Grumpy and Confused about Ride Height Settings

[mastermind]

Well... the car goes in for an alignment on Thursday, so I'm mussing about with ride height settings on my '99 C4 with PSS-9's. I want to get this dialed in so the shop does not have to deal with setting ride height, and no, I don't really care about corner balancing the car... just getting a good, even, height.

Right now the car measures 120mm in front and 130mm in back, as per the measurement points in the manual. With this setup the car has a very slight forward rake... when measured on the frame bottom (just in front of the back wheel and just behind the front) there is about a 5mm rake from front to back.

Now, X74 spec with 18" wheels is 118±10mm front and 133±10mm rear - so by going by those specs I'm right there, 2mm high in front and 3mm low in back, but I'm still pointing nose down.

I guess my main question is, does the factory mean to have the nose pointing at the ground??? It would seem if I want level ride I'd want to go up about 5mm in front, so then I'd be 125 in front and 130 in the rear - pushing the limits of the spec, but level for my car. I'm hoping this would not be too low for the PSS-9's - I've been reading all the who-ha about hitting the internal bump stops if one goes too low and I don't want to deal with this... but I still want the car at around that X-74 lowered height.

What do you guys think ???

Also... I'm going back and forth between X74 and GT3 alignment settings.. the main difference seems to be .5 deg neg camber in front (x73) vs. 1 deg neg (GT3) and again in the rear, except only about 10' more neg camber for the GT3 back there.

I do a handful of driver ed and auto x every year.. so an aggrssive alignment would be nice, but I don't want to wear out the inside of the tires too much either with day-to-day driving. Would the GT-3 alignment be going too far ?

trev

[ar38070]

Disregarding corner balancing then set the ride height to whatever pleases you. My guess on the rake is that the factory is trying to allow for the fact that under power the car will shift weight to the rear and the car will squat. The higher rear is to offset this.

If you can put your finger in between the top of the tire and the wheel well then you are probably not too low (with regard to the shocks bottoming out).

Uneven wear is more of an issue in the rear (as there is always more camber there). I would set the front to -1 and the rear to -1.5 to -2. The rears will wear out first.

I would not use factory toe. The factory spec is about 0 all the way around. I would set slight toe in at the rear.