458 Lowering a 458 with the front lift option on oem springs. Anyone have pics?

I lowered my 458 Italia 15mm in front and it looked terrific (much better than stock).

Originally, I had intended to do 20mm at all four corners. However, after seeing how nice the car looked with just 15mm less in the front, I didn't even bother doing the rear. So a little can make a big difference. I lowered the car myself on the stock springs; I'd think even with the lift kit, you should be able to get away with 15mm lower.

Ray

 

Rescuing this old thread. I just bought a 458 italia with the oem lift option. considereing lowering the car a tad. Does lowering only the front axle affects car handling negatively?

 

It improved handling on mine. Probably due to having less wind getting in under the car.

Ray

 

Be careful.....You're changing the factory rake angle between front and rear if you do not adjust equally front and rear heights. It's best to keep the factory angle and lower just a little and it's really preferred to corner balance the car. The height adjustable coilovers are really there to corner balance the car 1st and foremost. Ride height is secondary. Adjust the cars height and measure the difference from the frame points noted in the workshop manual for your specific car. The coilovers are really not there to adjust for looks/stance but that is what we all do anyway...LOL.

There is a great article in Race Car Engineering magazine June 2017 I had that has a lot of useful info on rake angle and it's effects to vehicle dynamics th I used some with my cars in the past.

When I lowered my cars ( various Porsche's and Ferrari 488GTB) I did not lower too much and I kept the factory rake angle the same. Corner balanced the car and alignment to a slightly more aggressive alignment. I did this because I was going to track the car and wanted a base point that was more like stock but I drove the car on the street more than track.

• Downforce and Grip:
  • A higher rake angle (higher rear, lower front) can increase downforce, especially on the rear, leading to more grip and stability, particularly in corners.
  • This is because the angled floor under the car creates a low-pressure area, sucking the car down towards the track.
  • However, excessive rake can also lead to more drag, potentially reducing top speed.
• Weight Distribution and Balance:
  • A higher rake angle shifts weight towards the front ( lower front higher rear), which can reduce understeer (where the car tends to push wide in corners) and improve front-end grip. However 1st start with alignment and track bar adjustment then rake angle.
  • Conversely, a lower rake angle (lower rear, higher front) can lead to more weight on the rear, potentially resulting in oversteer (where the rear end swings out).
  • Some drivers prefer lower rake angle to help rotate the car for corning.
• Other Considerations:
• • Rake angle is a compromise between different performance goals, such as maximizing downforce, minimizing drag, and achieving optimal weight distribution.
  • The ideal rake angle for a car depends on its design, intended use, and the specific track conditions.
  • In Formula 1, for example, teams carefully tune rake angle to maximize downforce and performance, often to the point of pushing the limits of the regulations.

 

None of this is really going to apply within the realms of what is reasonably achievable with just changing ride height on our cars

1) Aero, unless you're regularly travelling north of 120mph, it won't matter. Even when it does, you won't feel it. 458 makes just roughly 10% it's weight in downforce at 120mph. Unless you're cornering at 120mph, realistically that downforce effectively does nothing. It matters a lot if you're driving at the limit of grip because that extra grip means lower laptimes but realistically none of us even go to 120mph let alone take it to the track where it's possible to simultaneously travel at the speeds where aero matters AND operate on the edge of the performance envelope. In a straight line you don't want ANY downforce (or lift)

2) wrt changing weight distribution.. Unless you started off in a pickup and dropped the front 3 inches and raised the rear 3 inches, your weight distribution isn't changing by even half a percent. Mathematically it just isnt possible. Wheelbase is like 2.7 meters and COG is what like 7 inches? You could drop the front to its bump stops and the F/R weight distribution would be within 1% of where it started out at.

The biggest change would be how it affects your suspension travel (duh). Running a lower ride height on whichever axle means you have less compression travel on that axle and you might bottom out more easily. Whether this affects you depends on the roads you travel on. This is a very unsatisfying answer for (what's the biggest impact) but it is literally the biggest impact.

The second biggest impact is that by starting out at a different point in the suspension travel, your camber rates (camber change per inch of travel) will be different. More importantly your relative camber change between the front and rear will now be different meaning you will objectively be changing how the relative grip between front and rear changes as you load up into a corner (changing both turn in balance as well as limit balance). In almost all cases with double wishbones front dropping the front more (or even dropping the same between front and rear) will lead to a more oversteery car (how big this effect is is car dependent) since the camber curve (camber vs ride height) tends to be more convex/sharp in the front than the rear. This is purely due to suspension arms typically being shorter in the front than the rear so the camber change tends to be relatively linear in the rear and less linear in the front.

When you change your camber when you do your alignment you're affecting only static camber, what the camber is when the car sits still. As you compress the suspension the camber will change, basically every suspension design from multi link to struts will give you more negative camber (to account for roll) as the suspension compresses. Almost every car has the rear gain camber quicker than the front (i.e more understeer, for safety) AND the camber change from stock to - 1 inch will be less extreme than the camber change from-1 inch to -2 inch ride height. If you drop the front by an inch, it's first inch of compression will now give it far more camber change than it did originally and more importantly, more than the rear will gain, i.e less understeer.

This is still a bit of a moot point because I can't imagine anyone would drop the front axle an inch and do nothing to the rear and even if they did the relative differences would be really minimal and only relevant on a track or some other HPDE. In almost all cases the most obvious effect will be the loss in compassion travel and higher likelihood of running into your bump stops.

if you want to drop the front relatively more than the rear by 1cm/half an inch, just do it, you won't notice a difference in handling.

If you want absolute drop in ride height by an inch or more you probably should think about stiffer springs. I have no idea how much suspension travel the 458 has but I would be very surprised if it was more than 6 inches, at that point the tire is through the inner fender liner. Dropping an inch means you lost ~16.7% travel so you should run ~16.7% stiffer springs. Issue now is your damper isn't well matched to your spring. Ideally you want to increase your damping rates accordingly but you can't revalve our shocks. A 10-15% divergence probably isn't the worst thing in the world and you could always just run it in race mode permanently but I hope this illustrates how a very extreme drop simply isn't something that's reasonably doable "properly".

This isn't to say if you just drop it onto lowering springs without touching damping or whatever that your car is suddenly going to turn into a boat. It's just not ideal, if ideal is you want it to behave as similarly to what ferrari intended. Plenty of people have done it and been happy with the results because they value the look far more than whatever impact the change may have on the 1 track day they might do every 5 years.

 

Oh, and everything above is all BEFORE taking into consideration that roll moment arms tend to increase with compression travel in almost all systems meaning the proportion of load transfer tends to be disproportionately taken up by the axle you drop more.

So all things considered if you apply more rake (lower front, higher back, relatively) you will almost always get a more oversteery car