The current Chevy Camaro is a lot of things – powerful, stylish, a sales success story, and a fitting heir to the pony car legacy established by the previous four generations of GM pony cars. One thing it definitely isn’t is “light on its feet” – while it’s not in the same baby-hippo category as the new Dodge Challenger, it’s still far heavier than any of its predecessors. With a curb weight of 3,750 pounds, even the switch to an independent rear suspension and big, low-profile tires wasn’t enough to make the fifth-gen Camaro nimble, and an engineering bias towards understeer (the tendency for the front tires to lose grip before the rear) makes the situation worse.

Fortunately, there’s a healthy aftermarket for fifth-gen Camaro suspension upgrades that range from relatively simple fixes for the stock car’s major deficiencies all the way up to full-on competition setups. To get an education on all things suspension related for the current Camaro, and bring our own project SS up to a higher handling standard, we got in touch with suspension specialists Pfadt Race Engineering, then started turning wrenches.

One of the biggest favors 5th Gen Camaro owners can do for themselves is a suspension upgrade.

“The first problem with the 5th gen Camaro is that the car understeers very, very badly,” explains company founder Aaron Pfadt. “It’s normal for the factory to build in some understeer because it’s a safer condition, but you can ask anyone – it’s just absurd with that car. I don’t think they tuned it that way intentionally, it just came out that way. Whether you’re driving it on an autocross track, road course, or your favorite twisty road, you’ll find that the front end starts to slide before anything else, and it’s at a level of grip that I think most people will run into.”

“A secondary problem is that they are heavy machines, and it takes a lot of spring to support that. GM is a little light, in my opinion, on their production spring rates,” Pfadt continues. That’s also understandable, because while enthusiasts might want stiffer springs (and be happy with a tradeoff in ride quality as a result), the perception is that the majority of the buying public wants a car with a comfortable, isolated ride.

While putting the production line Camaro on a serious diet isn’t within our power, correcting the understeer and spring rate issues certainly is, and for our test car, a 2010 SS, we solicited Pfadt’s help. He provided PRE’s Stage 2 Camaro Performance Kit, which consists of Adjustable Sport Sway Bars and Drop Springs,  which we then complimented with their Sway Bar End Links and topped off with Pfadt’s Rear Trailing Arms.

The heart of our new suspension is Pfadt's Sport sway bar set and lowering spring kit.

Sport Sway Bar Features: (PN 1410100)

• Eliminates under-steer by providing proper balance
• Enables fine-tuning with rear adjustment for street or track
• Increases performance by reducing body roll and increasing steering response
• Easy installation with basic hand tools
• Includes greasable graphite-impregnated polyurethane bushings and new mounting brackets
• Front swaybar diameter: 24mm solid (stock: 23mm hollow)
• Rear swaybar diameter: 39.4mm hollow, 3-position adjustable (stock: 23mm hollow)

Lowering Spring Features: (PN 1410109)

• Engineered to optimize the factory shock absorber damping
• 1 to 1.25 inches of drop for the correct relation between looks and proper function
• Engineering design and race testing ensures the ultimate in quality and longevity
• Powder coated gloss silver for unbeatable looks and durability
• Optimized designs for both V8 and V6 applications
• Made in the USA
• Front spring rate: 210 pounds/inch (stock: 150 pounds/inch)
• Rear spring rate: 425 pounds/inch (stock: 375 pounds/inch)

We also stepped up to Pfadt's adjustable end links. 'With our end links, it’s strictly a question of functionality,' Pfadt explains. 'The stock ones tend to bend, and so it’s really just a durability change. As for a performance advantage, there’s not much - they’re a little bit lighter. They’re also adjustable in length, so if you corner-balance your car, which not everyone will do, you can take all the preload out of the swaybars.'

End Link Features: (PN 1410108)

• Includes all four endlinks needed to mount your sway bars (2 front and 2 rear)
• Lighter and stronger than OEM units
• All four are adjustable
• Endlinks do not require drilling out your sway bar mounting holes
• All hardware is included
• All components are very high grade materials, and high grade spherical units
• Made in the USA

Rear Trailing Arm Features: (PN 1410118)

• 106% stronger than stock
• 17% lighter than stock
• Laser-cut side panels
• Includes trailing arm bushing kit

Out with the stock rear anti-roll bar, to make way for the new, stiffer Pfadt bar.

Rock & Roll

Because of the large amount of understeer bias built into the Camaro’s stock suspension, everything has to start with correcting that issue. “It won’t perform up to its potential until you have a car with neutral handling,” Pfadt states. “The first thing we do is address the balance issue, and we do that with the swaybars, because they are the biggest driver of the neutral handling and front to rear stiffness.”

