sarmyth

Just put these on my GS350 last night and it's quite a difference. The responsiveness and predictability of the car in hard cornering has greatly improved. I had gotten used to the flex and roll in the GS during spirited runs and now I need to unlearn those bad habits! Conditions aren't great so I haven't pushed too hard yet, but it appears the car no longer has the understeer tendency approaching the limit; unverified until I can grab a run on some dry pavement, but that's what it's feeling like.

Interestingly this mod eliminated a decent amount of body roll giving the car a solid set on turnin. You no longer need to wait for things to settle before getting on the gas. Before this mod, I was looking to get stiffer springs for my GS which retained the stock height, however these bushings give me the responsiveness I was looking for; Sport+ with the dampers set firm now has the feel of a proper sport sedan; it's similar to what I had setup on my 370Z.

As to the effect on ride quality: does the GS soak up potholes as well, no. Does my car now rattle more, yes . But this has little effect on highway cruising, no effect on tram lining, no added vibration to the steering wheel. But running around the city streets you'll feel the difference if your roads are bad. Qualitatively, when your dampers are set to soft this mod will put your normal suspension feel at roughly 5/8th the way to sport+. Not uncomfortable by any means, but not the quasi-LS boat feel that the GS had before. I also had come to appreciate the GS's ability to smash through broken pavement without getting upset, she doesn't like that anymore!

On the install, if you're doing this in a garage, remove the wheels and get a second person to help pry down on the arm from outside the car, to remove the original bushings. The instructions on where to pry the arm are suitable only if you have a lift. Also, be sure to buy some EP grease before you start! Overall a very simple and easy installation.

In short did i toss my original bushings, no. Will I ever put them back in, probably not

Nasrul3698

How much did you get them for? Been looking for a solution to remove understeer from aggressive cornering. Would buying a lowering spring have the same effect as buying these bushings?

sarmyth

Got them direct from rr racing's website for ~$350, they're a sponsor here from what I understand.

The streets dried up a bit last night so I threw my car into some aggressive off camber situations and it was an eye opener. Toyota put together such a solid, stable chassis when they made the GS only to let it down with the OEM LCA compliance bushings. Off-camber mid-corner expansion joints which used to make my front outside wheel hop and lose traction now stick with the entire chassis remaining planted. Aggressively tossing the car into 90 degree turns ~50 mph now has me bracing to countersteer.... I no longer worry about sliding into the next lane, but rather oversteering into parked cars! The difference is unbelievable if you're someone who really drives your vehicles. I never knew what exactly was wrong with this car, and learned to work with it as up until the limit it was fun to drive, but it was all the fault of that large soft donut.

Quite frankly I doubt that lowering springs would come close to this type of improvement as the purpose of the springs is to up your spring rate and thereby make the car more nimble and react quicker to your inputs ( yes dropping the cg helps this effect as well ) but even after doing that, you're still going to have this damn rubber donut fighting your inputs; until you eliminate that wild card, very little is going to change.

RR has a video on how your arm moves which sold me on giving it a try, but I wasn't prepared for the improvement that I saw last night. Once it really dries out I'll update my thoughts but color me phenomenally impressed at this point. OEM bushings are now in the trash

sam430

iTrader: (10)

bought this a year or two ago, maybe I'll install it. thanks for the review.

RRRacing

iTrader: (1)

Thanks for the plug! As you guys may already know, we have a 2014 IS350 development car, and we recently released a tune for all the latest gen 350's GS/IS/RC. We are also developing an SC kit for the IS and GS.

-Rafi

sarmyth

I've now had dry streets and ~500 miles on those badboys. Here's what strikes me:

It's amazing how well engineered the GS350 is, the big rubber bushing this part replaces was such an integral part of the setup; this bushing is what allowed you to feel a difference between sport and sport+. Effectively, the OEM bushing put in so much compliance(read: slop/roll/shimmy) that the AVS system was explicitly designed to cope with it. Have it in normal mode and AVS is trying to sort out all this movement to keep the car somewhat sorted, put it in sport+ and it *really* tries to counteract the movement and reactively flatten out the vehicle.

