In the current import market, performance-modified vehicles known as sport compacts are finding themselves equally at home at local road courses and drag strips as they are on city streets. While the most popular hot-rod imports were originally designed to squeeze the last mile out of a drop of regular gasoline, these gasoline-miserly vehicles may now squeeze astoundingly high horsepower out of their small cubic-inch engine displacements. With turbocharging boosts now breaking into the 20-psi range, and with combustion aided by generous whiffs of nitrous oxide gas, these little mini-rockets are posting elapsed times at the drag strip comparable to the huge domestic big-block engines of decades past.

Unfortunately, too many hot-rod sport compacts don't have enough suspension upgrades to handle their muscle-car horsepower. Import specialist shops may be asked, on an increasing basis, to align, modify or fine-tune increasingly elaborate suspension systems. It's not difficult, providing that you sell your potential customer the complete suspension upgrade!

Generating at least one horsepower per 10 pounds of vehicle weight will create handling problems due to high vehicle speeds and cornering forces. Tire performance, therefore, is critical because, without good pavement-to-tire contact, all of our high-performance aspirations will go up in rubber smoke. In the worst-case scenario, increased horsepower can push the stock chassis beyond its intended limits, creating steering ...

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