Ride height modifications
A standard golf MK1 at 360mm height has 90mm of travel.
That means a lowered golf at 60mm is 300mm from the top of the arch and wheel centre and has 30mm of travel. With rolled arches, you can get 20mm additional travel back. An additional 38.1mm can be gained with raised top mounts, which should get you back to near-standard travel with a 60mm lowering kit. The maximum length these kits reach is usually about 70-80mm of lowering. I tried 80mm, which looks cool but is undrivable and will shake your fillings out.
There is enough travel in the rear for 60mm lowering, so this is not a problem. The back axle is fixed and acts as one big swinging arm, and the wheels can tuck under the arches once folded and smoothed.
Lowering the car causes the geometry to be out and the car to bump and steer all over the place, increasing understeer. The geometry requires the ball joint to be extended and the track rod arms to be flipped to align everything as it should when the car stands stationary.
The geometry needed to stop the bump steer and understeer is below:
As you can see, the wishbone and the tie rod are aligned. The ball joint extender has allowed the lowering of the wishbone, and the flipped track rod arms have allowed the track rods to be parallel with the wishbone.
These kits were used in the USA on the Rabbit racing scene. Luckily, Noath Engineering also produces these kits now in the UK. Noath Ball Joint Extension Kit
I ended up splitting the bushes on both of the rose joints and had to replace them after a few hundred miles, as it is an MOT failure. The boots can be easily sourced once you know the diameter of the rose joint lip; however, Noath Engineering sells a bearing rebuild kit for £40
With the raised strut top, the ball joint extenders and the trackrod flip kit, the car is a pleasure to drive. I recommend this modification for any MK1 lowered more than 30mm as it transforms the car. No more banging and smashing of the suspension, no additional understeer in the corners and best of all, no more crazy bumper steer. After getting the mods in place, it rained for a week, so there was no top-down driving 😂
The only negative point is that before the modification, when you hit a bump under acceleration, the car would dart all over the place, and the LSD would kick in and make you feel like you were really motoring. Now, it just accelerates cleanly in a straight line after you hit a bump, and the LSD has less work to do, which is not as exciting.
