KW uses mildly progressive springs on the Variant 3 kit for this car, with rates of about 6 kg/mm front and 4 kg/mm rear once the initial progressive stage has been compressed. So it came as no surprise that I could feel the G35 roll and the suspension compress and then take a set once I started to turn some hot laps. Still, the car felt much better balanced, with virtually no turn-in understeer to fight with and superb mid-corner composure and balance.
After a quick review of the data recorded on my MSD G2X data acquisition system, I decided to increase the compression settings on the front shocks to full stiff, to better control weight transfer and hopefully optimize front grip without inducing any unwanted understeer. This setup change worked as planned, with my best lap time falling to 1:25.618, a full 2.5-seconds faster than our best baseline set just a few hours earlier.
Once I downloaded all the G2X data to a laptop computer, it was easy to see that lateral g-forces and corner speeds had improved tremendously, with lateral g’s increasing by as much as 0.2g to 0.3g in the faster corners. In the slower corners the gap between the KW setup and the baseline setup wasn’t as pronounced, but we did still see consistently higher lateral g-forces and faster cornering speeds across the lap, verifying that the KW coilovers and Stillen-improved alignment were paying big dividends.
Generally speaking we see a 1.5- to 2-second lap time improvement when converting a car to a high quality coilover system like KW V3’s, which goes to show that the G35 benefits more than most cars given that it cut 2.5 seconds off its stock suspension lap time. And the ride quality on the street, though certainly firmer than OE, was still quite civilized. Yes, there’s a bit of added harshness over high-speed bumps like seams or potholes, but everything is nicely controlled. And from an aesthetic standpoint, the G certainly looked 1000 times nicer with the wheel well gap gone. All in all, I’d say there’s virtually no downside to this combo of KW V3 coilovers and Stillen camber arms, other than a tiny bit extra ride harshness on the street, with huge upsides at the track and in the looks department.
The rest of the G35 upgrade stories are located here:
G35 Tuning: Big brakes make a difference
G35 Tuning: How to bolt on over 40WHP
G35 Tuning: Ditching the V-LSD for a proper diff
Do you have full specs for the rim size including backspace, I really like the way yours turned out.