I decided to up the game after really enjoying my HPDE track days. I needed a better set of shocks. I had done alot of research into Penske, MOTON, Koni, and ZEAL. All are highly respected manufacturers with ties to proffesional racing and all are considered the top of the food chain in dampers. My car being Japanese I decided to go with a set of ZEAL SuperFunction "A" dampers with their X-coil springs. ZEAL is a popular damper in the Super GT series on the Japanes racing cars and time attack cars. I decided on their track damper the Super Function series. I called up Adam @ http://www.z1auto.com/ and ordered a set.
The Super Function series uses it's own valving unique to the series and is designed for track use. Super Functions come with a coaxial top spring mount so the spring compresses evenly and does not side load the piston. The lower damper mount is aluminum and threaded onto the shock body and is adjustable in legnth front and rear. Height adjustment and spring preload are independant adjustments. The Super Function series comes with the ZEAL X-coil springs. ZEAL states they stopped using Swift springs in favor of these which they say are more closely matched to the advertised spring rates.
ZEAL allows you to spec your own spring rates so I decided to go with 16F/14R since Sebring is very bumpy. ZEAL sets the valving accordingly. The valving is one way adjustable with 6 settings.
I ran into a problem when I installed the rears. Because of my 305 tire in the rear I don't have alot of room between the tire and the lower spring perch. The tire was hitting the perch. ZEAL installs 7" long springs and I found switching it out to a 6" spring it would clear the top of the tire. So that's what I did and it worked out fine.
My initial impression on the track was that it had excellent low and high speed dampening much improved over my last set of D2 dampers(really no suprise there). I had no preload on the springs and ran the damper on the 4 setting out of 6. The car was easier to drive faster on turn 1, and 17 where it gets bumpy. My previous damper allowed the tire to lose contact with the ground in turns where the pavement got rough sending the rear skipping sideways in oversteer before the tire came into contact again. My sessions were short due to some other issues so I really did not have enough heat in them to evaluate the dampening when the oil gets hot.
More impressions on these to come after my next track day @ Sebring Dec 14th. So far they are everything I expected.
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