's less things we have to design and manufacture yeah shock shock bodies uh not the Piston but the shock bodies and then the brackets sometimes the top hats so if there's if there's an option that's inexpensive that we can buy from overseas that looks like it checks all the boxes for us we will use that and what do we do with the extra funds well we spend a lot of time developing the internals so for us we're really damper people like the coilover that you get is really just like the way we package our damper Tech and put onto the car cuz for us as long we just need to mount our Tech onto the car and then we can make dampers for whatever so um by I say that because we spent so much time just trying to like we design our own Pistons we manufacture our own Pistons we spent a ton of time just cing um you know the flatness the uh material you know that we spec for the Pistons the hard anodizing that we use the shims that we're we're we're not just using like you know inexpensive shims from Asia we've like handpicked or manufactured all the required parts to make a really good damper and that's really what we spend our focus on so on U yeah and then on a car like the GRC we picked a profile that we know has has worked on similar weighted cars and uh allows us to hit the frequencies we want and get the ride quality we want before we head to the track I felt it was Ultra important we drove both of these cars on the street that's really the point of this build and to a probably vast majority of of our viewers that's where you're going to be spending most of your time 99% of your time in these cars so let's talk about how the power feels how the suspension ding feels and how both of these cars drive overall and I'm going to be doing all of this from inside of the high car because honestly the drive is going to look the same to you guys so with that let's set off with this thing so powerwise both of these cars have the same identical power mods they both have the same engine tune identical they both have the same intake neither of them have any extra power power modifications other than the fact that this MCS equipped car has a cooler the way they feel versus stock is pretty simple to be honest they have the same throttle calibration which means the tipin feels the same it still has the identical drivability as the stock cars had but you make Power basically everywhere and you make more of it the car still requires you to wind it out the great thing about this three-cylinder is it's a car that you have to or an engine that you have to work you need to get it in into the higher RPMs for it to make more power it is a more exciting engine a lot of modern like I hate to say soulless four-cylinders but a lot of its competitors in this class and the tune and the intake just goes that little bit further to give it a little bit more personality the intake regardless of how you feel about the way the exhaust sounds on any of these cars goes a long way in bringing some of that retro late 9s early 2000s compact car fun back to it I don't think this engine sounds all that great so the intake does add a little bit more indu induction noise and that turbo wish that so many people love in these cars it does give it that extra bit of character exhaust wise this car had an awe the low car or the annex car has an mbrp neither of them if I'm going to be honest sound all that pleasing to my ear I prefer the ton of the awe the reason why this car no longer has it his both exhaust are really every exhaust of experience in this car drones most of the the exhaust systems for this car have deleted the valve so you just get this constant Sound Of Agricultural 3-cylinder all the time I don't like it some people do though if you were going to pick one of the exhaust for this car and you really wanted it to be louder at least is a street car the AWD or the awe does a better job having a a more high quality tone for what that's worth um suspension wise honestly that's where we're going to see the biggest difference over the stock cars and in in the real world on the road over our style of payment Farm roads broken pavement Highway Expansion Joints the aw sorry the MCS car the car that I'm in and the annex car honestly are remarkably similar in the way they ride and the way they feel and both suspension setups feel much much better than what you find in the stock car so as you heard from Grant the problem with the car at least stock is it does a very bad job in dealing with with little bumps and big bumps basically this suspension is not particularly compliant feels like it has too much rebound you're always bouncing up and down there's a lot of head toss it isn't very compliant on larger bumps either and look I have the fortune and Misfortune of driving a lot of cars I've driven every car in this class Civic Type R aleran gol R the new WRX none of those cars have the same problem this has with almost too much rebound when you move to either the mcss or the annexes probably more realistically to most of you guys what you notice is the car breathes so much better even though we're behind this Rav 4 overall these bumps that normally really do upset this car you have none of those issues it soaks everything up you can carry more speed as you want to push through the corners as well these little bumps that I'm going over don't seem to upset the car as much yes you definitely feel them you feel them you feel them in anything but they don't upset the car and none of that harshness makes its way into your back which is the big thing honestly roads like this the road we're experiencing which albe it is not all that twisty but it still has some turns is where the gr Corolla shines and all the mcss or the annex suspension do is make you enjoy this more you can push on these roads harder the car doesn't ever sort of beat you up anymore it doesn't get upset over bumps and with the more aggressive alignments that both of these cars have the thing that this car always sort of struggled with is rotation now when you lift car rotates when you ask it to exactly what you want a performance car like this which is so satisfying I always felt like the regular Corolla was sort of dead this doesn't have that problem anymore we're going to go through this corner signal cuz I'm a gentleman go through go through lift back in moves around it's fun and regard less of suspension set you get for this car from The High versus low they both do that on the road so with that let's remove the subjective and Chase just the objective all right now it's time to talk to someone who can actually drive we're going to be talking about the track section of this video Brit was kind enough to lap both gr Corollas the low car that we're going to call the annex car the high car the thing behind us the MCS vehicle now as far as testing conditions go we ran them both back to back it was a hot day while both cars shared the same track conditions when you look at our actual leaderboard You could argue both cars could have had better lap times if it was cooler both being turbo cars they don't necessarily like 100° ambient temps yeah the track itself was a little bit greasy so there are lots of variables that slow down the overall lap time there is essentially 1.1 seconds difference between the low car and the high car the high car being of course faster as far as mathematically where you gained the speeds was essentially in every corner um walk me through Brit how both of these cars drove well I think the first place to start would be the brake package on this car um that became a very significant factor that gained lab time uh overall it complimented the shock package but there was one corner where it was very obvious to me that the the new rotor and well whole brake assembly on the front it was yes the Splurge assembly on the front um the way that that car Wicked away the heat um between short distance brake zones so in my mind it's turn eight and turn nine on Autobon South there is a very short window of time where you're off the brakes and accelerating before you hit another hard brake Zone the feel difference between this car and the white car that we tested was significant going into that second brake Zone because this car Wicked off the heat a lot quicker uh it maintained the pedal pressure uh it kept it consistent between the two corners more so than the other car um what was happening in that second brake Zone with the other car was the pedal became a lot softer just due to the temperature difference um between it spiked the temperature going into turn eight and then it spiked the temperature again going into nine on this car really no difference between the pedal field and the other car it was a lot more travel it was a lot softer pressure uh the brake pedal went deeper um what that did is it it killed the confidence um whereas this car is is all day long going to have great brakes so how did the the other part of this I mean they make the same power right on a Dyno how did the actual handling of the cars differ how do they get you know through corners and let's be clear both cars are much faster than the cars that have been stocked much faster um but specifically on the track as a Pro driver how did the damper package feel different in both cars yeah so the first thing I'll say is the uh highspeed bump meaning when you're spiking off a curb pretty similar between the two suspension packages um so that would be the most similar between the two after that I would say the MCS package uh felt stiffer overall in a good way um and also the rear shocks were valved in a way or or they just they felt like they had more rebound and bump at the same time but it it created more stability um it in the MCS that outside rear tire you could really feel take a set um on Corner entry and it was there to hold while you were getting on the power so the handling they're pretty similar but the MCS is just more crisp I would say um more fine-tuned