If you love that lowered look, but you don’t want to scrape on every bump in the road, a suspension that you can raise and lower on the fly might be just the ticket. Air Lift offers two such suspension systems that offer remote-control adjustment and automatic ride height settings.
“This is fully adjustable so for parking ramps, pulling into driveways and speed bumps you can move it up and down. If you are on a super-smooth road and you really want to show your stuff, you can drop it down and roll like a quarter inch over your tires,” Andrew James of Air Lift Performance told us at The PRI Show. “Beyond that, these are really nice dampers with a monotube, high-flow, linear piston, so it’s not like we took a random damper, put an airbag on it and sent it out the door.”
Air Lift offers two different systems, both of which will return to the ride height you suggest, but one does it more precisely than the other.
“The nice thing about this system is we have done a lot of work on the ride heights. You can have a height sensor—which is the 3H system—that will hit the ride height, guaranteed every time,” Andrew explained. “The 3P is a pressure-controlled system, so it’s predictive ride height. …The 3P does a really good job of getting close to the ride height you want, while the 3H hits it on the money every time, but the 3P is very close and it’s an easy install because you don’t have to run height sensors.”
Besides offering adjustable ride height for functional and superficial reasons, these systems can also provide improved handling.
“We have done a lot of testing. We have tested against traditional coilovers and the OEM suspension. We took it to Virginia International Raceway and we did improve on the coilover lap time,” Andrew added. “The air spring is a softer spring, so it is progressive and it has completely different behavioral characteristics than a steel spring. With the softness you are going to get more grip, so it just works.”
Not only do these systems offer better looks and better handling, but they can be controlled via a handheld remote or a free smartphone app.
For more information on the Air Lift suspension systems, check out the company site here.