1993 canyon carver build

[CBeast7e46]

what would i need in terms of suspension and tires?
Kinda new to this stuff haha

[deevergote]

If you don’t plan on driving the car in temperatures below 50 degrees (F), then get some quality high performance summer tires. Check reviews on the major tire sites, or in major magazines. You can’t really go wrong with anything made by the better brands: Michelin, Bridgestone, Firestone, Yokohama, Toyo, etc... if the price is considerably less than other brands, expect performance to be comparably less. Buy quality.

Suspension wise, I suggest getting koni yellow shocks and either h&r or neuspeed springs. Avoid adjustable coilovers. Most on the market for these cars are garbage, and you don’t need the adjustable functions. Better not to have adjustable stuff, honestly. The koni shocks offer more adjustment than you need, even.
People WILL suggest coilovers, and many will recommend a number of the trash brands (like Raceland, D2, TruHart, etc.) Ignore them. That stuff is crap. You don’t want to trust inconsistent, cheaply designed, cheaply made junk when a failure means sailing off a cliff.

Additionally, replace all your bushings with prothane or energy suspension polyurethane pieces. It makes a huge difference.
Beyond that, look into chassis braces and a traction bar from ExplicitSpeedPerformance (ESP). They sell directly, right here on this site. Not cheap, but an absolute bargain considering the quality of their parts.

Also, make sure your brakes are adequate for your intentions. Make sure they can take the beating of spirited canyon driving. Brake fade while diving into a curve on a downhill is NOT fun. Been there.

Finally, be sure to get a proper alignment after you’ve installed your new suspension bits. You will be replacing your expensive new tires very soon if you don’t.

[CBeast7e46]

Originally Posted by deevergote

If you don’t plan on driving the car in temperatures below 50 degrees (F), then get some quality high performance summer tires. Check reviews on the major tire sites, or in major magazines. You can’t really go wrong with anything made by the better brands: Michelin, Bridgestone, Firestone, Yokohama, Toyo, etc... if the price is considerably less than other brands, expect performance to be comparably less. Buy quality.

Suspension wise, I suggest getting koni yellow shocks and either h&r or neuspeed springs. Avoid adjustable coilovers. Most on the market for these cars are garbage, and you don’t need the adjustable functions. Better not to have adjustable stuff, honestly. The koni shocks offer more adjustment than you need, even.
People WILL suggest coilovers, and many will recommend a number of the trash brands (like Raceland, D2, TruHart, etc.) Ignore them. That stuff is crap. You don’t want to trust inconsistent, cheaply designed, cheaply made junk when a failure means sailing off a cliff.

Additionally, replace all your bushings with prothane or energy suspension polyurethane pieces. It makes a huge difference.
Beyond that, look into chassis braces and a traction bar from ExplicitSpeedPerformance (ESP). They sell directly, right here on this site. Not cheap, but an absolute bargain considering the quality of their parts.

Also, make sure your brakes are adequate for your intentions. Make sure they can take the beating of spirited canyon driving. Brake fade while diving into a curve on a downhill is NOT fun. Been there.

Finally, be sure to get a proper alignment after you’ve installed your new suspension bits. You will be replacing your expensive new tires very soon if you don’t.

Thanks ill definitely be taking your comment into consideration! As far as starter engine mods what would you recommend? Currently investing in a turbo kit but still doing research. I was planning on ebay turbo and doing everything else right including a tune but im not sure if its worth the risk of a cheap turbo. Im really not into beating my car since its my daily and i hardly ever go passed 5k so idk if i would be at risk of blowing my engine?. I try to baby it lol

[deevergote]

If it’s your daily, do not go turbo.
Stock pistons will break ring lands under even low boost. The only way for it to be reliable is if you install forged pistons. That gets pretty involved, and expensive. Boosting your car the right way will cost 2-3x the car’s value. It’s fun, but risky even when done right. Wait until you can treat the car as a toy, rather than necessary transportation.

[Darkcloud]

Sway bars will help so much, I'd say get a rear progress bar as it's 22mm. That alone will be felt.

Also look into widening the wheel base of the car. There are ways of doing this without getting fender flares unless you want to. Dont over neg camber the wheels either. As for tires don't do the stretch look by any means. Reason being is because if you run a tire with a stretch on it, you idk debeading the tire from the rim. Get tires that fit the width or a bit more.