However, eliminate the source of this compliance and the car is *already* exceptionally well controlled. Effectively the AVS system has nothing to do! Switch between sport and sport+ and there's an ever so slight difference cruising down the road, a bigger one once you start chucking the car into corners, but for all practical purposes these rr lca bushings make the computer's life simple.

So Lexus's initial design for the GS... give it stiff springs to help with turn-in and general responsiveness (that's how the got the feel of a well sorted german car), then counteract the stiff springs with a fat, soft lca bushing in order to soak up the road imperfections and reduce the harshness of the stiff springs. Then to deal with the amount of slop that bushing introduces by designing a computer controlled damping system which monitors the yaw angles of the car to keep it together. And voila, you have a car which "drives smaller than it feels," maintains a decent amount of luxury feel over harsh roads but still can be driven aggressively. It's truly something interesting to witness.

Change those bushings out and you can see how wonderful this chassis really is... if it felt as it did stock with all that slop, you can only imagine what it's like without it.

Another odd side effect like the reduced body roll is the lack of "wallowing" in the vehicle. When cruising down the freeway, you no longer have that slow, side-to-side rocking which was always so mystifying.

This mod isn't for everyone as you do lose that luxury LS-type ride, that ability to nail a pothole and not really care, that boat-like wallowing down the road which lets you know you're not in a Toyota. But when you're entering a corner way too hot, trailbraking to get rotation, jumping on the throttle and putting down power without any upset in the chassis through the entire process, you really could care less about now having to dodge potholes.

If you really drive your car, this one change makes a world of difference.

jkonquer

did you notice any inner tire wear on the fronts prior to installing this? if so, do you think this will remedy that problem?

kcstunna82

I've heard that this solves the problem that most people have with the slight wheel when braking at times. Either way I will be putting this on mines as well.

sarmyth

I did have this wear which is what pushed me over the edge to give this a try before i installed new tires. I don't have data yet but i expect this to cure the issue.

sarmyth

It does provide a good deal of directional stability under hard braking yes. You can really put a huge amount of force into the pedal quickly without having to fight the car as it dances around like it did with the OEM bushings. I've used that me than once already lol

Meraki Autoworks

iTrader: (8)

Contact us for pricing on this!

-Josh

sarmyth

With about half a year on these, I can say the inner tire wear has ceased. I drive much more aggressively now and I'm still on the same set of tires which were wearing quite low on the inside of the tread. Planning on swapping soon as I'm tired of having the spare set taking up space in the garage.

bb700092

@sarmyth: Truly appreciate your sharing this mod and your experience. I have been looking for a suspension mod for better handling (as opposed to cosmetic looks) since I purchased my GS. There are a number of control arm bushings available in the market. Did you do any research on them and then choose the RR Racing one? If you did, which other ones did you consider?

sarmyth

I settled on these based off the quality of their explanation with regard to how the existing bushing deforms and their design choices for the housing. If you've already gone through the trouble of designing a new housing and not just slapping a new bushing into the OEM housing and then making a video explaining your choices and the design tradeoffs you've got my vote as you're pretty confident in your product and the process you followed as anyone can look at the choices you made and decide if they were sound. The bump to caster was also appreciated.

I found these guys first, had never heard of them before stumbling on this product, and after taking a look at the other products, a couple of which require you to hog out the old bushing, in my mind, there wasn't any competition. I've done a full poly bushing replacement on previous cars (crx/off-road toyota pickup) which required hogging out the old bushings and I was, in both cases, dissatisfied with the result; they never made the newer poly bushings large enough to eliminate the slop... the new bushings just "dropped right in." They were harder sure, but it didn't give the car a solid feeling because they weren't tight enough. On the CRX I end up replacing the polys with new factory arms w/OEM bushings installed and that was much better for responsiveness on that particular car.

To you question I can't offer you comparisons, but I can say that I'm very impressed with how this particular part performs. And for the price, it's really hard to beat.

MythicOne

Quick question:

Those of you that did install this component, did you do it yourself or had a shop do it for you.
If you did use a shop, can someone recommend an honest and competent shop in Southern CA area (near Thousand Oaks or Los Angeles) please?