geeman, i'm sure your car would do well round a track, because track cars are generally low and stiff, and the track surfaces tend to be extremely good quality and very smooth.
A fast track car does not make a fast road car though, and i'd be willing to bet that down a country B-road, the stock car would fare far better, assuming ofcourse that all its mechanicals were in good order. Not really fair comparing your shiney new coilovers with a 12 year old set of shocks and springs is it?
Unfortunately, a low and stiff car FEELS at least initially more positive, as it sits flatter thru the corners and doesnt wallow about. The reduced bodyroll gives the driver more confidence, but its not actually improved the handling. My brother had a nova a few years back on spax coilovers. They were far too hard and the car was low, although perhaps not as low as the dubbers take it. It was extremely unpredictable though, as yes it was stiff and you could push it into a corner with great confidence thinking "its on rails" to use the oft used phrase, however if that corner or roundabout or whatever happened to be a little uneven, or perhaps had some broken up tar, or basically anything that required the suspension to work, it would start running wide and almost skipping over the road because it was so hard.
Similarly i had an old astra, which i'd fitted with some Speedline Alesios and some decent tyres, and drove it around for a few months on the standard suspension. You could throw it into a roundabout and it rolled over onto its door handles comical style, yet still gripped pretty well. After a while i picked up some lowering springs and koni shocks, and fitted them, which totally transformed how the car FELT when driving it around. I still couldnt drive round the roundabouts any faster, and it still began to understeer at more or less the same point, it just felt a lot better doing so. Ie the modifications hadnt improved mechanical grip all that much, but gave me the perception that the car now handled better.
Stiff suspension can reduce mechanical grip, because to control the stiff springs you tend to have the shocks wound right up, and that means once the shock compresses over a bump, it resists the spring pushing the wheel back down onto the road, giving the unpredictable handling i experienced with the nova. Craig fixed the nova by changing the spax coilovers for a different brand which were a lot better, however if your running the car extremely low, you dont really have much choice but to run stiff springs, as otherwise the car will bottom out.
