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Originally Posted by wrenchmen
Considering the quality of your GTO and your choice of components, that is a very interesting statement....especialy to someone like me who is currently in the begining stages of a restification.
With all the aftermarket components avalable, particuarily suspension and brake and from someone who has "been there, done that" is there any words of advice or thoughts you can give based on your experience?
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When starting a project I think it is very important to have a goal in mind of what you envision your final build to be. How often will it be driven? Will it be raced? Drag? Road race? How often? All those things play an important role in determining what product to use on the car.
Take for instance the brakes. In retrospect I went way overboard. I wasn't realistic with myself about the use of the car and I made the brakes more complicated and more expensive than necessary. When I built the car it was very common to upgrade to the b-body spindles and custom upper control arms. This addressed the suspension geometry issues and allowed the use of some large OEM brakes. The b-body swap also has a bit of a dark side, with increased bump steer and a reduced turning radius due to the longer steering arm . In the last few years the ATS spindle has emerged as the best of both world solutions. It fixes the geometry issues without inducing other negative effects, and it allows the use of the c5/c6 brakes, that are relatively inexpensive and very well engineered. With the introduction of the C6 ZO6, you can now get an OEM quality 6 piston caliper with a 14" rotor. That is the way to go in my opinion if the car seem mostly street driving with an occasional romp on the road course or auto cross.
There are other systems, such as aftermarket EFI in comparison to the latest OEM hardware and software that GM uses to run their modern engines. The amount of effort that the OEMs spend on IDLE would easily surpass the combined engineering efforts of many, if not all aftermarket EFI companies, combined.
Andrew