Lowering factory springs vs Novitec

I lowered my 458 Italia myself - 15mm in front - using the factory coil overs. I'm getting ready to do the 488 GTB next. I'm debating 15 mm or 20mm on the 488. It's pretty straight forward. I was actually going to try to do the 488 without pulling the suspension off.

Ray

 

Would be interesting to see a DIY video on this..

 

Ray, Where did you get the wrenches from to lower it?

 

I just used some spanner wrenches I have here in the garage. They are older. Here are a couple of photos:

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Here's a video showing some of the tools and work I was doing while lowering:

I made my own coil spring compressors, which can be seen in the video also. I took some off amazon and cut/welded them, then heat treated the hooks and tempered them. They are very good quality and slim, so I am wondering if I might be able to lower the 488 without having to pull the assembly totally off - but doing each coil-over on the bench is far nicer.

Right now I'm working on my Toyota Pickup truck, but as soon as I get that out of the garage, I'll be starting up on lowering the 488 and building the SS exhaust system. I'll let you know how it goes!

In the meantime, this video covers some info:



The hook spanners I used are also shown in the above video.

Ray

 

Great tutorial! What size spanners did you use? Also why did you compress the coil, was it to take the pressure off of the perch and nut? I had coilovers on my R8 and only had to turn the nut and perch to lower or raise the car. Unless you are completely taking the assembly apart the spring wont come off.

Thanks Robert

 

You have to relieve the pressure on the perch and jamb nut. If you don't, you are trying to turn threaded collars with load on them - and these are made from aluminum and are turning on aluminum threads - very bad idea.

Ray

 

"You don't know what pure fear is until you compress this spring (ha ha), and that's not too far from the truth." absolutely classic

 

I recall reading something about the OEM springs might be too strained if they are lowered, while Novitec springs will be less so. The extra strain from lowering the OEM springs will reduce its lifespan.

I'm no expert on springs however. Can anyone confirm?

 

I can confirm you're no expert on springs ;-)

All kidding aside, no it doesn't shorten the life. All you're doing is lowering the support point and giving up a touch of travel.

Ray

 

When it comes to understanding what's going on when you lower your car, it helps to step back a little bit and understand how all this works. The car has 4 wheels - and basically, the wheels are attached to some springs. There is a sliding mechanism (your shock absorber) which allows the wheels to move up and down and prevents the spring from bouncing out of control. So the car is effectively sitting on top of springs. Okay great.

There is a maximum range the wheels can move up and down. Think about it like this: if you place a 10 ton elephant on top of your car, then the wheels will go up as far as they can and your suspension bottoms out. If you lift the car off the ground with a crane, then the wheels go down as far as they can. When you are driving, the car is operating within a relatively small range by comparison, however.

Where all this starts is determined by the weight of you and your car. Ferrari designs the springs in the hopes that everything sits about in the middle of its typical/ideal operating range.

If you really want to understand automotive suspension, you should research motorcycle suspension - specially setting what is known as initial "rider sag". On a motorcycle, the introduction of a rider of unknown weight into the equation is a much bigger event than with a car. With a car that weighs 3800 lbs, when you sit down in it, you might alter the total vehicle weight by 5%. With a motorcycle, which weighs maybe 360 lbs, when you get on it, you could have just changed the equation by anywhere from 30% to 100% - dependent on your weight. On a motorcycle, the proper operation and understanding of the suspension can literally be a matter of life and death - not so much with a car.

Anyway, so the important takeaway here is that all suspension systems have an operating range where they like to function - and under ideal circumstances, you want to start the ball out right in the exact middle of that available range of operation. This is a very important concept to understand, not only with a motorcycle, but also with a car.

So generally, when you start changing things, the first thing you are messing around with is that initial starting / midpoint location. On a bike, it can potentially be a huge issue. On a car, it's usually not a huge issue, but it's something to certainly be aware of.

Just for the sake of argument, let's say you weigh 250 lbs and you have a 300 lb wife and you load 50 lbs of luggage into your 458 Italia. Well, what you've done is just used up a pretty decent percentage of your "available downward suspension travel". Ferrari was kinda expecting an Italian guy, weighing 135 lbs, to be driving the 458 by himself - so what now? You can see the issues faced not only by motorcycle manufactures, but also by high performance car manufactures, when it comes to building suspension systems that accommodate everyone and every situation. This is part of why my girlfriend is 95 lbs. I can't have someone weighing 135 lbs on the back of my bike. I mean seriously, I'd have to reconfigure my entire motorcycle suspension geometry every time we rode into town together lol 95 pounds has enough of an impact as it is! Even 5 lbs has an impact on a high performance bike w/ racing suspension.

Okay, anyway, so when you start moving the spring perch around (i.e. down) on the coil-over, all that you are really doing is giving up some of your available travel on the down side; you are sort of moving the "bottoming out point" closer to where everything bottoms out. On a street car, not a huge deal as long as you aren't trying to lower the car 3 inches or something. And, contrary to popular belief, you aren't affecting anything as far as spring rates. The springs didn't magically change. Some people incorrectly think you are reducing or lengthening the springs when you move the perch, but the compressed length is dictated by the car's weight sitting on them, not where they are in relation to the wheel. The installed length is merely a factor when the coil-over is sitting on the work bench or perhaps when the car's suspension is fully expanded - such as when you are jumping the Snake River Canyon in your 488 GTB.

