Chucez

I'll be honest here: I've never taken my GS to the track, nor have I spent more than 5 minutes examining the underside of the car. Which is why I pose this question to those of you who have taken your cars out to see what their potential is.

What in your experience limits the handling of the GS300? suspension geometry in the front? suspension geometry in the rear? I supose if I actually went to racing school and learned how to evaluate the car on the track, then I'd be ablet o answer the question myself, but that's thousands of dollars and several credit cards away.

Anyway, i'd like to hear what you all think.

rapollon

iTrader: (4)

Money+engineering+motivation! I'm answering you because I hate when people don't reply to posts. But I don't know exactly what you are asking. If you have a machine shop hookup you can make whatever you want (money+engineering), trial and error will be a PITA if you're trying to do something new(motivation). I'm focused on fabbing a rear suspension setup myself. PM me if you wanna get into it some more..

ra

jmax.garage

iTrader: (2)

This question mainly depends on a drivers experience (time on the track) and MAINLY driving style and vehicle setup. In no way I am a pro, but I have logged about 150+ of track time as a drift vehicle in the last 4 years and I have also attended several auto-x sessions with my GS before deciding to make it a decent daily driver~shop car for my company (vip style oriented body shop).

At auto-x events I found the car rather slow to respond on fast responsive layouts. Other 'big' sedans fared rather better than my car including G35's and early 2000's Maximas (the only other sedans to attend events). I would say that weight makes the car oversteer way too much when attempting to drive hard or when getting out of tight spots coming in hot. Front would lift on hard tight turns and becasue of the weight, understeer was always a problem when faced with close turns (even after trying several damping settings on modified Tein RS MKIV Supra Coilovers or K-Sport basic coilovers i never got rid of this annoying lift).

On the other hand, this car driven on drift events (gutted) fared way better than other sedans including cressidas, g35s and almost equally heavy coupes like full interior 350z's, Supras and G35c.
Tail is really snappy and the weight distribution makes it for an easy car to transition easy, even with the limited suspension tuning you are able to to do.
Also, the wider wheelbase helps the car maintain 'side-longs' longer than other vehicles at a lower speed entry if the weight is 'snapped' correctly. 'Mantries' on this car are awesome once you get to know the car.

I had and drove an S13 built purposely for drifting as well as a hachi w/a 20V ST and driving the GS, you start to appreciate what a wider wheelbase does to a vehicle. Compared to these vehicles, I consider the GS is a very good platform for a drift car if it wasn't for the lack of suspension tuning parts.

I would say that on smaller tighter track configurations, unless you have a good amount of HP/TQ, the car does feel slow and unable to cope with tight turns, again because of undesired oversteer.

On long and wider 'faster' tracks, the GS fared actually pretty good even with a stock motor (which I used my car like so for about 2 years before getting a 2j swap and blowing the motor and going back to stock).

For me, on a lowered car, the weak link is the rear suspension. On stock form, the vehicle is really REALLY high and lowering the car about 2 inches gets your rear camber in the negatives really fast. I lowered my car 3 3/4 front, 3 1/2 rear from stock, and my rear camber was at around -4. This sucks since you really can't get any traction to control the heavy body. The closest I could take it to zero was -2.2 before compromising popping something out. If I would've had a way to make my rear camber -1 or even 0 and keep my front around -3ish, that would had changed the entire feel of the car pretty much.

Other than that, even though I think small body braces would help with the rigidity of the car (like bolt-on roll cage or pillar braces, strut bars), the car feels solid and easy to drift: it has potential in my eyes. Addressing the adjustable suspension parts issue to fix the rear, makes this a very good car to drive.

Hope this answers your question and again, this is from my perspective and driving experience.

buchum

iTrader: (1)

Awesome information man. I'm going to subscribe to this thread

Chucez

That was brilliant. I'm really glad that you found this post. Based on what you've said, I'll be examining the rear suspension geometry in the months to come as i get myself set up. Hopefully you'll be around and maybe I could give you some prototypes to try out if you decide to take the 147 out on the track in the future.

jmax.garage

iTrader: (2)

It is funny since i have been planing this for a while (building parts). Another thing to, for drifting, I always thought my front end needed to be adjusted but after Fosberg drove my car (this happened in 2006) and then I drove it with him as the passenger, I realized my problem was the rear not having enough traction because of the toe and camber caused by lowering the car. After that, it was an ongoing battle with rear camber.