one of the things I'm going to say as well when it comes to the way they both drove is obviously you uh Brit is a former TCR Champion GT4 driver Brit is as fast as you could possibly get a regular person in a car well there's we can get faster yeah give me a day and to be fair to both of these packages we didn't tweak a lot when it came to how they drove other than tire pressures we worked directly with Annex and with MCS to sort of give their precise settings I just I didn't want to confuse the variables too much but you got up to speed in the MCS very very quickly the annex took a little bit longer as a novice driver I felt more conf in the MCS setup than I did in the annex while the lap time difference particularly for probably $15,000 worth of part Delta uh is not a lot your confidence level as a driver on track is much higher with the MCS you can make the annex get to a similar lap time but I think it takes a higher skill level to Wrangle the car where it's much easier with this High car between the brakes and higher you know higher end damper and The Wider Wheels to get to that level I mean mhm that's at least just my feel behind it and you know to be fair to both Brands the MCS sacrifices a little bit of the as we've talked about already Street livability you have a lot more nvh you have the crazy camber plates you do have a higher spring rate versus the annex setup but again that's sort of your own personal priorities in driving either of these vehicles thing I will say the driving style of the Corolla at least for me I'm going to ask you this as well I find that you basically you get the brakes to rotate the car in and then you stabilize it with the throttle is that a pretty basically the dynamic yeah for sure I mean you just you get the rotation with the brake pedal and then you just crack open the throttle valve your the throttle plate and and it it changes the diff so the diff is now in acceleration mode the wheels are locked and rolling forward um that's exactly what you want in these types of cars where it's more front-wheel drive driven yeah it's uh it is a very easy car to drive and I to sort of end this out before we get on the final thoughts I don't think there's necessarily a right or a wrong uh way to do this to be entirely honest if you are crazy enough to spend almost $660,000 on a Corolla is it a better track car than a car that you're spending less than 10 on you know in in modifications yes but is that necessarily worth it to you probably not both options I do feel are uh worthwhile as far as uh uh improving a stock Corolla I think the Corolla despite its fairly impressive lap time and its you know base form is not a particularly enjoyable car to drive on track and I think that's probably your assessment as well yeah and I think we it was cool how many upgrades we did because we saw kind of every genre of upgrade that we we could choose from um we did Just Tires we did wheels and tires and pads and Camber bolts and then what both of these cars ended up being as well engine power upgrades as well I mean the engine power upgrade it it let it allowed us to run third gear in what was before a second gear Corner um and I think that alone is is a lot uh significant lap time difference because if you have that low-end torque you don't have to do that extra shift you don't have to overs slow the entry of the corner by going down to second gear um we also did that shifter upgrade and and that quick shifter um which is awesome um in the in that low car yeah yeah big big big upgrade for a shifter um huge upgrade for shifter uh it was cool because before the the engine power upgrade we could use second gear and that made it clear that okay this this aftermarket shifter is much better um but with the power upgrade you didn't even have to go down to second gear in either car so that simplifies a lap a lot and it also for sure gains lap time all right so with that let's head into the final thoughts final thoughts on our High versus low gr Corolla video/ modification guide now before I talk about anything else we'll be doing one more gr Corolla video in that I will race Mark around ottobon South we will will be racing for position on Autobon South course in his fl5 type R which has been modified with wheels and tires brake pads and alignment and some other fun things versus my gr Corolla High build we'll be racing for position where we'll finally Crown the king of front-wheel drive based hatchbacks I also want to say huge thanks to everyone involved in this video everyone from Autobon Country Club who gave us a home to do this so if you want to do a track day or learn from someone like Brit go there you thanks to Brit Casey our in-house Pro driver who's been with us now for years and he allows us to fully demonstrate what cars are capable of doing and thanks to all the companies that helped us with this series people like Ben from limit plus one Wyatt from MCS who spent a lot of time with me Grant who flew all the way out from Annex to show you on camera how they worked on the suspension and some of their goals thanks to Graham the engine tuner in this Apex Wheels Bridgestone tire and Jeff from S6 AP big brakes and lots of other people without them the series would not have been possible the gr Corolla is a car that I've had some mixed feelings on to be entirely transparent um out of the box it was not my favorite hot hatchback and I think our big shootout demonstrated why felt like there was some left on the table and I think what this Series has proven hopefully is that this car takes to modification exception Al well it is a vehicle that if you are clever or wise with the modifications you pick you can make a better overall car you will not be sacrificing its Street performance and track performance you can improve both the low car which is albe it's still not cheap to do is a great example of that the fast roads from Annex do a really good job improving the overall character of this car they are a very impressive set of coilovers for the money improves the ride quality in the street improves the approachability and handling Dynamics on the track it now rotates under throttle lift you can neutralize it under throttle it has a lot of the damping characteristics of the mcss without all the nvh that comes from our high setup it rise a little bit better on the street and it costs a hell of a lot less money the MCS setup is very impressive probably one of the most impressive set of coilovers I've experienced but they're very expensive and they do have a little more nvh in the street department so that's something to factor in when it comes to brakes the S6 big brake kit is phenomenal I sh you not it is probably the best set of brakes I felt in any car I've driven they are exceptional calipers and rotors they feel better than the brake semi C8 Z6 which are carbon Ceramics the con is they're expensive and they generate some more nvh so if you're primarily Street driving they may not be for you when it comes to Wheels yes the apx wheels are gorgeous gous they weigh no more than stock you get a wider Wheel and Tire overall but to do them they are pricey and you have to do extended lugs which on a gr Corolla is an expensive task essentially you're adding a little less than $1,000 the engine tune honestly is a no-brainer really does wake up this car and it seems to be quite safe the oil cooler does a great job on lowering oil temps but again it's about what you prioritize in these cars and I'm not going to say there's a right or wrong answer hopefully you've just taken away what you think may work for you from this series so that said thanks for watching again we really really appreciate all your supportI hope you like gr Corolla content because this is about to be a very long video on this car we're hoping that this video is going to serve two different purposes first off maybe more entertainingly this is going to be a high versus low shootout we're taking two identical gr Corolla circuits the car behind me and another 2023 car and showing what you can do on the track and on the street with two different performance budgets the car behind us is our high car it's essentially a $65,000 Corolla and the other vehicle has a little under 5 to $10,000 worth of modifications trying not to screw up what makes these cars so great and that is their multi-purpose capability the other thing we're going to be doing in this video is essentially creating an aftermarket guide to this car you're going to be hearing from a bunch of different functional experts from Graham the biggest engine tuner of the gr Corolla platform arguably you're going to be hearing from Ben the owner of limit plus one one of the biggest shops who sells and builds G Corolla parts and makes customer cars go fast he's done everything you could possibly imagine with this car he's going to walk you through where this platform's at some of the pros and cons of it and of course what these cars I like to work on and you're also going to be hearing from Grant from anex suspension who's going to walk you through the pros and cons of the chassis of this car along with his engineering philosophy and of course Wyatt from MCS suspension the other thing is what about our experience with our own car so far so as a recap we own a 2023 gr Corolla circuit it now has over 8,000 miles for most of its life it's been mostly stocked minus a set of Apex wheels and brake pads from counter space garage and of course Potenza race tires the car has been mostly pretty reliable there are the typical gr curl issues which we've talked about so far like weak front bumper Clips to just weak bumpers uh the car has developed the Subaru smell meaning gear oil smell which no one seems to be able to find or address I've just learned to love with it but the car itself has been very reliable your mileage will vary with this product most of the people I've known who own this car don't have any problems that's largely due to