Mainly what you are doing is this: you are just lowering everything down X mm - and in turn, you lose X mm off the bottom end of your available suspension travel on the downside. The real question is: "on the road, would you ever use that travel?" Usually not, but it can happen; it's happened to me. Once I was driving on a back road in my 355... I came around some crazy S bend that went down and then up and it fully compressed the front suspension - and just then I also hit a pot hole at the same time. Ouch. The result was it shattered the left hand driving light because all the pot hole impact went straight into the frame of the car (because the suspension was fully loaded and compressed). That was with stock suspension. Now, if I had also lowered my 355 by say 20mm, then this potential would have simply arrived more often/sooner and with less force - but probably not all that much less. Also, outside of a race track, this really isn't a common occurrence either. So, like with anything, it's all a trade off at the end of the day.

Another point: contrary to what most people think, you really don't even have to realign your car's suspension. This is because with modern multi-link suspension systems, they pretty much hold the wheel/tire in constant [near perfect] alignment through their entire range of travel. As such, a 15 or 20 mm shift isn't going to materially affect your alignment enough to really matter all that much in the real world. I'm sure I'll get slammed by a bunch of people who know next to nothing about aligning their suspension and they will say "Must have the dealer re-align the entire car and laser check it". Sure.. go ahead. Keep in mind, in most situations "re-aligning the car" really just means adjusting toe in/out about 1/2 a millimeter and not much else. Also, keep in mind, toe is somewhat of a dynamic settings to begin with, since it changes under braking and acceleration anyway. And, not only that, Ferrari errs these days on the side of toe out, which does improve cornering but also induces understeer (understeer results in far fewer crashes with inexperienced drivers than oversteer, so it has probably saved a lot of Ferrari owners from crashing their cars).

For a street car, where you just want to improve the look of how the car sits and maybe take some of the gap out of the wheel arches, turning down the stock coil perches 15-20 mm is really your best bet as far as I'm concerned.

As far as going through the trouble of installing totally different springs...

Sure, when you change springs, you have a few more options available to you. You can lower the car, not by altering the height of where the spring sits relative to the rest of the suspension, but you can simply install springs which have a shorter overall height/length, as well as the rate you want. You are still going to lose travel when you install them, however. Keep in mind, we aren't magically changing the A arm attaching points here, we are still just messing around with the height of springs and their perch location. With different springs, what you can do is fancy stuff like mix springs and/or use progressive spring rates, etc. For a car you are going to use on the track this might be pretty handy. For your average street car, it probably falls more into the category of a lot of cost in exchange for something which you're rarely going to benefit from - or worse, something which is going to destroy some of your ride comfort.

As with motorcycles, OEM car suspension systems are largely a compromise of sorts. They tend to be a trade off between cost vs. performance and must be designed to handle a wide range of potential situations. Will it be raining today or dry? Will you be driving in NV where the roads are kept perfect and paid for by gambling revenues or will you be driving in NY or NJ where pot holes are so large plants can safely grow in them? I don't know. Neither does the factory.

Everyone should lower a few cars - especially a few Ferraris

I've lowered a number of cars - everything from welding up different suspension components to modifying existing factory parts (or by installing after market stuff) and/or changing springs, etc. Even cutting springs with a gas torch! Unless you really look at everything as a total package which must function together - and you really understand what you are doing - I would basically advise a lot of caution when it comes to modifying a street car too much. Roads are unforgiving - and so is your wife, when you are driving to dinner. If you aren't careful, it's very easy to produce a car that looks great when sitting in a parking lot, but that otherwise is a nightmare to drive on public roads.

Ray

 

Damn Ray.... what a nice post!
Can I ask what do you do for a living?

have a nice weekend!

 

That's a entertaining treatise on lowering a Ferrari but I would like to add a couple or comments. I am not an expert tuner by any stretch and I don't mean to spoil the fun but I have looked into the subject and gone through the process with an expert mechanic at my dealer's. We need to be careful when contemplating DIYs because these cars are very expensive toys.

There's at least one reason why tuners like Novitech and Eibach offer sport springs for Ferrari owners, and that is to facilitate lowering their cars without bottoming out their suspensions when they encounter minor bumps on the road. The original springs are tuned more for comfort so their spring rates are relatively low. If you lower the car without increasing the spring rates the front end can easily contact the road surface when your front suspension responds to a sudden drop on the road, like a pothole or even transitioning from your driveway to the road. As you pointed out, your car now has less of the originally-designed suspension height for the original springs to travel. Stiffer springs resist the sudden suspension shock so your suspension won't travel as much and won't bottom out as easily. It's the sudden over-travel of softer springs that results in contact with the road when you have reduced the available travel height of those springs.

Reducing ride height will also reduce clearance, like when the front (or rear) overhang of your car has to mount a ramp, speed bump or just clear a cement parking spot marker or sidewalk.

Finally, increasing front toe out actually increases oversteer, not understeer.

