The Ultimate Mitsubishi Lancer Evo Suspension - Garage Tech

Since we're running race car spring rates we had to significantly beef up our chassis stiffness in order for our suspension to work properly. Usually a race suspension won't work well on typical street cars because its stiff springing will allow bumps to flex the body instead of the suspension, allowing the body to become a huge undampened spring, which can contribute to oscillations and tire shock. A flexing chassis also leads to a harsh ride. This is one reason why a rollcage is usually critical in a race car's suspension system. A stiff chassis rides smoother, offers sharper response to control inputs and responds better to chassis tuning. Fortunately for us (so we don't ruin our street car), a roll cage isn't allowed in the Street or Limited Time Attack classes so we weren't tempted to tear up our brand new interior and weld some bars in. Fortunately the EVO's WRC rally-bred chassis is much stiffer than many cars from the factory. Also, a lot of excellent chassis braces are available for the EVO on the market.

We chose what we feel are some of the best braces on the market to significantly stiffen our EVO's chassis, enough so that we can get away with race car-like spring and damping rates on the street. For the all-important strut tower brace, we chose the sturdy brace offered by Works. The Works front strut tower brace is a lighter, super-stiff version of the factory piece. This bar incorporates all the OEM mounting locations and increases the torsional rigidity of the chassis by reducing body flex in the front end. The Works brace is made out of billet aluminum with a brushed anodized finish and rust resistant coated hardware. What's cool is that the solid billet construction made it easy for us to make brackets to mount the remote reservoirs of our Moton dampers directly to the brace. The Works front brace has a unique feature, the ability to adjust the brace's mounting position on the firewall vertically. This worked out really well for us because our GC camber plates bolt to the top of the strut tower which makes the strut tower brace sit about 31/48 of an inch higher. This would mean that you would have to tweak the braces to get the bolts to line up with the firewall mounting point, not a big deal but a fiddling step for sure. Since the Works brace's firewall mounting point is adjustable for height, we were able to accommodate the additional height of the camber plate without tweaking anything. Later we found out that the Works engineer who designed the brace also designed the GC camber plate. No wonder they work so well together!

Of course we could not ignore the rear of the chassis. To beef up the stiffness of the rear we used another Works product, the Works rear tower brace/cage. Made of strong anodized aluminum billet like the front brace, the Works rear strut tower brace ties the rear shock towers together. To improve chassis rigidity even more we added the optional Works Drop Bars. These billet bars bolt to the strut tower brace and go rearward where it ties into the optional factory RS brace. When combined with the rear truck brace from the EVO RS, the entire assembly forms an integrated completely boxed in multipoint cage for the ultimate in bracing. We mounted our Moton reservoirs to the drop bars so the low- and high-speed compression damping adjusters would be easily accessed. We also cut a hole in the trunk liner over the shock towers so we could easily reach the rebound adjusters and quickly make damping changes at the track.