2002 Front Suspension Surgery

Update by Per Schroeder to the BMW 2002tii project car
Apr 3, 2012

Back up on jack stands for some suspension work.

The old Bilstein and H&R combo is good, but not quite enough for our intentions.

These new struts have larger tubes, yet are considerably shorter. This will help us retain suspension travel while lowering the car.

The camber plates and coilover parts were anodized green to match our project.

We kicked the top of the struts inward, creating more negative camber for improved handling.

We drove the 2002 to work this morning. Despite the race-spec struts and stiffer springs, the ride is still very tolerable.

Here you can see just what 3 degrees of negative camber means!

Our project car came with some perfectly serviceable struts and springs—the Bilstein shock absorber is a natural pairing with H&R sport springs. Unfortunately, they really didn’t offer enough spring rate or damping for real high-performance track work. We wanted to go with a spring that could combat the body roll caused by massive amounts of grip from our Hoosier tires. That meant a pretty serious upgrade was in order.

We bought a set of rusted Tii-spec strut housings (Tiis have larger wheel bearings and the spindle that’s attached to the strut is also larger than standard) to use as cores for a coil-over conversion. We had Ground Control cut off the stock strut housing tubes which measure 47mm in diameter and weld on new tubes that measure in at 50mm. That would allow us to use off-the-shelf race-quality Koni double-adjustable inserts. We used a Ground Control coil-over sleeve with Eibach 400 lb./in. springs.

We also wanted the option to dial in more negative camber into our little beastie, so a set of Ground Control camber plates were used to kick the top of the strut inwards, creating more negative camber. This will help our front tires maintain grip even during pretty hardcore autocross use.

To make things look extra cool, Jay at Ground Control had his team anodize some of the aluminum pieces in the coil-over conversion and the camber plates a vibrant shade of green to match our project car. This service is available whenever you order parts from them, for a small charge. It took a little longer as a result, but the finished product looks awesome.

Here’s a quick and dirty walk around the car as it sits now.