How Low Can You Go?

I’m not talking about the limbo games you used to play when you were little, attempting to overcome gravity just to go under a stick. The childish game has now turned into something much greater and more entertaining to the masses. Even the tools have changed. Your body has now become a car, the stick has turned into a ruler to measure ride height, and the crowd that used to be your friends cheering you on has now become the car community. This game is much more serious now. The game of going low.
How did going low become such a craze in the car culture, and where did it start?  The art of going low began in the 1930′s with the Latino crowd taking whats known as the Chevy Bomb and throwing weights in it or any oldschool car of that era, or cutting their springs.  The reason they did this was to take away from the regular crowd and have a more laid back type of car culture, thus today known as the lowrider group.  Then later on in time came the  muscle car era, when they decided their cars needed to take corners, and the top-heavy sons of bitches might have a little problem in doing so. To this came more cut springs. Cut springs?  Whats up with everyone cutting springs?   It’s all these guys could do back then because they didn’t have suspension kits or the internet to just log-on and order a set of coil-overs. The Latino crowd and lowriders could quite be considered the pioneers of our sickness, so cheers to them next time someone says they cut their springs. Now that I’m done with my pointless rant of bullshit, onto the next scene in this story.

Who else thought of other things besides this. The Earth sent us in the correct direction of why to go lower. The only reason I am saying that is due to friction and lift. When driving a car you have to think of the aerodynamics involved with the body lines and the shapes of the car. By substantially lowering a car and setting it closer to its mother Earth you are creating down force and a lower friction area due to less air being able to hit the under panel of the car and actually swoop its way over the aerodynamically tested body lines that will reduce drag. Scientists and professional racers then took all of this into account and began to lower their cars for racing purposes.
After racers figured out that lowering your car could be an advantage it took upon a new crowd in a whole new era, by this I’m talking about our generation of cars. People began to take coil-overs and springs and start throwing them on everything. Most of the time it was for a useless cause except just to show that, hey my car is lower. At first this was thought of as a childish yet somewhat tasteful trend by some, but just like the game limbo you used to play as a kid, it stuck and became a craze and a very competitive trend. The game nowadays is not “hey I have coil-overs so that I can spank you on the twisties on the track”, but it is to say “hey I scrape road reflectors off the ground, I’m LOWER then you”. this might be deemed as stupid, and childish by some, but just take into account that we are all children at heart and the game has just begun!

Tags: coilovers cup-kit cut springs drop dropping low lower lowering springs wheel gap