One of the most popular upgrades our customers approach us about is lowering their car. There are a number of ways you can approach this modification, it can vary in cost and it really depends where you’re starting from. The age of your car will determine what type of suspension you’re running on and as such, will determine which parts you use to achieve your desired ride height.

The premise of lowering springs is a simple one, by shortening the length of the spring at each wheel, you reduce the amount of travel in the suspension - this in turn reduces the distance between the chassis and the road surface. You could remove the existing springs and cut a small section out of the spring, bolt it all back together and presto - your car will sit lower to the ground.

But there are a couple of other things to take into consideration. If the coil of the spring retains the same tensile strength but is shorter, the spring will have less resistance and produce a bouncier ride. If we consider you’re car is now closer to the road than it was, being bouncier is not a good thing as you risk bottoming out suspension mounts or catching the undercarriage of the car on the road.

The solution is two-fold

1 - Install a lowering spring, which is shorter in overall length but contains the same if not more coils, maintaining or even increasing the tensile strength of the spring.

2 - Install dampers or shock absorbers with less travel in them and that offer more effective resistance, preventing suspension arms bottoming out or fouling suspension mounts.

Your first step is to decipher what ride height you can lower your car to. You may face various limitations in your efforts, depending on the available parts and dimensions of your car. There is a limit to how low you can go through using traditional ‘spring and damper’ components, needless to say the overall appearance can be dramatically different, as can the ride.