You can lower your Ferrari on original springs but it can also increase oversteer aside from the bottoming out that you have also mentioned. The bottoming scrapes can make for very untimely and expensive repairs on some cars, while sport springs are cheaper and more effective solutions when lowering a car. Your car will also handle better on proper springs, after suspension settings are retuned.

 

I turned the spring perches and lowered my Italia about 20 mm on stock suspension. No loss of ride quality, no bottoming out. Granted, I weigh 150 lbs, and my wife weighs 100 lbs (and rarely rides with me). Just be sure not to go too far, as you'll run out of thread and that presents a new risk in and of itself. Note: When you lower the car, the wheels do not look good so far inside the wheel wells. I added 20 mm wheel spacers all around to push the wheels out, and much prefer the look. Lowering the car and NOT adding wheel spacers makes it look puny and weak. I think the car looks much nicer a bit lower. And I like that when I am sitting next to a Camry at a stoplight, it feels like the Camry is sitting at the height of a 4x4 comparatively. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

The car will always drive better and work better with the stock set up.

 

Define "better."

 

This is definitely good advice. I have lowered (and raised back up) multiple cars with shocks/struts on the car. Both my GT3's, an older Gallardo and my Scud without problems. I do grease the threads, and never had issues.

 

No idea what you just wrote but love this part

 

A photo of a 250 lb man and 300 lb woman crammed into a 458 Italia would be highly amusing.

 

Increasing the spring rates is definitely helpful, but at the end of the day, any spring can be fully compressed. I don't think there's much chance of the front end making contact with the road - no matter what springs you are using. Even if the coils of the spring were completely bound/compressed, the bump stops should come into play long before the car made contact with the road. Turning the coil-over perches down does take away some of the margin of safety, but outside of the track, I don't think 15 or 20 mm less clearance is going to make enough of a different to cause problems on the street. If you are talking about lowering the car several inches, then probably yes.

My 458 had front skid plates and that's something I'm considering installing on the 488 as well.

On my 458, when I purchased it, the car felt somewhat skittish under acceleration. I checked with the dealer and service department, etc. but nobody had any answers. After reading up on everything, I discovered that Ferrari puts a little toe-out (+1.0 mm as I remember) into the front of the car. This seemed a bit strange to me, but after researching further, I gather this was done to help improve cornering at the expense of straight-line stability.

On the subject of toe-in vs. out. You are right; I'm wrong. I miss-spoke when I said Ferrari put toe-out to help induce understeer. You are correct that toe-out helps to improve cornering in the front, thus the car would be more likely to oversteer, not understeer. What I was trying to get at was how my car handles if you push it very hard into a sharp turn (not so much a long wide sweeping curve on a race track where over/understeer comes into play more). On my 458, I noticed that when I came into a 90 degree corner very hard, the front end would lose grip first, but I think it was probably more a matter of just exceeding the overall ability of the smaller front tires vs. the rear tires (which have the weight of the motor over them). Either that or simply how the entire car handled in a very hard turn, rather than any effect from a +/- 1 mm toe in or out setting. I always felt like the toe-out was maybe contributing to a slight loss of traction in the front end (compared to having no toe at all), but that's just speculation on my part. With that said, overall and especially with all the electronics turned on, the 458 is very balanced and so it's very hard to determine if the car favors over or understeer frankly.

The main thing that always bugged me about the 458 was how the front end seems a little "darty", for lack of a better word, under hard acceleration. I did notice, however, when I lowered it 15mm in front, this seemed to improve the car's overall stability.

On the 488, I'm planning to lower all 4 corners 15 or 20 mm. The 488 doesn't seem to be as sure-footed on the road as the 458, but my 488 also is brand new, whereas my 458 was broken in when I purchased it. So the jury is still out.

As 4th_gear says, when attempting any DIY stuff on these cars, you need to be extremely careful. Also, it's important to keep in mind that a great number of parts on the Ferrari are now aluminum and you have to be very careful when torquing things down, using any sort of lubricant on threads (which might skew torque settings), etc. Most of the bolts that hold the suspension to the car thread into aluminum body parts, so you've got to use extra care when starting bolts or working in there. Everything has to be done perfectly, or you can end up creating some very big problems for yourself if you aren't careful.

Ray

 

I don't get the point of a skid plate, you are reducing clearance, it's glued or drilled into the bumper which messes up the paint. Let it scrape and paint it later? its a bumper, not a body panel.

 

I felt the same way when I took delivery of my 458 and there was a skid plate installed (which nobody mentioned). However, after having it on there for several years, I definitely grew to appreciate it. The beauty of the skid plate idea is that it's still a skid plate and still looks the same, no matter how much you scrape the !@#% out of it. With your bumper, it ends up looking like a bumper that is all scratched up. The skid plate just always looks like a skid plate, no matter if it's scratched or not.

You do give up a little clearance, but not enough to make too much of a difference 99.999% of the time.

It's one of those things where it sounds terrible, but once you try it, it actually is a net/net benefit.

Ray

 

Thanks for sharing your experience. I might do a front spoiler from novitec, perhaps I will just wrapping the bottom with layers of ppf


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