their relationship with their dealer and luck of the drop fuel economy in this car has been low 20s depending on how you look at it either a huge disappointment or exactly what you should be expecting for a car that makes I don't know two 300 horsepower and his all-wheel drive but with all that said and that housekeeping out of the way it's time to put this car up on the lift and briefly walk you through the High versus low builds before we head to the track have Brit involved talk to all the experts and everything else you're going to see in this video so what are we trying to accomplish well we're trying to show you what you can do with two different budgets a lower budget and essentially a unlimited budget we wanted to build the best J C possible something that maintains the good points of the car meaning a daily driver that you can take to the track we want to improve ride quality we want to improve limit handling and the way the car is actually felt behind the wheel driving while we are going to demonstrate lap times is more than just numbers it's about how comfortable you feel at the limit now for this test we did keep some variables constant between both of these cars again going back to the fact that we wanted to build the best cars possible when it comes to engine performance both of these cars get the identical power output they both are tuned by Graham who you're going to hear from later they both have a 93 octane tune they both have an even chury intake which you're can hear from him on why that is the case and both of them have exhaust for the track portion of this video the low car gets an mbrp exhaust the high car gets an awe touring exhaust both improve the volume levels of this car but both are quite loud I will say the gr Corolla has an acquired taste when it comes to engine tone though both do visually look better than the stock exhaust but I'm going to be honest neither of them had really any vast amounts of power the other thing that's constant between both of these cars is they both have SPL rear camber arms the reason for that is that gr Corolla has essentially no camber adjustability whatsoever and that's the only way we could adjust the rear and they're both on Penza race tires however in different sizes we're going to explain why here in a second so let's start with the High car it is a 2023 gr Corolla circuit has about 8,000 mi in this video you'll see it in two different shades of green one was a vinyl wrap one was a ppf color change wrap doesn't really change anything about the car the low car is also a 2023 circuit which means again both cars get the differentials and the carbon fiber roof and the low car is white for the high car the primary changes are all in suspension as you're going to clearly tell very quickly in this video starting with the coilover setup in the High car we are running the MCS limit plus one single adjustable road-based kit you'll see the skew in the bottom it's running an 8 8K front 10K rear spring rate and it gets camera plates it is arguably the more aggressive of the two setups it's definitely skewed a little bit towards more the track usage case of these dampers while this generates a little bit more Envy VH than the uh Annex kit for sure and doesn't ride quite as well it does have quite a bit of track capability the other thing to talk about is the big brake kit this is running the AP S6 big brake kit this is the radical kit has the EMP finish I'm going to flat out say this it is the best aftermarket break kit on the market the radical setup is incredible they work very very hard on properly sizing these kits for the master cylinders they spend countless hours the R&D side of things you basically get no compromises other than nvh it doesn't weigh anymore despite being far bigger it has higher thermal capacity it doesn't have pedal knockback issues it has incredible pedal feel it is just the one con expensive and noisy and that again is the compromise we're going with this the other thing to talk about are the wheels the high car gets Apex wheels these are the sm10 rss's they're forged they essentially weigh the same as the factory wheels despite being wider and they are running a two 65 Tire it is a very wide tire and thankfully they don't rub the con of the gr Corolla which you can hear about probably later in this video is if you run a aftermarket wheel you essentially have to add $1,000 to the price tag particularly if you're not doing your own maintenance or you're doing your own Parts because to run an aftermarket wheel on this car you have to run extended studs which is expensive these are running the ARP studs it's the only way that's going to work and for the low car we're running the annex fast roads this is a slight Ely different setup they designed for this video this is a inverted monotube their Philosophy for this is flat handling with good ride compliance for the money we feel is the best coilover kit you can buy on purpose because this is a more Road focused kit we wanted to demonstrate what was possible so we're not running camber plates in fact we're running camber bolts so you don't have any of the nvh issues that come from the MCS for brakes we're keeping the stock calipers obviously we're running a higher temp brake fluid but we're running counter space garage pads as you're going to see they are still more than capable enough to do what we're doing in this video the AP kit is also running counter space garage pads we're running the factory wheel for the reasons we just mentioned with a narrower Penza race Tire to test both of these setups you're going to see a street drive that I'm going to do solo and then we're going to talk to Brit after he's locked both of these cars but before we do any of that let's talk to a series of functional experts we're here at limit plus one with Ben the owner of limit plus one he's been the man behind the curtain for a lot of these videos and without them this video series would not be possible just like we've done in the past with James I wanted to talk to Ben about where the market is as far as modification sure what you've learned about these cars you've you have a gajillion customer cars at this point doing everything from sequential builds to regular engine Tunes everything in between you've seen it all you've raced these cars let's talk about what's gone wrong what goes wrong with these cars engine costs you know what you've seen so far since the last time we've talked yeah first Jack thanks so much for for having me on of course I I think he gave me too much credit there but that's that's okay so all-wheel drive has been talked about a lot with that overheating obviously you've experienced it a bunch uh how many laps are you seeing until it overheats around Autobon South with someone who's going pretty quick so myself or Brit or marker or yourself it's like two three laps of going flat out the car goes in a front wheeel drive same thing maybe 10 to 15 minutes of use yes right um yeah kind of a kind of a bummer um but there's it it doesn't necessarily ruin the car right you can still get around it by doing a cool down lap uh you know in between or not even a cool down lap you have to cycle the ignition um so pull into pits turn the car on and off and then you get another couple laps out of it um there's been a a ton of different variants of of trying to fix this issue uh it kind of started off with uh what wrapping the exhaust uh the theory was that exhaust was transferring heat uh into the rear clutchback and the pinion side of the differential uh that was proven to be false um we we tested that well over a year ago now um and had just no change whatsoever uh it didn't last any longer uh and there's been a ton of iteration since then of of trying to solve this issue um we even worked with uh varis engineering on uh building a uh aftermarket housing for the rear clutch pack uh that basically has a a large Reservoir underneath uh with two ports that allow for uh for cooling as well uh you could then run the fluid through a cooler uh and back in um to hopefully resolve the issue uh found out that doesn't work either so not ideal uh why doesn't it work I guess is my question so we there's a temp sensor uh on this housing uh and it actually doesn't really read anything uh it might put a value into the computer somewhere uh but that is not the value that the computer is using to open up the clutch pack uh it's actually a calculated value what he means open up he means turn off the all-wheel drive system turn off all-wheel drive yeah and put it basically put it in a limp mode or front front wheeel drive mode after those couple laps um so yeah this this value that we're seeing at the temp sensor uh on uh on this housing um you know isn't used at all from what we can tell um and believe it or not once you take apart uh it doesn't actually sit in fluid so it only sits in open air um so uh it it's probably not the most reliable reading anyways uh the design of the sensor looks like it would be a sensor that would that would sit in fluid um but it's just not the case so I'm not really sure what it's reading exactly um and that value is being used somewhere but definitely not uh for opening up uh this clutch pack and allowing basically putting the car in front-wheel drive mode and you've gone further than that in between all of our various tests Ben disconnected my trans temp sensor which is the other sensor we were looking at and the diff sensor we ran a different sensors that sat in open ambient air correct and still after two is laps it went into frontel drive the same amount of time yeah we yeah we like you just said we had those sensors in open air uh under the vehicle picking up fresh air the entire time and uh and no change whatsoever and there's no other temp sensor uh that could be that could be causing this necessar uh in the drivetrain so between engine transmission or I'm sorry between transmission uh transfer case in differential