Spring rate help?

Originally Posted by GSS138

Completely depends on corner weights and if you are trying to lean the car towards more understeer or more oversteer.

On my first set of coils(soon to be installed). I have opted for 10KF/12K rear. This will produce a front ride frequency of 2.0 and a rear of 2.3
2.0/2.3 = ~.86 which is on the understeer side, and is almost identical to the OEM ride frequencies. It's also almost the exact ride frequencies of the swift spec-R.

The mfgr's tune to this frequency on purpose, understeer is safe. Almost every single OEM vehicle is going to be close to this ride frequency. I figure I will stay close to OEM, but at a stiffer spring/wheel rate, as to not make too drastic of a change. The car will behave similar to it does now, but won't roll over as bad.

Now if you wanted to dial in some oversteer which is more typical of a race car setup(looser). You would bring the front rate much higher. Something like 14k/10K on oem spring location would produce

2.3/2.1 = 1.12. Which would be mild oversteer and is pretty well balanced and is probably what I will do next for a stepping stone.

The big no-no is to do something like 2.1/2.0 = ~1 as was explained to me by an engineer(this is not my math I just know the equations).

As he described it to me, anything in the range 0.9-1.1 is flirting with some real problems and can get you into trouble. You always want to aim outside of those numbers either towards understeer or towards oversteer.