By increasing the stiffness of the bar in back, grip up front is improved and the factory understeer can be dialed out.

A swaybar, also known as an anti-roll bar, is a torsion spring that connects the left and right side of the car. When the vehicle leans into a turn, the swaybars resist that roll, and because of the way they’re designed, they do it without increasing harshness over bumps that effect both sides of the car like stiffer springs would. The other main effect of swaybars is that they increase grip on the opposite end of the car – in other words, a stiffer rear bar adds traction to the front tires, and vice versa. That’s where balance comes in.

Pfadt's rear bar provides three different end link positions. Pfadt explains, 'We share the exact same bar length and leverage ratio as the GM bar has. The change in the roll stiffness at the rear from changing mounting points is pretty significant. The radius, meaning the distance from the pivot point of the bar to the end link, can be looked at as a percentage - in other words, if you cut the radius in half, you double the rate of the bar. Our bar has a relatively large range. We optimize our setup around the middle hole, and we provide those other two positions for people who are running different wheel and tire combos because, once again, we are always using roll bar stiffness to control balance and vehicle dynamics.'

“When you stiffen up the rear bar, you effectively move grip to the front,” says Pfadt. “What really affects balance is roll stiffness and tire grip. Spring rate is a variable as well, but it’s relatively minor compared to tire size and roll stiffness. Because modern cars’ roll stiffness is dominated by the roll bar, and not by spring rate, you can add a lot of roll stiffness with the right bar and not destroy ride quality.” With that in mind, the company set out to design swaybars that would correct the Camaro’s inherent deficiencies.

“We approach everything from an engineering perspective, so the first thing that we did was sit down with the models of the car and look at the published data on spring rates, do some measuring of the bars, and all of that stuff,” Pfadt explains. “Our first gut reaction was that we needed to put some roll stiffness in this thing because it was very soft in roll. We built up a couple of sets of swaybars, and because we are interested in balance first, we worked on the swaybars, then built the springs around them.”

Of course, nobody races engineering models, and testing was required to prove out the numbers. Per Pfadt,”When we went to the skidpad for the first time, frankly the car wasn’t any better with our package. It rolled less, but it still understeered really badly. We had to go back to the drawing board and double check all of our engineering, and we found a couple of unique characteristics of the car. We went through about three iterations of the bars to finally get the thing tuned in.”

Spring compressors are a necessary tool to get the stockers off of the damper units - don't try to just unbolt the top nut and hope for the best!

Spring into Action

The second piece of our suspension puzzle are Pfadt’s lowering springs. Like every other component, the stock springs are a compromise between performance, comfort, and of course price. But as anyone who has taken a cutoff wheel to a set of stock coils can tell you, simply throwing on shorter, stiffer springs isn’t always a good idea.

Comparing the stock spring on the left to the new Pfadt lowering spring, you can see some clear design differences. While slightly shorter, the Pfadt spring features more coils and a progressive rate, going from the factory 150 pounds per inch of compression to 210 pounds per inch.

Pfadt explains that it takes a more thoughtful approach to do it right with the 5th gen Camaro. “We were able to go through with our lowering kit and raise the spring rates, which provides a more stable feeling – less dive under braking, less squat under acceleration, less roll in the corners. It’s just a compliment to the sway bars in what’s going on to the car.” Of course, the other components in the stock suspension play a part in what can and can’t be done.

“Honestly we would like to have even more spring rate in that kit,” Pfadt admits. “However, the factory dampers are soft and they won’t control much more spring rate. That’s one of the limits on those springs – we have to live within the factory dampers. That’s why we picked the spring rates that we use – they still provide a comfortable ride, and the factory dampers still work well with them, but we still firm it up and lower the center of gravity of the car.”

To really create a compromise-free suspension, without the limitations of the stock dampers, Pfadt also offers a coilover conversion package that allows a higher spring rate and adjustable ride height, as well as adjustable compression/rebound. However, it’s a significantly more expensive proposition than the lowering spring kit.

What makes the extra outlay worthwhile? “I really bring it down to usage,” says Pfadt. “The lowering springs are good from a cosmetic perspective because the car sits too high from the factory, and there’s an engineering benefit from the lower center of gravity and higher spring rate. If the car is mostly for street driving and they want it to look good and drive well, and to feel the way GM should have built it, then the lowering kit and swaybars are a good choice. If you’re a customer who is going to go to the drag strip, do road course events, or autocross, then you really need to go to the coilover package because the increase in spring rates are quite a bit more than we can do with the lowering springs because we have control over the damping.”