uh there's there's only the two sensors that it could possibly be uh neither of which are causing uh the clutchback to open up so it's a software issue that hopefully after market tuning we're going to talk to grie about that a little later we'll address that is sort of the big elephant in the room with this car I guess the other thing we want to talk about is some of your solutions to oil Cooling and radiator temps yep uh oil cooling is pretty basic it's just the oldfashioned way of doing it uh add a sandwich plate add a cooler uh and we're seeing about a 25 degree drop in oil temps uh I think we were running two cars on the exact same day at Autobon uh and we saw about a 25 degree difference in oil temps uh in adding that oil cooler did not uh play a negative factor in coolant temp either uh a lot of times when you add an oil cooler stacking that in front of a radiator can raise coolant temp uh but we're actually seeing a 5 degree decrease in coolant temp uh as well as a 25 decrease uh uh decrease in temperature for oil temp and this is a there are various kits but you guys have designed your own in-house one that we're running on my car yeah correct all C trb components uh super high-end stuff kind of uh the standard in the Motorsports industry the one thing I will say as well is if you are driving this car reasonably hard you probably won't run into the oil temp issues but once you start tuning this car or driving it fairly hard both the low car and the high car running the same engine tune and after I don't know four laps you were getting 250 260 on my car and you were basically overheating the oil on the other vehicle yeah uh me driving at Road America last year with no oil cooler uh I even crept up towards 300° oil coming from racing BMWs in the past that's a very common thing I mean I've I've run uh endurance RAC is sitting at 300° the entire race um but it's not a turbocharge application uh and we'd like to see uh definitely cooler temps just just for peace of mind yeah and that car runs like an ow20 or ow6 yeah which I don't recommend for track use uh if it's a he heavily tracked car 540 all day um you know even heavier sometimes um but 540 is a good good middle point if it's just a spirited driving car you're going to beat it up on the weekends through some back roads uh 540 is a good option for that you have also seen what it's like to deal with when these cars lose an engine which is very rare y uh the one you dealt with or the couple that you've dealt with have all been either user error money shifting a car and that car ended up here um yeah the dealership wrote a massive quote for it I think it was nearly $40,000 uh it was definitely in the 30s if I recall um which is which is crazy but uh unfortunately that's just the cost of Toyota parts right now um this engine uh I think they they priced it at about $16,000 uh which is which is wild you see long term you foree that price coming down though of course yeah I think it's a supply and demand right now um but you know I can we can get a bare short block I think for about the $6,000 range uh so that's the whole rotating assembly in the bottom end uh from there the additional cylinder head is that extra cost uh and just the turbo itself too if you have a blown up engine you have to replace the turbo due to metal contamination uh that's $5,000 in Toyota so um it it just adds up you know but the failures are all either user related or pushing the car to a point where you you're making far more horse power than you probably should out of a three-cylinder with Factory internals totally yeah it seems fully reliable um unless you just put it in the wrong gear to 120 mph uh you can't which would happen to any manual car exactly yeah any manual car at all it's not a gr uh Corolla specific issue obviously um you know you could do it on a new M2 even and I guarantee the repair bill for that will be more than the Corolla you have dealt with thousands of customers at this point with this vehicle and my sorry ass trying to trying to make this car or both of these cars better than they are yeah where is the market now when it comes to modifications and parts available ility versus when I started this almost a year ago now well obviously it's developed fully almost um you know we've discovered the limits of a stock engine uh that being valve springs um we've got a couple engine builds here in house uh where we can solve that issue uh and then reliably make 400 horsepower um so I think most of the bases are covered we're still waiting for a lot of Manufacturers to actually release the parts they've developed um but there is an option to do almost anything you want with this car um so the aftermarkets kind of come to fruition and uh you know we can we can basically tune a stock car now uh make 315 wheel horsepower a 93 octane all day long it's reliable drivability is great uh there's now awesome features like I think Graham's going to talk about uh launch control uh flat foot shifting stuff like that um so this car has developed more than I ever thought it would have uh and once this problem is solved with the uh with the rear clutch pack uh in the in the pinion half of the differential uh this is going to be uh really brought to the next level uh and I think it's really just up to uh to eutech to figure out the coding for it and hopefully it's as easy one day as check in a box while tuning and uh now your problem is solved so I think that's what it's going to come down to it's only a matter of time so this is our Engine Tuning portion of our video I'm here with Graham Graham you are the in-house tuner here for limit plus one obviously you work with Ultima race works you work at Paragon you tune Subarus I've known Graham longer than Savage geese is existed said you tuned one of my wrx's and you did FaZe garages R SDI if you've watched that video um we go back a long way yes yes we do which is when you came in here and you said hello to me and you're like remember me I'm like yeah and then Ben's like that's Savage Beast I'm like no way no way I feel awful right now I did not know this connection existed but it's super cool no this is a it's a very small world apparently it turns out it is so let's talk about what you can do with this car so far you sort of the deao tuner for the gr Corolla where does this car sit as far as what you can do with the ECU what you can change what are the parameters you're working with so far sure so um we are using eutech Technologies tuning to do the tuning on these cars they have been they picked this car up right away they have a yarus over there but as you know the yarus and the the gr yarus gr Corolla have a lot of parody our cars have a few little differences for the us but for the most part all the development work they're doing on their in-house yurus applies to these cars so they they hit it really hard from the beginning um we got right on the beta program with them I've been one of their beta tuners for a very long time for other platforms so we had some early access to it and yeah we Dove right in we did a lot of um testing with them and we're still going ongoing testing but at this point we have a ton of control over the engine it's a extremely complex ECU in here and tuning one of the most complex I've ever seen for like a production Japanese car you know kind of almost on par with Audi Volkswagen and how they do things but eutech has done a really good job of mapping out all the important stuff to the point where on a stock Turbo you can do full boltons we can do ethanol tuning so we have really good engine control at this point what are the added complexities Graham if you've if you know Graham it's probably from your Subaru or your your your Corvette stuff what is the added complexity that the ECU and the Corolla has over say a regular car sure best way I can compare it especially if we're talking in the Japanese realm of cars because as I as I've done tuning I've done every type of platform American cars kind of have a style that they follow and German cars have a style that they follow and Japanese cars have always kind of had a style that they follow so as far as Japanese cars go and Subarus that I've done you know 5,000 plus of they're very straightforward it's it's just for example let's just talk about a turbo car and boost if you want to achieve a Target boost there's just simply a Target table okay you type in a bigger Target you go to the wastegate control table you use more wastegate control boom you've got more boost it's that simple on these cars and a lot of German style cars they call them torque-based so it all starts with your pedal goes to a driver demand goes to a theoretical torque to the engine and that goes to an airflow that you're looking for and the airf flow is met with Boost so the Boost is indirectly targeted through your pedal so it's it's a very complex mapping that you have to understand all the way to get to that Target boost Point are you are you actively changing timing at the same time and how are you mapping that with keeping a linear pedal as well so right now honestly the the stock pedal mapping on this car is phenomenal there's really not much reason to change it it has three Drive modes the Eco you probably notice Eco kind of takes a little bit off the normal daily driving the normal mode is really smooth and very linear and then sport gets kind of touchy and Sport's awesome when you're on the track you know that's what you want so honestly I haven't had any desire or need to touch those modes even though we have access to them so when it comes to the actual performance of the car before we get into some of the finer details what have you seen as far as the numbers obviously you've tuned both of the cars in our series and I think they're making high 200s and that's off a 93 octane tune with an intake and that's it where are sort of the levels of power and where do you start to see the limitations of both the