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KW Suspensions make some of the best suspension kits for performance cars. Each suspension kit is made by hand in Fichtenberg, Germany and if the ‘Made in Germany’ stamp wasn’t enough credibility, the overall winner of the 2021 Nurburgring 24 hour race last week also ran KW Suspension. But KW makes more than just suspension for track use. Their range includes the Street Comfort coilovers, Street Performance coilvers and finally the Track Performance kits. And now, you can get all of these right here in our country through Racetech India! Let’s take a look at the applications for KW Suspension.
The range for the road-biased suspension starts off with simple lowering springs that essentially work with the OEM dampers and just lower the ride height of your car. While these do provide marginally better dynamics, they are primarily to make your car look cooler. There are also full coilover kits available that should improve handling considerably and prove bump, rebound and height adjustability.
KW Suspension also offers kits specifically for SUVs. Why SUVs, you ask? Well, SUVs traditionally ride a touch too high and have soft, wallowy suspension. With the KW kits, you can control ride height, suspension stiffness and for certain car models you even get electronic damping control which allows you to alter the suspension’s characteristics via your smartphone!
For cars like the Volkswagen Polo, Skoda Octavia vRS and the Mini Cooper, among others, the KW Street Comfort coilover system provides a good balance of handling and comfort. In some cases, the KW Street Comfort actually improves the overall comfort of the car by reducing the pogo effect over bumps and doing a better job of handling minor imperfections.
KW also offers suspension lift systems for sports cars and supercars. These work in a similar way to what OEMs offer when the front or rear lift system will temporarily raise the ride height to help you clear the obstacle ahead, like a speed breaker or a parking lot ramp, and then you can either press a button to get it back down again or it will automatically lower to stock ride height above 60kmph.
With a big part of KW’s claim to fame being their expertise in motorsport, they have a wide range of products for track day and competition use. The track day lineup ranges from fixed damping setup which comes with a car-specific setup from factory and you can go all the way to dampers with five-way adjustability and even set individual values for low-speed and high-speed compression damping with 18 clicks each. It features a solid valve piston which allows for a more direct reaction to even the smallest of inputs and it gets KW’s valve technology with plate springs. This allows for a more characteristic design and covers a large force range of 1000 to 12000N.
The fifth side of the adjustability is the additional blow-off characteristic that the modular built damper can be extended with. This ensures that the suspension works in even the toughest of situations with additional oil and cooling capacity. The external reservoir is connected to the damper either directly as a piggyback or via a hose connection. This kit is suitable primarily for race cars with double-wishbone or pushrod suspensions.
KW also owns Reiger suspension which is one of the most popular choices in the off-road and rally circuit and this also means that these are available through Racetech as well. There are also custom kits available for open-wheeled race cars, Formula SAE participants, off-road buggies, prototypes and a whole lot more. These custom kits do however take longer to be delivered — roughly eight to twelve weeks, (versus three to four weeks for off-the-shelf kits) depending on how busy the team in Germany is with their motorsport commitments.
Being a handmade product from Germany, these aren’t going to be cheap. Even so, one can get the basic lowering springs for somewhere between Rs 18-19,000 which is great value for money. The full coilover setups start at Rs 1 lakh and can go all the way up to Rs 15 lakh, depending on the car, complexity and the purpose you’re buying for. Racetech can even help you tweak these suspension kits exactly to your liking. “Every driver wants something different. So, we can rent out a racetrack for you, bring in our team and tweak the suspension then and there with data to back it up,” says Manik from Racetech.
Racetech is partnered up with many retailers across major cities in India and KW Suspension kits all come with a two-year worldwide warranty — which is actually more than some OEMs offer for their suspension.
KW Suspensions are used in some of the most extreme cars and SUVs all over the world. Racing aside, cars like the Porsche 911 GT2 RS MR uses KW Suspension and customer racing teams from BMW, Mercedes-AMG and even Toyota, use KW Suspension. In fact, the suspension setup on the #911 Manthey Racing ‘Grello’ car was one of its strongest points, allowing for higher corner speeds and a more stable ride on the rollercoaster that is the Nurburgring. To get your kit, you can get in touch with Racetech through their Instagram page or drop them a mail at info@racetech.in.
