Biting the bullet

So, that was expensive, but what can you do. (Other than not owning old shit that is nigh-on impossible to get parts for. I should have thought about that five years ago!)

My car is running a fairly horrible mongrel suspension setup. Shortly after she came off the road in 2007, she gained some custom-made rear shocks from Gaz, as part of my brother's work to get her road-legal after her last MOT failure. These were, and still are, very nice; as good as you would expect from tailor-made stuff by Gaz. They're still on springs of unknown provenance and unknown age, which I intended to replace at some point.

The front ones, on the other hand, are awful; they look like budget coilovers from a completely different car (quite possibly a Mark 2 VW Golf) that were bodged to fit. In other words, they were shit coilovers, that are now old and shit coilovers that feel terrible. They also sit far too low. Weird, I know, someone with a modified Japanese car saying such a thing; except I actually like driving my car on the road, and me driving anywhere means driving some distance on Norfolk back-roads. As much as I like "the lows", I like not having a smashed sump even more.

As you may have guessed, with the GTX being a very rare car and the suspension being specific to the GTX, I do not have many off-the-shelf suspension options; there are only K-Sport and D2 coilovers available for it.^[1] Bear in mind that the UK market for any 323 GTX part is about five people, myself included.^[2]

I was kinda ignoring the suspension issue, mostly because I'm cheap and it handles well enough (tiny wheelbase, 4wd, and good rubber goes an awfully long way). But after multiple painful bottoming-out incidents on the back roads, and with everything being vague on those roads at very high speed, and seeing these selling for about £200 less than I had last seem them sold...this had to be done. It's overdue.

I'll update when they are here and fitted. I suspect this is going to be a massive improvement; you'll probably get a review out of this.

Aside: yeah I've done this one before, but what is the deal with shipping from the United States? I did notice that these were available from the US, for significantly less money, and I might have been tempted to save a few quid by waiting roughly six years for these to make their way across the Atlantic. And then I looked at the shipping costs:

OK, so this one was a bit of an outlier, but all of the coilovers that came up in my searches (only one of which was actually for my car) had shipping costs not far off £200. It's so strange.

[1] Fun fact: I'm told that D2 and K-Sport are made in the same factory, branded differently for different national markets.

[2] And I know that one of those people already has K-Sport coilovers fitted...