cooling as well as the fuel sure so um base power wise they're usually about 260 in that realm if we do to the wheels yeah 260 to the wheels if we do an intake and a tune um we can generally get that up closer to 300 um especially if you're adding a downpipe to it that helps it breathe a little bit better to inter cooler will help get those charge temps down so we can start to kind of approach the low 300s as we talk about putting ethanol in and we do like an e50 blend tune right now and that will get you up into the you know middle 300s you know my car with just an intake exhaust intercooler and that's a caded exhaust on this Dyno produce 340 at the wheels when it comes to intakes obviously we' we've added an even chury to both uh Vehicles why and do they actually work so from my testing we we tested evenu very specifically on the dyno it on the on the low end it really didn't do a whole lot for the car but that's not too surprising with a turbo car they're not really they don't really need that much extra you know Air volume down low but on the top end we did see some performance gains some of it was it will sometimes create some more boost pressure which can create more power kind of be sort of a false negative of is it doing anything but genuinely when we tested it and we saw exactly the same boost levels same timing same fueling there was extra power there the thing that I looked at as on the data this car has a turbo um Inlet pressure sensor so it actually knows how much vacuum is being created after the air filter and I could see that there was less restriction in other words less vacuum a lot closer to to ambient pressure with the evenu intake and most other intakes show that same thing so the stock airbox at high RPM at higher boost levels does create a bit of a restriction so after market intakes including even tur reduce that and get more air flow into the engine and that's not always the case for most cars these days to be inter not always yeah a lot of times intakes especially naturally aspirated cars do yeah they do almost nothing but turbo cars a lot of times can benefit from you know even just filter element changes you know sometimes you know a race air filter in a turbo car can make a difference because again you're you're reducing those Inlet in that you know Inlet pressure drop essentially and the downpipe is just helping with flow downpipe is helping get the exhaust out exactly back pressure an engine is a pump right is pumping the you know pumping the air through essentially and and if you can pump it out a lot easier then you're going to have more actual power getting to the wheels and not going through your pumping losses where do you see limitations is it cooling primarily is it Inlet temps and what is sort of stopping you to make more power so if we're talking on the street yes there's really no limitations on the street you can you can drive these cars pretty hard now maybe if you're on some like back roads where you can really give it the beans for a long time you might drive your oil temps up but on the street honestly you really can't overheat these cars that I've seen um if you're really staying in it you might see High intercooler charge temps it'll pull some power back the biggest limitation honestly is the valve flow I don't know how much you've talked about that on your series yet but we've left this for you sir so anybody that knows about these cars there's two big things there's the front-wheel drive mode of course which we've talked about a lot you guys have covered that so the valve float is my department so basically the valve float is the biggest thing we have to watch out for if we try to raise the boost pressure at higher RPMs where are you peaking where's boost Peak now currently for the cars so boost boost Peak um about 3400 RPMs to what PSI um depending on the fuel 28 up to 30 yeah so Jesus and to give you so and so Toyota tuned in well quick sidebar we'll come back to Bell Flat Toyota tuned in a really flat torque curve on these cars um potentially just for longevity for drivability for whatever reason if you look at the Boost curve on these it's really interesting they at at about 3,000 they start off near 18 to 20 and by 5400 they actually ramped to 25 so that takes this climb to 25 then they drop straight down to about 17 or 18 by Red Line to kind of again create this flat torque when we get in and tune these a lot of the power that we're adding is in the mid-range we can we can run that boost up quite a bit farther in the mid-range um on my car on e50 by 4,000 RPMs I'm at 28 29 PSI and so it has significantly more torque than it does you know we're talking 260 torque up to about 350 torque on mine and that's kind of my race my tracks back to and there's more if you really pushed it but I'm trying to be nice to the engine let it last for for obvious reasons for obvious reasons kind of expensive so but yeah we can put a lot more boost in the mid-range even on pump gas and the punch of these cars is significantly different as you as you felt were are you feeling so when are when's the valve float coming in what horsepower figure what boost valve float is high RPM it's above 65 you it's and because valve float is coming from basically the exhaust valves not being able to close and the reason why exhaust valves can't close is there's too much exhaust back pressure working against them so you're trying to pump the exhaust into the into the manifold but if there's too much pressure in there and the valve springs are not strong enough it's keeping the valves open so um the problem there again is just simply soft valve springs now to some degree if you just put valve springs in it and Hammer it with a ton of boost up there the back pressure is still there you're still making the engine work harder it's not necessarily good just to put valve springs in and then go willy-nilly on Boost you still have to respect the turbocharger efficiency Li what's that power figure at what point are you basically forcing the car to have that Val FL problem is it 400 wheel 500 well that's the thing it's nothing to do with power you can put a bigger turbocharger on here and keep your back pressure within the limits of the stock valve springs and and you put a big enough turbo on there you might be able to make 500 before you get Val flow so it's not a power thing it's a it's a turbo efficiency these turbos are kind of small that come on this car because it's a tiny little engine trying to spool it up so with a stock turbo then were you getting that number is there a what what boost LEL Bo level right so typically from my from my experience and kind of mod dependent 22 23 PSI if you're trying to carry more than that I I I went chasing Val FL on my car on purpose both on pump gas and E85 and I found it by 25 on my car sometimes 26 also depends on ambient air conditions so I had it to a point where I thought I was safe and I tuned it here on the Dyno in warmer weather I went to Mid Ohio one year ago with that map first session out instant valve flow at the same boost pressure because it was quite a bit cooler morning denser air so as I've tested this car I've learned that there's a lot of variables and you need a pretty big cushion and then ethanol you would think maybe with ethanol you can run more boost pressure right and get away with not seeing Val float other way around interesting we actually have to be a bit more careful with ethanol because ethanol is amazing it's an amazing fuel it makes more power but it uses a lot more fuel to do it which means more exhaust density and when you're putting more exhaust density into your manifold your exhaust back pressure gets higher sooner so that's basically a parameter though if you wanted to just keep most of your internal parts stock stock Turbo stock valve springs you could tune around that issue theoretically you can yes so when we tune these cars we make sure that that upper upper RPM boost pressure stays well under the the valve float limits no matter what the mods no matter what the fuel and we don't have any issues with it we also warn people what it looks like what it sounds like what it feels like so they can let us know hey my car is it's basically it's like an artificial rev limiter coming in earlier than you expect so in our case when we ran this car it was worst case scenario for both vehicles like 108 reel feel neither of those cars felt like they're making Peak power for obvious reasons when do you start noticing timing getting pulled and how can you get around that in these cars so that's a temperature component so there's there's oil temperature can pull timing coolant temperature can pull timing and also your charge air temperature can pull timing and that's probably what you were running into was because you guys are Factory intercoolers on those cars Factory intercoolers they after a couple laps the charge temperatures start getting pretty high and when those are high enough that'll create more knock so we have to pull back timing and pull back boost so that's what at what point does that happen typically about 120 to 130 is when we kind of start getting a little bit of uh you know timing reduction and if it starts getting past 140 to 150 160 if it gets that high we got to get pretty aggressive on pump gas fuels that can knock pretty easy when you're but if you move to an ethanol tomb you can get around that a little bit absolutely so we recalibrate all those timing compensation tables for ethanol you don't want to zero them out a lot of tuners will think oh ethanol is Invincible it can ever knock but we can reduce it quite a bit so through through my testing like when I'm out at the track and like Mid Ohio last weekend I'm playing with that and kind of watching it seeing seeing how things look sometimes pull the plugs read the plugs see how they look and we can we can reduce those compensation so that ethanol even as your charge temperatures might be the same as on your pump gas tune we don't need to pull as much timing and the car will still run happy and safe I'm at limit plus1 with Grant from Annex suspension Grant gets to be yet another half asian technical expert I interview on this channel Grant please introduce yourself to the boys boys and girls at home hey guys I'm Grant Hendricks I'm the uh founder and product manager at anic suspension and also half asian all right so Grant you guys are a small company as we've we've Grant and I been talking for months about this project is youve kindly helped us develop a I hate to say the road and track alternative to a damber kit it's not purely street it's not purely track it's for someone who's looking for that weekend warrior approach and they don't want to sacrifice ride quality tell me about or tell them cuz I know about it but tell them about sort of annex a story how'd you guys start and how do you guys Place yourself in the segment because as you and I have talked about you have cheap shitty Chinese eBay coilovers already for this car and then you have very very price prohibitive dampers as well you guys are trying to sit in the middle of price but obviously deliver all the quality you could possibly ask for I mean that's worth mentioning cuz there's like a ton of options out there like the suspension Market itself is extremely saturated um so why do we get into this right so uh we started I had the idea around 2016 2017 but basically what it stemmed out of was um I couldn't find something that I actually wanted for my own car you know back then my friends and I were driving like you know 240s and you know cars like that and just like hot boy car yeah exactly right um but like I just I couldn't find something like I've always been pretty technical so like I cared a lot about suspension my friends just want to be you know slammed and have a good time but I wanted something that would like not be super harsh would have good like uh uh reduced nvh would be comfortable but also wouldn't cost a million dollars at the time there really wasn't anything in that space the two extremes right yeah it was either super cheap stuff or even not so cheap but I'll just say it like Japanese stuff but it was Al kind of harsh or you had the really nice like European Brands and you especially when we were younger it was just kind of Out Of Reach so I was like why does it have to be this way cuz you know I I understand kind of what's going on in the shock even back then conceptually so it's like I'd like to take a cracket and that's kind of how we started so you guys are a small shop in Northern California yeah um how I guess let's talk about the design philosophy you don't build car you don't build dampers for every single car but the Cora specifically the base coras come with a twin tube damper obviously the maros get a monot tube that's much more expensive shock and better but still not perfect how did you guys design your damper kit for this car what parts you using are you making the housings in house can you walk me through all of that so um you know in the P I'm sure we'll talk about this more like later on the video but uh or in the interview but wow break this chair yeah hear saying but uh yeah I mean we really wanted uh for us like I I was really interested in the GRC when it was first announced so I actually tried putting a deposit on one I was going to dealership so early that they were like what are you talking about I was like dude please like just talk to someone I want to put deposit on this car long story short I ended up not getting one but I really had my sights on um making something really awesome for this car since day one so we took a completely ground up approach you know um like in the past we'd use maybe some off-the-shelf components or something like that and kind of optimize and really focus on internals to build for the car when this car I wanted to do a clean slate approach and you know as the GRC has a little bit of like a rally pedigree and background I knew that we'd want this to be an inverted monotube setup and that was a big part of the project that we did for this so um so like you know for us we we knew that after looking at the car we knew that it was going to be very hard to access the either the camer adjustment or the dampers uh from the front cowl area and also on the rear there's no access for the rear dampers so we literally did everything upside down so we have upside down rear shocks we have inverted monot tubes and also on the table over there we have some upside down camera plates that you can adust adjust From Below as well so like a lot of this was all new to us and for the car um but it was like a great uh I don't know excuse if you will for us to do a deep dive um so I mean just to speak a little bit more on that like we have personally spent about like six months straight just developing what we have to get to this point maybe even actually no it's probably been about a year um so it's been a long development process but it's really pushed us so before we get into the actual construction of the damper kit and some of the the technical bits of it you guys spent a lot of time developing these cars obviously customer cars you've worked with the speed Academy folks what are the inherent deficiencies Mark and I talk about it all the time that this thing does not ride particularly well which you've experienced what are some of the inherent deficiencies that your damper kit fix in a car like this yeah well I mean aside from the obvious like you can't really adjust the dampers like you would on a normal car uh yeah I mean the car is like it was actually kind of shocking how like loud it was in the interior and then also how harsh the factory dampers were they don't in my opinion they don't really do anything very well like they're not compliant they're not really good for performance so it's I I felt I felt like there was definitely a lot of room for improvement and actually even the marizo um was a lot better from a performance point of view but it's also very aggressively damped so like if people are thinking they might want to get some Rizo shocks to have like you know a more Superior um you know ride quality I don't think they're going to have it so let's talk about some basic principles in in dampers you have compression and rebound yeah how do your your profiles obviously you know we don't necessarily have the internal information on the toyos field but how do you s differ that approach in how you control compression Rebound in your damper versus say a factory Twin Tube you know what's interesting is um we have we have the factory dampers uh speed caby was also nice enough to give us the marizo dampers um we haven't actually DED them uh yet just because we knew right off the bat this is not what we wanted so but I can just tell you just from like my experience like you know tuning shocks the uh let's say the the the GRC it definitely feels like there's um uh there's definitely a lot of ramp up on the high-speed compression and rebound and that's what's giving it that kind of harsh feel um when it comes to actual spring rates how did you determined what worked for this car was it purely mathematical yeah yeah so I mean we've we've pretty much um maybe if I could talk a little bit more about our our beginning but before we started building any dampers for any customers we really took like a physics based approach at first cuz like I did not want to just start yet another like you know BS coilover company right like I just because that's what I that's that's exactly what I was trying to get away from right so we we spent a long time like just developing like internal physics models and stuff that we validated uh you know my my dad's actually he's a he's a nuclear physicist so um my my dad and I work together on this model and like he he did some crazy math but he basically helped me to like just come up with an entire model for a vehicle a lot of it with my input but also with his like mathematical like validation he's smarter than you are I understand yeah that's what I'm trying to say a nuclear physicist right so but then like it was pretty wild because like once I strung together the pieces that like I had studied and you know you know I've taken Cal and stuff like that so I have some math understanding but like um once I got together the pieces and he validated it he was like you know son I think this is going to work why don't you try it out and then you know we my myself and the team we uh we built our first set of you know uh dampers using the model and it was just like eye opening it just like bam like holy crap this is working so that being said we've used this model internally for years and it allows us to pretty much take any c that we work on and as long as we take very careful measurements and get the right math setup we can just tune by frequency so now I know that on a passenger car like this um and depending on like for your use case right um for someone that just wants like a weekend warrior wants to have a good time these are not race cars yeah I'm sorry if you are watching this and you have a cur like it's a race car it is not a race car yeah I mean it's got rear seats like you want to be able to take people around um in most drive on the road yeah so like on like this or like a sedan like a WX on that kind of product we might shoot for around like maybe like 1.95 Hertz and so that's around what we set up for uh this car so you're are you running a softer so you're running a stiffer spring in the rear a softer spring in the front to give it a little bit more rearward rotation still though correct yeah so we start off first by trying to build in flat right are you familiar with that term no I'm not actually um so it's the concept where you have a little bit higher rear frequency than you do on the front and so it's more about a like like oem's pretty much build this into all their suspension packages