The general presumption among enthusiasts, created through decades of cheap and cheerful coilover conversions for the Mustang market, is that this kind of a setup is always noisy, harsh, and marginal for street use. Pfadt, on the contrary, says that his kit is nothing like you’d expect. “The ride with the coilovers is actually very good – in fact I think it rides better than the production car, and that’s with an almost 50% jump in spring rate, which is really significant. You would think that would make it ride like a dump truck but because we can control that spring, we still have a suspension that I don’t feel has any compromises and is way more capable in a competitive environment. I don’t think there’s any downside of our coilover in ride quality compared to the lowering springs; it’s just a question of usage.”

A Balanced Package

Regardless of whether you pony up for the full coilover and race swaybar setup, or stick to the lowering springs and sport bars as we did on our test Camaro, the goal is to end up with a car that addresses all the factory suspension’s deficiencies without asking the driver to live with any new downsides, and that’s exactly what we achieved. “It makes the car more confidence-inspiring; it really makes the car more nimble,” says Pfadt, and after experiencing it for ourselves, we have to agree. “When you take out that roll, it makes the car respond more quickly to steering inputs. The car is really heavy to begin with, so anything you can do to make it respond better? You’re in good shape.”

The installed Pfadt lowering spring kit dramatically improved the stance of our test Camaro. The part that doesn't show is the vastly improved balance and grip provided by the combination of springs, sway bars, and trailing arms.

Part of that improvement also means making sure the car has no bad habits once the springs and bars are installed. Having race car capabilities shouldn’t require race car driver reflexes to stay out of trouble. Per Pfadt, “We still want them to be safe for the street, and we still want it to be a very drivable package. If you’re in an emergency situation – on an off-ramp, catching up to someone and you have to lift off the throttle – we want the car to behave well. That’s the kind of thing you can’t necessarily engineer in from a numbers standpoint. You have to do the testing on it. We want our cars to have good behavior at the limit, so that if you’re a novice driver, or a street driver, you’ll have the ability to have much better performance while still having a car that will do exactly what you want it to do in an emergency situation. You don’t have to be a race car driver to use it.”

Behind the Wheel

To put Pfadt’s suspension upgrade into perspective, we asked our test Camaro’s owner, John Coy, to give us his feedback on what the car was like both before and after the modifications. Coy drives his Camaro on a daily basis, as well as competing in autocross events, so he’s typical of many enthusiasts who want to sharpen their 5th Gen’s handling without sacrificing the ability to enjoy their car day-to-day.

Per Coy, “It’s a night and day difference. The car handles pretty well stock, but at speed there’s a considerable amount of understeer. The Pfadt suspension takes care of that without the harshness you would normally associate with a lowered vehicle. It’s real crisp – that’s the best way of saying it. When you get it on the track, it’s like a roller skate. It’s a very balanced car now, and it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t come from the factory that way. It’s an enjoyable car anyway, but you just can’t believe the difference that it makes.”

Subsequent to our suspension installation, Coy has put a lot of cone-dodging laps on his SS, both at the Camaro5Fest and the NMCA’s inaugural west coast event that featured an autocross competition. He explains, “My very first time autocrossing with the stock suspension, you’d go into a corner and you couldn’t hold your line at any rate of speed. It was either plowing, or you would get on the gas and the back end would just kick out. I just autocrossed it at the NMCA event in Fontana, and it was unbelievable in how it responds now, and how you can take a corner without losing the front or rear end on the car.”

On the road, Coy is generally positive about the car’s new manners as well. “If you hit a pothole or a speed bump quicker than you should, you’ll definitely feel it more, but as far as just going down the road, it’s very smooth,” he explains. “It doesn’t have the “floaty” feel you sometimes get with the stock suspension. I compare it to a Mercedes now – it has a world-class feel to it.” Overall, Coy calls the whole experience positive, noting, “I couldn’t ask for better customer service than I’ve received from Pfadt. It seems like you can always get ahold of them and if you can’t and have to leave a message, they call you right back. A lot of the time I ended up dealing with Aaron himself – where else do you get customer service like that?”

"From the pictures you shot right after the installation, the car has probably settled another quarter inch or more, which is just perfect," says car owner John Coy. "It makes the car sit exactly the way it should sit. Aaron and the guys have definitely done their job with the spring calculations. Whether you track the car or not, it's an incredible package."