E30 Zone

Hi, just bought a 325i touring on 15' bbs's. Just wondering if anybody had some good recamendations for suspension setup. I'm lookin at doing a few trackdays but dont want to wreak the cars ride on the road. 40 or 60mm springs? Shockers? Have i heard somthing about using e30 m3 front bushes? Cheers James

The setup I'm going for is;

H&R or Eibach anti roll bars.
KW or H&R suspension kit (40mm rear, 60mm front).
M3 Eccentric front bushes.
Powerflex rear subrame, trailing arm and diff bushes.

My car will be more track focused, so you may be happier with standard bushes at the rear. I think it will be quite a lot more solid with the powerflex jobbies.

I'm going down exactly the same route as PZero with my 325i touring. After trawling through a lot of posts on here, this seems to be a good compromise that won't break the bank! I'm also hopefully adding some adjustable camber top mounts at the front.

I would go with no more than 40mm lowering as you go beyond this and you render the suspension useless as you will be using bump stops only. That is unless you are fitting a coil over system.

I have just bought a spax adjustable set up non coilover. Lots of people don't rate the kit, but i was on a budget for my track car. I have to say i am very pleased. Very easy to adjust i can wind up the whole car in less than 5 mins. You can set the car up soft for the road when you want to potter and wind it right up for the track when you want to be a hooligan.

I wanted adjustability but did not want to pay £800+ for a coil over set up. On research there are only 3 adjustable kits out there.
Koni at around £450, but you have to remove the springs to adjust them
Avo at £400 top and bottom adjustable
Spax at £350 top and bottom adjustable

If you don't want adjustability then i would go with the Bilstein B12 kit. This costs around £450 and you get H&R springs with Bilstein stiff dampers and lowered by 35mm. This will be hard, but will handle well and has been developed for the car. It's probable the best fixed kit out there.

If you want coil overs the best kit i could find was from Gaz, but you are looking at £800 or £950 and it's really a race set up.

Hope this helps

Gaz also do inserts and springs- from memory much much cheaper than the above?

JimmyC wrote:Gaz also do inserts and springs- from memory much much cheaper than the above?

Gaz do indeed do inserts for £67.50 ea and £40 something each for the rear shocks

Fronts are adjustable for rebound only and rears are adjustable for bump and rebound at a fixed rate

Excellant service from Gaz as well

Just had my fronts rebuilt with shorter piston rods and got them to alter the damping too

Got them back within a week too(door to door)

There's a set of AVO dampers in the for sale section as well

HTH

I have a question,

I too am looking at the suspension setup on my touring, I really only want to lower it for looks but dont want to shatter the ride. I am very friendly with a major spring manufacturer through work and they said they can custom produce me a set of springs for my car (custom drop, spring rate etc) Obvioously i would need to buy a set of shocks, but i was probably going to do a 60/40 drop as the front sits so high.

Any recommendations for cheap but sturdy shock and a spring setup to use as a basis for my design?

Thanks.

Personnaly on my touring 325i, I will go for H&R -30mm front and rear with matching H&R anti roll bars.
Will be nice and sporty, and not too low.

Will let you know then..

cheers / Pierre

On my old 325i touring which was a daily and used for jaunts to ring also i used

H&R 60/40mm cupkit saloon springs, on B6 dampers - short ones to work with the 60/40 mm springs
Hartge roll bars - H&R,eibach are just as good
M3 TCA bushes
LSD
bbs with 205/50 profile rubber
Strut brace front

No poly shite, all the bushes where rubber BMW bushes else where. Handled neutral, no under/oversteer

Ride was fairly hard but no worse than a new mini. E30's dont' ride that well no matter what height due to the suspension design.

The only dowside was the ride height but it never stopped me getting anywhere you just had to go very slow sometimes!
It took me 5 trips to ring to perfect this setup, if i'd change something it would be neggy front top mounts as i think they would help.