so what they want is when you hit a bump uh the front is is has a lower Herz or which is basically like the the relative stiffness of the the you know the suspension package but they'll have a softer frequency on the front so that when you hit the the bump with the rear wheels the rear is actually catching up so as as so if you're an occupant you're going to feel this like uh like the car is rising and lowering it at the same rate so we try to shoot for that first there are definitely some cars where that just cannot be done with the factory sway bars the BRZ is an example if we built in flat ride into that car it would be um terribly terribly over steery so like it we can't safely release that okay so on those cars we have to make a compromise but um hopefully that answer your question no no that that's actually perfect but the the traditional thought process we at least we've had or been toped by the engineers we've worked with and you know our my you know my engineering background is that typically the the belief with spring rates is if you have a lower spring rate you are sacrificing a little bit of body control for technically a little bit more mechanical grip then if you raise the spring rate you theoretically gain some body control but you lose mechanical grip is that a general way that that's a that's a a great point and for us it really comes down to like the the tires that are used so interesting okay so um we have a we have a a free suspension consultation that we recommend everyone take before they make a purchase or even before like just do the consultation we'll do all this math for you for free so we've talked about your basic company Philosophy how you guys picked ride frequency for the car but when it comes to damp in and your actual internals of the shock other than obviously it's inverted monotube construction how do you pick oiling paths and how the actual internals of the shock are designed yeah so um for us we you know we we're very transparent about this we'll use like components that are like catalog items that we can buy from various companies so as long as it fits the car and it's it's safe and it does all the things that we want we'll just go and buy that item because that it it saves cost basically right cuz that's less things we have to design and manufacture yeah shock shock bodies uh not the Piston but the shock bodies and then the brackets sometimes the top hats so if there's if there's an option that's inexpensive that we can buy from overseas that looks like it checks all the boxes for us we will use that and what do we do with the extra funds well we spend a lot of time developing the internals so for us we're really damper people like the coilover that you get is really just like the way we package our damper Tech and put onto the car cuz for us as long we just need to mount our Tech onto the car and then we can make dampers for whatever so um by I say that because we spent so much time just trying to like we design our own Pistons we manufacture our own Pistons we spent a ton of time just cing um you know the flatness the uh material you know that we spec for the Pistons the hard anodizing that we use the shims that we're we're we're not just using like you know inexpensive shims from Asia we've like handpicked or manufactured all the required parts to make a really good damper and that's really what we spend our focus on so on U yeah and then on a car like the GRC we picked a profile that we know has has worked on similar weighted cars and uh allows us to hit the frequencies we want and get the ride quality we want before we head to the track I felt it was Ultra important we drove both of these cars on the street that's really the point of this build and to a probably vast majority of of our viewers that's where you're going to be spending most of your time 99% of your time in these cars so let's talk about how the power feels how the suspension ding feels and how both of these cars drive overall and I'm going to be doing all of this from inside of the high car because honestly the drive is going to look the same to you guys so with that let's set off with this thing so powerwise both of these cars have the same identical power mods they both have the same engine tune identical they both have the same intake neither of them have any extra power power modifications other than the fact that this MCS equipped car has a cooler the way they feel versus stock is pretty simple to be honest they have the same throttle calibration which means the tipin feels the same it still has the identical drivability as the stock cars had but you make Power basically everywhere and you make more of it the car still requires you to wind it out the great thing about this three-cylinder is it's a car that you have to or an engine that you have to work you need to get it in into the higher RPMs for it to make more power it is a more exciting engine a lot of modern like I hate to say soulless four-cylinders but a lot of its competitors in this class and the tune and the intake just goes that little bit further to give it a little bit more personality the intake regardless of how you feel about the way the exhaust sounds on any of these cars goes a long way in bringing some of that retro late 9s early 2000s compact car fun back to it I don't think this engine sounds all that great so the intake does add a little bit more indu induction noise and that turbo wish that so many people love in these cars it does give it that extra bit of character exhaust wise this car had an awe the low car or the annex car has an mbrp neither of them if I'm going to be honest sound all that pleasing to my ear I prefer the ton of the awe the reason why this car no longer has it his both exhaust are really every exhaust of experience in this car drones most of the the exhaust systems for this car have deleted the valve so you just get this constant Sound Of Agricultural 3-cylinder all the time I don't like it some people do though if you were going to pick one of the exhaust for this car and you really wanted it to be louder at least is a street car the AWD or the awe does a better job having a a more high quality tone for what that's worth um suspension wise honestly that's where we're going to see the biggest difference over the stock cars and in in the real world on the road over our style of payment Farm roads broken pavement Highway Expansion Joints the aw sorry the MCS car the car that I'm in and the annex car honestly are remarkably similar in the way they ride and the way they feel and both suspension setups feel much much better than what you find in the stock car so as you heard from Grant the problem with the car at least stock is it does a very bad job in dealing with with little bumps and big bumps basically this suspension is not particularly compliant feels like it has too much rebound you're always bouncing up and down there's a lot of head toss it isn't very compliant on larger bumps either and look I have the fortune and Misfortune of driving a lot of cars I've driven every car in this class Civic Type R aleran gol R the new WRX none of those cars have the same problem this has with almost too much rebound when you move to either the mcss or the annexes probably more realistically to most of you guys what you notice is the car breathes so much better even though we're behind this Rav 4 overall these bumps that normally really do upset this car you have none of those issues it soaks everything up you can carry more speed as you want to push through the corners as well these little bumps that I'm going over don't seem to upset the car as much yes you definitely feel them you feel them you feel them in anything but they don't upset the car and none of that harshness makes its way into your back which is the big thing honestly roads like this the road we're experiencing which albe it is not all that twisty but it still has some turns is where the gr Corolla shines and all the mcss or the annex suspension do is make you enjoy this more you can push on these roads harder the car doesn't ever sort of beat you up anymore it doesn't get upset over bumps and with the more aggressive alignments that both of these cars have the thing that this car always sort of struggled with is rotation now when you lift car rotates when you ask it to exactly what you want a performance car like this which is so satisfying I always felt like the regular Corolla was sort of dead this doesn't have that problem anymore we're going to go through this corner signal cuz I'm a gentleman go through go through lift back in moves around it's fun and regard less of suspension set you get for this car from The High versus low they both do that on the road so with that let's remove the subjective and Chase just the objective all right now it's time to talk to someone who can actually drive we're going to be talking about the track section of this video Brit was kind enough to lap both gr Corollas the low car that we're going to call the annex car the high car the thing behind us the MCS vehicle now as far as testing conditions go we ran them both back to back it was a hot day while both cars shared the same track conditions when you look at our actual leaderboard You could argue both cars could have had better lap times if it was cooler both being turbo cars they don't necessarily like 100° ambient temps yeah the track itself was a little bit greasy so there are lots of variables that slow down the overall lap time there is essentially 1.1 seconds difference between the low car and the high car the high car being of course faster as far as mathematically where you gained the speeds was essentially in every corner um walk me through Brit how both of these cars drove well I think the first place to start would be the brake package on this car um that became a very significant factor that gained lab time uh overall it complimented the shock package but there was one corner where