After speaking with both Greg at Teinusa and Jay Morris at Ground Control, I decided that the person who knows the most about shocks should get my money, so I ordered a set of Jay's Advance Design aluminum coil-overs, $399 ea. plus $55 ea. for springs. Jay said I did not need new upper spring mounts since the ITR stock one's are excellent. I compared the dyno curves of the Tein RS ( these have the external attached reservoir with adjustable bump) with a dyno curve of a set of Advance Design coil-overs, and found both to be quite similar in terms of actual rate and range of adjustability. It was hard however to compare the slow speed bump and rebound due to lack of detail in the Tein dyno curves. Slow speed bump and rebound are what affects the car when you turn into or out of a corner, or when you brake or accelerate. High speed damping is related to shock's response to sharp bumps. The Advance Design coil-overs have good adjustability in the low speed bump part by choice, in order to best adjust the car for handling. This is why I wanted separate adjusters for bump and rebound.

Another feature which helped me choose the Advance Design over the Tein's is the fact that I get the springs I want and valving to match for the original price. In my case, Jay recommended 450 lb springs front and 550 lb springs rear, and by adding a pair of 650 lb springs for an extra $110, I can run 550 front and 650 rear. If I had chosen Tein's, you first pay for the stock set (which comes with higher rate front than rear springs which I did not want), and then you pay to revalve the shocks, which for the spring rates I wanted, would have required an extra $160 ea. or $640 extra, plus any springs. I had also checked out the Tein N1's which I assume are similar to the Mugen N1's, but the springs and damping are twice as hard as the Tein RS, and so not suitable for a car being driven to the track. If after learning how to drive the car I decided I want to use even higher springs (going towards the 800 lb front, 1200 lb rear used by Realtime Racing's ITRs), then Advance Design can rebuild the coil-overs for only $50 ea. A good deal I think.

With regards to shock info, Jay said the best book he had found describing shocks was the one by Paul Haney called Inside Racing Technology (out of print but look on Amazon.com for used copy). Paul Haney on his web site www.insideracingtechnology.com also recommended in his book reviews section the Ohlins TT44 damper manual. He says "the most practical information yet presented about racing shock absorbers". Paul Haney also has a new book, "THE RACING & HIGH-PERFORMANCE TIRE", which I just ordered. Ohlins is a very high performance shock manufacturer (Jay told me he thinks they have 40 engineers working on their products), and the TT44 is a shock used by CART teams, but if you are technically minded, it is worth a look. Call Ohlinsusa, $26 for the manual on CD. It is amazing how complicated shocks can be. Some people spend so much time worrying about headers, which are really very simple in comparison, and cannot be adjusted to your car. A friend of mine reduced his lap time by 4.5 seconds at Mosport by installing a set of Tein RE's on his ITR, and he only improved 1.5 seconds with a ton of engine compartment mods (including headers), which also gave him overheating and other problems. Number of problems with coil-overs was zero.

Aj was lucky to get some of the Ohlins products, but I could not afford them. Motons would have been nice too!