Before setting off on the Epic TVR Road Trip, I wanted to check how much clearance I would have when the car had 2 passengers and a boot full of luggage.
These aren’t accurate ride-height checks as used in suspension work, but measures of how much clearance parts of the car have over obstacles.
I took a number of measurements using my trusty approach of a stack of DVDs of various thickness arranged so they just slide under the part of interest, and them the stack’s height is measured.
I took 2 sets of measurements on flat ground. One of an empty car, and the other of the car with 2 of my colleagues sitting in it and an extra 30kg of weight in the boot in addition to the usual bag of TVR stuff I carry.
The measurements are shown below. No difference was made to the front ride height and the rear dropped a little but not too much. This gave me reasonable confidence that the suspension setup would be ok for this much weight.
It is good that it was ok since when I had tried to tweak the rear ride height when the car was on a friend’s car ramps I couldn’t move the locking rings with a C-spanner. His ramps were not very big, and the car is very low, so I was struggling for space to work.
What I did manage to do when the car was up was change the damping on the front and back.
Track V Road said they set the damping at 10 clicks from soft on the front, and 8 on the back. I spoke to a chap at Gaz Shocks as I had read online that they would send out a C-spanner if asked. I also asked about damping settings and adjustments and he suggested 12 front and 10 back, but for a heavily laden car I could use 12 and 12, so this is what I set. It felt fine on a test drive after. The spanner never arrived.
I found that the settings on the car were 10 / 6, so perhaps a little soft on the rear. I had only ever had one incident of the rear suspension compressing enough for the wheel to touch the wheel arch liner and that was on the way back from Millbrook when the car was loaded with 2 people and luggage and the road has a bit of sudden up, drop, up again that was quite a jolt.