it was very obvious to me that the the new rotor and well whole brake assembly on the front it was yes the Splurge assembly on the front um the way that that car Wicked away the heat um between short distance brake zones so in my mind it's turn eight and turn nine on Autobon South there is a very short window of time where you're off the brakes and accelerating before you hit another hard brake Zone the feel difference between this car and the white car that we tested was significant going into that second brake Zone because this car Wicked off the heat a lot quicker uh it maintained the pedal pressure uh it kept it consistent between the two corners more so than the other car um what was happening in that second brake Zone with the other car was the pedal became a lot softer just due to the temperature difference um between it spiked the temperature going into turn eight and then it spiked the temperature again going into nine on this car really no difference between the pedal field and the other car it was a lot more travel it was a lot softer pressure uh the brake pedal went deeper um what that did is it it killed the confidence um whereas this car is is all day long going to have great brakes so how did the the other part of this I mean they make the same power right on a Dyno how did the actual handling of the cars differ how do they get you know through corners and let's be clear both cars are much faster than the cars that have been stocked much faster um but specifically on the track as a Pro driver how did the damper package feel different in both cars yeah so the first thing I'll say is the uh highspeed bump meaning when you're spiking off a curb pretty similar between the two suspension packages um so that would be the most similar between the two after that I would say the MCS package uh felt stiffer overall in a good way um and also the rear shocks were valved in a way or or they just they felt like they had more rebound and bump at the same time but it it created more stability um it in the MCS that outside rear tire you could really feel take a set um on Corner entry and it was there to hold while you were getting on the power so the handling they're pretty similar but the MCS is just more crisp I would say um more fine-tuned one of the things I'm going to say as well when it comes to the way they both drove is obviously you uh Brit is a former TCR Champion GT4 driver Brit is as fast as you could possibly get a regular person in a car well there's we can get faster yeah give me a day and to be fair to both of these packages we didn't tweak a lot when it came to how they drove other than tire pressures we worked directly with Annex and with MCS to sort of give their precise settings I just I didn't want to confuse the variables too much but you got up to speed in the MCS very very quickly the annex took a little bit longer as a novice driver I felt more conf in the MCS setup than I did in the annex while the lap time difference particularly for probably $15,000 worth of part Delta uh is not a lot your confidence level as a driver on track is much higher with the MCS you can make the annex get to a similar lap time but I think it takes a higher skill level to Wrangle the car where it's much easier with this High car between the brakes and higher you know higher end damper and The Wider Wheels to get to that level I mean mhm that's at least just my feel behind it and you know to be fair to both Brands the MCS sacrifices a little bit of the as we've talked about already Street livability you have a lot more nvh you have the crazy camber plates you do have a higher spring rate versus the annex setup but again that's sort of your own personal priorities in driving either of these vehicles thing I will say the driving style of the Corolla at least for me I'm going to ask you this as well I find that you basically you get the brakes to rotate the car in and then you stabilize it with the throttle is that a pretty basically the dynamic yeah for sure I mean you just you get the rotation with the brake pedal and then you just crack open the throttle valve your the throttle plate and and it it changes the diff so the diff is now in acceleration mode the wheels are locked and rolling forward um that's exactly what you want in these types of cars where it's more front-wheel drive driven yeah it's uh it is a very easy car to drive and I to sort of end this out before we get on the final thoughts I don't think there's necessarily a right or a wrong uh way to do this to be entirely honest if you are crazy enough to spend almost $660,000 on a Corolla is it a better track car than a car that you're spending less than 10 on you know in in modifications yes but is that necessarily worth it to you probably not both options I do feel are uh worthwhile as far as uh uh improving a stock Corolla I think the Corolla despite its fairly impressive lap time and its you know base form is not a particularly enjoyable car to drive on track and I think that's probably your assessment as well yeah and I think we it was cool how many upgrades we did because we saw kind of every genre of upgrade that we we could choose from um we did Just Tires we did wheels and tires and pads and Camber bolts and then what both of these cars ended up being as well engine power upgrades as well I mean the engine power upgrade it it let it allowed us to run third gear in what was before a second gear Corner um and I think that alone is is a lot uh significant lap time difference because if you have that low-end torque you don't have to do that extra shift you don't have to overs slow the entry of the corner by going down to second gear um we also did that shifter upgrade and and that quick shifter um which is awesome um in the in that low car yeah yeah big big big upgrade for a shifter um huge upgrade for shifter uh it was cool because before the the engine power upgrade we could use second gear and that made it clear that okay this this aftermarket shifter is much better um but with the power upgrade you didn't even have to go down to second gear in either car so that simplifies a lap a lot and it also for sure gains lap time all right so with that let's head into the final thoughts final thoughts on our High versus low gr Corolla video/ modification guide now before I talk about anything else we'll be doing one more gr Corolla video in that I will race Mark around ottobon South we will will be racing for position on Autobon South course in his fl5 type R which has been modified with wheels and tires brake pads and alignment and some other fun things versus my gr Corolla High build we'll be racing for position where we'll finally Crown the king of front-wheel drive based hatchbacks I also want to say huge thanks to everyone involved in this video everyone from Autobon Country Club who gave us a home to do this so if you want to do a track day or learn from someone like Brit go there you thanks to Brit Casey our in-house Pro driver who's been with us now for years and he allows us to fully demonstrate what cars are capable of doing and thanks to all the companies that helped us with this series people like Ben from limit plus one Wyatt from MCS who spent a lot of time with me Grant who flew all the way out from Annex to show you on camera how they worked on the suspension and some of their goals thanks to Graham the engine tuner in this Apex Wheels Bridgestone tire and Jeff from S6 AP big brakes and lots of other people without them the series would not have been possible the gr Corolla is a car that I've had some mixed feelings on to be entirely transparent um out of the box it was not my favorite hot hatchback and I think our big shootout demonstrated why felt like there was some left on the table and I think what this Series has proven hopefully is that this car takes to modification exception Al well it is a vehicle that if you are clever or wise with the modifications you pick you can make a better overall car you will not be sacrificing its Street performance and track performance you can improve both the low car which is albe it's still not cheap to do is a great example of that the fast roads from Annex do a really good job improving the overall character of this car they are a very impressive set of coilovers for the money improves the ride quality in the street improves the approachability and handling Dynamics on the track it now rotates under throttle lift you can neutralize it under throttle it has a lot of the damping characteristics of the mcss without all the nvh that comes from our high setup it rise a little bit better on the street and it costs a hell of a lot less money the MCS setup is very impressive probably one of the most impressive set of coilovers I've experienced but they're very expensive and they do have a little more nvh in the street department so that's something to factor in when it comes to brakes the S6 big brake kit is phenomenal I sh you not it is probably the best set of brakes I felt in any car I've driven they are exceptional calipers and rotors they feel better than the brake semi C8 Z6 which are carbon Ceramics the con is they're expensive and they generate some more nvh so if you're primarily Street driving they may not be for you when it comes to Wheels yes the apx wheels are gorgeous gous they weigh no more than stock you get a wider Wheel and Tire overall but to do them they are pricey and you have to do extended lugs which on a gr Corolla is an expensive task essentially you're adding a little less than $1,000 the engine tune honestly is a no-brainer really does wake up this car and it seems to be quite safe the oil cooler does a great job on lowering oil temps but again it's about what you prioritize in these cars and I'm not going to say there's a right or wrong answer hopefully you've just taken away what you think may work for you from this series so that said thanks for watching again we really really appreciate all your support\n"