I'm planning on getting another GS coming this next year for r&d purposes (mainly im trying to design my own lip kit) and I have been thinking of building suspension parts myself as well...

I have RCA's and front upper adjustable arms on the drawing board (actual drawings since I took CAD & technical drawing in college) and i'm now trying to get some protos of these ones.

My next parts was getting OEM front and rear lower arms and start figuring a way to modify them in order to make them adjustable.

We should stay in touch because I am dead serious about starting a small, very small Aristo specialized only shop. I think I can tell you more over a PM since I don't want admins to take this as bus advertising... ha, in a way, they should thank people interested in developing parts for this wonderful car being that there are practically no companies making adjustable suspension parts for this platform and in the future doesn't look like there would be.

EDIT: BTW, you can find some of my research in this forum in the form of suspension threads and comparison with other chassis. The closest cousins are newer JZ16x, JZZ30 and (even though limited) JZX90 and JZA80's. This was a reference starting point for me after looking at the Mode Parfume suspension parts (i heard the owner is an Aristo lover himself).

http://www.blowdesign.co.jp/suspensi...ex_toyota.html

handfore

Quote:
Originally Posted by Chucez View Post
I'll be honest here: I've never taken my GS to the track, nor have I spent more than 5 minutes examining the underside of the car. Which is why I pose this question to those of you who have taken your cars out to see what their potential is.

What in your experience limits the handling of the GS300? suspension geometry in the front? suspension geometry in the rear? I supose if I actually went to racing school and learned how to evaluate the car on the track, then I'd be ablet o answer the question myself, but that's thousands of dollars and several credit cards away.

Anyway, i'd like to hear what you all think.
This question mainly depends on a drivers experience (time on the track) and MAINLY driving style and vehicle setup. In no way I am a pro, but I have logged about 150+ of track time as a drift vehicle in the last 4 years and I have also attended several auto-x sessions with my GS before deciding to make it a decent daily driver~shop car for my company (vip style oriented body shop).

At auto-x events I found the car rather slow to respond on fast responsive layouts. Other 'big' sedans fared rather better than my car including G35's and early 2000's Maximas (the only other sedans to attend events). I would say that weight makes the car oversteer way too much when attempting to drive hard or when getting out of tight spots coming in hot. Front would lift on hard tight turns and becasue of the weight, understeer was always a problem when faced with close turns (even after trying several damping settings on modified Tein RS MKIV Supra Coilovers or K-Sport basic coilovers i never got rid of this annoying lift).

On the other hand, this car driven on drift events (gutted) fared way better than other sedans including cressidas, g35s and almost equally heavy coupes like full interior 350z's, Supras and G35c.
Tail is really snappy and the weight distribution makes it for an easy car to transition easy, even with the limited suspension tuning you are able to to do.
Also, the wider wheelbase helps the car maintain 'side-longs' longer than other vehicles at a lower speed entry if the weight is 'snapped' correctly. 'Mantries' on this car are awesome once you get to know the car.

I had and drove an S13 built purposely for drifting as well as a hachi w/a 20V ST and driving the GS, you start to appreciate what a wider wheelbase does to a vehicle. Compared to these vehicles, I consider the GS is a very good platform for a drift car if it wasn't for the lack of suspension tuning parts.

I would say that on smaller tighter track configurations, unless you have a good amount of HP/TQ, the car does feel slow and unable to cope with tight turns, again because of undesired oversteer.

On long and wider 'faster' tracks, the GS fared actually pretty good even with a stock motor (which I used my car like so for about 2 years before getting a 2j swap and blowing the motor and going back to stock).

For me, on a lowered car, the weak link is the rear suspension. On stock form, the vehicle is really REALLY high and lowering the car about 2 inches gets your rear camber in the negatives really fast. I lowered my car 3 3/4 front, 3 1/2 rear from stock, and my rear camber was at around -4. This sucks since you really can't get any traction to control the heavy body. The closest I could take it to zero was -2.2 before compromising popping something out. If I would've had a way to make my rear camber -1 or even 0 and keep my front around -3ish, that would had changed the entire feel of the car pretty much.

Other than that, even though I think small body braces would help with the rigidity of the car (like bolt-on roll cage or pillar braces, strut bars), the car feels solid and easy to drift: it has potential in my eyes. Addressing the adjustable suspension parts issue to fix the rear, makes this a very good car to drive.

Hope this answers your question and again, this is from my perspective and driving experience.I think I'll check on your research work because i'm already finding this thread very interesting.