Example I was going to run 17x10 wheels with 255 40 or 255 45. The tires that came on my wheels were 235

Tires flex under high speed turning.

[Rilas]

Pretty much what has been said here is correct. Only thing I would mention is that I wouldn't upgrade the front sway bar, just the rear. Having and ST front sway bar is too much when I go running up and down mountain passes here in Montana. It's just too big of a spring and I hit a point of under steer when it just starts to plow with the wheels screaming at me. I'm actually trying to down grade to a DX/LX front sway bar to see what kind of a difference it will make.

I'm going to agree with the coil overs, you really will be more than fine with a good spring for a decent drop and some good shocks. I have what is an experiment for the most part on our forums. I choose to run 94-97 Accord wagon Bilstein shocks paired with Nuespeed race springs. Although to fully round out the shock spring combo I paired the fronts with FFC extended top hats and the rear with Cheddas Auto extended rear top hats. Adding the top hats are what really finished this suspension off. I haven't had the opportunity to ride in a lot of modified Accord's, but I can that so far mine has the best ride quality of them all. It's not the lowest by any means but I can't go really low with the crappy roads and entrances/exits on parking lots around here. This suspension is more than adequate though to do canyon carving / mountain runs.

Take the above with a grain of salt though as well. I have an ESP.net 3 point upper front strut bar, ESP.net rear tie bar, Ultra Racing rear upper strut bar and an Innovative traction bar. This is also paired with full polyurethane bushings.

Everyone here recommends Koni's shocks and Nuespeed or H&R springs.

[ellen123]

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[Harriers Wake]

What is the purpose/benefit of the Torque mount kit on the ESP Traction bar? Asking for a friend. Who is me.

[deevergote]

I don’t believe the esp traction bar is compatible with the factory torque mount. While the torque mount is not load-bearing, and is therefore not absolutely necessary, it saves your other mounts from additional strain under acceleration. The ESP bar can come with a provision for their torque mount, which will not only save your other mounts, but also help keep your engine still, thus putting power to the wheels, rather than to twisting the engine around in the bay.

[ukemike]

Our race cb7 is getting pretty sorted out. I'll share what we have learned. Our setup has been driven by track times and by controlability.

We have the koni oranges, but I would prefer the sports. Our springs are Neuspeed race springs which are about 2x the spring rate of the stock springs. We have adjustable upper control arms front and back. The front upper control arms are actually for a late 80s civic and they add a bit of caster. The rear adjustable arms are the Moogs from Rockauto. We have our fronts set to about 3 degrees of negative and the rears to about 2 degrees of negative. In the rear we have the anti-roll bar from a 1999 Acura TL. It is 16mm in diameter which is about 60% stiffer than the 14mm bar we used to have (which came from an Acura Vigor). I would not recommend going with something stiffer than that. Turn in will be sharp but even our 16mm bar made the car a tail happy. That's why we added the -2degrees in the back, to tame the rear end. It was actually a bit scary.

For brakes after much trial and error we ended up with 1999 Acura CL disks all the way around. I would not recommend upgrading the front and leaving the rears unchanged. The forward brake bias will actaully reduce your braking prowess. Actually the stock brakes are awsome even with the drums, but just are too small for the amount of heat Sears Point puts into them in an endurance race. I would not recommend a race compound pad on a street car but a sport pad is a good thing.

The single greatest and easiest thing you can do to minimize fade and improve braking reliability under hard driving conditions is to upgrade to a DOT 4 fluid. Just do it. Even super cheap DOT4 has much higher dry and wet boiling temperatures. A good race brake fluid can take over 500 degrees without boiling. Just flush that old crap out.

To top it all off we use whatever 200 treadwear tire is cheapest before each race. We loved our old Dunlop Direzzas. The BFG Rivals were sticky but let loose without enough warning. The Nexen Nferas were actually very good.

My last bit of advise will seem counter intuitive. Do not get huge wheels and tires. They may look cool but they will slow you down. Wider tires do not have a larger contact patch. Contact patch size is determined almost completely buy the tire pressure. Big fat tires on huge wheels are heavy. They increase your rotational mass and your unsprung mass. Both are baaaad. We went from running 225-45-17 to 205-50-16s (and much lighter wheels) and knocked 5 seconds off our Sears Point lap times. It was huge. The difference in acceleration was almost shocking. Smaller diameter tires will also reduce your final drive ratio which translates into more torque. This race we are trying Falkens in 205-40-16.