Not long after the suspension was right, I was rear ended in a 6 car pile up. The hatch and floorpan were damaged and both my front seats deployed whatever SIPS is and were bent and needed to be replaced. That resulted in a total loss, and my dream car turned into a (functioning) ugly version of that thing. I replaced the hatch, beat the floorpan so it would stay shut (still registers as open but whatevs). With some gaps on the bumper, it essentially looks good as new.
Then I needed to get to some trailheads for backpacking and hiking and camping and fishing. Then I needed to drive unimproved roads in Jackson Hole. Then I went into the backcountry of Toas, NM. Then I needed to get to the mountain to snowboard. Then I needed to drive on washboard for 50 miles. Then I hit some unavoidable debris from unsecured construction materials at 70 mph. The list goes on, and the car didn’t do well at those things despite being “not that low” and protected with the IPD skidplate. I scraped and dragged over what I could, got stuck, learned to navigate, and it was fun and a good learning experience. The car disagreed, and the debris from the road broke my DEM and AOC pump (only about 9 months since I refreshed all that) and my strut bearings were shottttt along with a wheel bearing.
I’m going back to a swiss-army style car that I can use to get it all done, with minimal maintenance (on a p1? lol) and short of 4 wheeling in high clearance areas, I want my v50 to do it all.
Why not get an Outback or XC70? Well it turns out nobody wants to buy a FWD M66 V50 that bad, especially with its quirks. SRS warning (control module fried), hatch says it’s open, and some cheap low. I just paid for the water pump, timing belt, camshaft seals, DIY’D THE pcv box, and nearly all the axles and suspension in the last two years, so this baby should be ready for some time to come, despite having 179k miles on the clock. I paid essentially nothing for the car since the insurance payout, BUT A LOT in maintenance. So I thought, let’s keep it.
There are only stale threads and whispers of a lifted P1, with many examples of XC70’s. Will my car ever perform like those? No, but I can get it to a stock XC/outback ground clearance level, and that’s what I’d like to do.
TLDR: What’s wrong? No clearance, no AWD (and some other boring stuff)
Solution:
Fix AWD
5.6 inches ground clearance needs to turn into ~8 inches.
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To be delivered in January from Russia and Wisconsin:
Front lift/level:
Tema 4×4 30mm strut tower spacers
Mazda5 Monroe quick struts with AWD 20mm spacers
Rear lift/level:
Tema 4×4 40mm shock spacers
H&R adjustable “coilover” spring sleeves (10-90mm adjustability)
Oem springs slightly shaved to fit on the sleeves. I’ll be taking the rubber coating off of the first couple coils to get it to seat “properly”
This should get me to about 1.5-2 inches over a stock P1 AWD ground clearance.
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Coming when my winters wear out and I sell my pegs to finance: 215/70/16 winter rated or A/T tires or M/S more research needed for fitment and weight consequences.
Regardless of the tire type, with those dimensions I should get around another 1-1.3 inches of lift. It’s been rumored on old threads and back alleyways that 28-29 inches can clear without rubbing or cutting. Cutting and hub spacers may need to be used, but I’ll use up my winters tires before the new/used tires are purchased.
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Coming if it needs to: 10-20 mm spacers for the subframe.
On instagram, lifted_mz3 is running some craaaaazy wheels and tires on his latest gen Mazda 3 with just a subframe lift and some major cutting and getting good clearance. I would never run that big of tires because that’s too $$$$$$$$ for me.
Early January work will start-lmk what you think!