Improving stability, grip & handling on the cheap

[Robinson]

An impossible task i know!

My touring drives like a boat, i'm used to driving a clio 182 trophy which is like a fly, whereas the touring is like an elephant.

It appears to have reasonable sized ARBs all round, i will measure them with a vernier.

There is far too much body roll, body control is poor and it bounces about all over the place like a pogo stick. The dampers are all new bmw OE ones, it is a 320 touring with 51mm struts, not m tech though obviously.

Would a simple cheap spring & damper kit like the spax fixed rate one make a dramatic enough difference to please me or am i throwing money down the drain?

Also does anyone make a solid steering column bush off the shelf as opposed to refurbishing the standard one with another crap rubber bush and the same problem occuring again?

[E30BeemerLad]

Does the 182 trophy have the remote reservoirs for the shocks?

Thing is you've gone from one of the best modern hot hatches to a 15+ year old BMW.

Do you know if the bushes are all in good order on the touring?

General recipe for a decent handling E30 is:

1- Fresh bushes
2- no more than-40mm drop with decent brand springs & dampers
3- Eibach or similar ARBs

No off the shelf solid steering UJ setup available to my knowledge

[Robinson]

Yeah remote reservoir dampers etc. And i'm used to track prepped 106s & had a 205 GTi so i'm used to sharp fwd hatches. Also had an E30 M42 though before and even though the mtech stuff on it was much better than the touring it still wasn't great.

The front bushes are pretty good, not very old. Probably could do with changing the ARB link rod bushes again. The rear ones i haven't checked, i guess the trailing arm and subframe ones were done with the whole car refurb but i may be wrong on which case i'll shove some powerflex ones on!

Looks like i'll have to fabricate a new bit for the column in that case.

Guess i can only try the spax stuff, it's pretty cheap!

[Boyraceruk]

Someone did have a batch of solid steering guibos made up, I forget who though. I think they were about £35 or something.

Search will be your friend.

[e30_singh]

cut the springs, weld the diff, replace the bushes

[Boyraceruk]

Oh, and good tyres of course, best performance per pound you'll ever get.