The pro-touring market is one of the most wide reaching aftermarket niches. The love for vintage American muscle runs deep, but with the discerning demands of modern drivers, handling often leaves something to be desired.
Companies like Classic Performance recognize the needs of these aging platforms, and the demands their drivers put on them with increased horsepower and cornering. The OEM stamped steel suspension parts might have been just fine for what the manufacturers intended 50 years ago, but today we are all looking for more.
We had a look at Classic Performance’ Pro Touring 4 Kits, and just what goes into developing a package to help classic muscle cars around the autocross.
“What the Pro Touring kit has is upper and lower tubular control arms, big swaybars, 13-inch brakes and double adjustable coilovers,” Jeff Norton of Classic Performance told us.
These kits are available for a huge range of applications, but don’t take that to mean they are cookie-cutter. A selection of spring rates is available to suit the needs of individual applications, “from 350, 450, 550-pounds depending on LS, small-block, big-block, we want to give you all those choices,” Norton continued.
Whichever spring rate you elect to have, it will be wound around a double-adjustable Viking shock for fine tuning and control over the damping profile.
“The biggest difference with the tubular control arms is obviously going to be strength, the cross-shafts that we use have an interlocking design so they never come apart, we use an aftermarket aerospace material on the bushings. None of the arms put any drop in the ride height, we put the drop in the spindle or the spring,” Norton concluded.
Paired with its 1-1/8 inch swaybars and beautifully machined aluminum brackets (complete with Zerk fittings), Classic Performance PTK4 kits are built with the prideful enthusiast in mind.
Also check out Classic Products new Hydra Stop brake booster: