Penske Racing Shocks have won in Formula 1, Indy, LeMans, and many more.  Penske has one line of shocks, the best.  We’ve been working hard with Penske Racing Engineers to provide the best quality, double-adjustable shocks with independent compression and rebound adjustments at a VERY attractive price point.  

Want the car to ride better EVEN with higher spring rates?  Want to trim 8 seconds off your lap time like one of our customers?  Read on!

• • - Big Piston/shaft setup moves lots of fluid for best control.
  • - Highly linear adjusters for precise control.
  • - Dynoed after they are built to ensure quality and matching.
  • - Eibach springs have excellent rate matching and consistency.
  
  
  A word about helper springs. Helpers are secondary lightweight springs stacked on your regular springs with a spacer. A spring rates go up, it becomes impossible for the stiffer springs to remain in contact with the perch when the car is off the ground on a lift or jackstand. This has ZERO effect on driveability as the car sits on the springs just fine. Over a bump, the rebound keeps the spring in touch with the perch. At worst you *might* hear a rattle over a severe bump every now and again(but probably not).
  
  At Blackwatch we don't use them as they add cost and weight. Did I mention completely unnecessary?) We are fairly convinced they are strictly a ploy by spring manufacturers to sell more springs! Some people love the look of them, so we offer them. If you have the means and the desire we will sell them to you, but understand we don't think they are required by any stretch of the imagination!

The single biggest contributor to faster lap times is good suspension.  Period.  Even better than stickier tires, proper damping provides grip, chassis control, and confidence.  At Blackwatch Racing we’ve been working on dampers i.e. “shocks” for the Lotus since 2006.  While there are many names in shocks, there is one that stands apart for Racing:  Penske Racing Shocks.

Penske Racing Shocks have won in Formula 1, Indy, Nascar, World Challenge, LeMans, MotoGP, Australian Supercar, and many more.  At Blackwatch we’ve spent hundreds of hours on the shock dyno at all hours of the day and night chasing the perfect Lotus shock setup.

The results have been 10 SCCA national championships on 45mm Penske Racing shocks of our own specification.

Additionally, we’ve been using them on our daily-driving Elise test mule that doubles as a track-day, street-tired auto-crosser, quarter-mile machine etc.  We routinely drive faster laps in this car on street tires than many 911s, built EVOs, Corvettes etc on race tires.  

Over the years, we’ve provided custom built double and triple adjustable BWR Penske’s to customers.  One customer told me that he “dropped 8 seconds per lap” at Limerock when he put the BWR Penske’s on his car!  That is the promise of quality shocks, improved grip and tire performance over a range of conditions.  In other words, the tires remain in optimal contact with the pavement, which delivers to the driver a predictably handling car that is more comfortable to drive at the limit.

Penske has a proven record of success because they use only the best materials, all engineered and maintained to their own specifications.  They use the highest grade stainless steel shims, billet aluminum bodies and pistons, linear and precisely matching adjusters, Viton shaft seals for low stiction, Teflon-lined bearings and they even have their own spec fluid.  The result is a quality product that is the best that money can buy.  Proven performance and strict manufacturing specs do add up though:  A complete double-adjustable Penske shocks START at $6000 a set.  Triple-adjustables generally begin around $7000.  

Until now….

Blackwatch Racing has taken on the challenge of engineering a set of shocks that will fit the very difficult packaging of Lotus Evora.  These cars are tight and extraordinarily hard to fit.  Nothing is standard in these vehicles, from the length of the shock, the available droop, compression travel, even spring sizes are different from most vehicle standard fitments.  This makes designing a high performance shock an exceedingly difficult task and more costly than more “normal” cars.

We’ve been working diligently with Penske Racing Engineers to provide the best quality, double-adjustable shocks with independent compression and rebound adjustments at a VERY attractive price point.  Our goal was to provide our customers with the quality and adjustability of a standard $6000 double adjustable for less money, simpler installation, and fitment for the biggest wheels & tires.  While this was certainly a huge engineering challenge, we felt that our customers would be very excited to have this level of technology and car enhancement available to them, all in a package that doesn’t restrict their wheel selection at a better price.

The result of months of research, design, development and testing, these shocks are AMAZING.  We started with theoretical car modelling to develop a test setup.  Then we connected with  Chris Mayfield, multi-time NASA and SCCA national champion (his day job is ride and handling engineer for an automaker).  Chris put his Evora through one of the most demanding motorsports events, One Lap.  One lap is a week long, driving from track to track, doing hot laps and autox, packing up driving hundreds of miles, and doing it again the next day at a different track.  ALL ON ONE SET OF TIRES!!!!  You need suspension that can work in all conditions and that is what we have here with our Evora Double-Adjustables.  Next, we worked with Penske Racing to produce our shocks using their latest technology, which means you are getting the latest winning racecar engineering on YOUR shocks, something you won’t find just anywhere.  Who else can say they took the latest technology developed for winning F1, NASCAR, Indy, and World Challenge teams and put it to use in products designed for you?  The end result is a shock that combines millions of dollars’ worth of racing R&D, technology that allowed us to meet OUR goal of providing the car control and precision of the top Penske double adjustable in a bolt-on package that will work in the tight packaging of the Lotus Evora! Fitting all of that technology into such a tiny space was no small feat, but our efforts combined with Penske made it all happen!

We designed our new shocks around a shock body with a floating compression piston integrated into the main body vs. a separate canister.  This eliminates the separate compression canister (that has no good place to fit in the Evora).  Each set is built to our spec in the US and dyno tested before shipping. A word about springs: One might think that springs are all the same. They are not. Performance springs cannot sag over time. They HAVE to have accurate rates from spring-to-spring. What matters in a spring? How accurate is their initial free length? Are they optimized for weight? How good are the inspection standards? Do you know who made them? When we started this project there were only a couple of suppliers we would even consider:  Ultimately we went with the best, Eibach. They are widely known for their manufacturing quality. We run them exclusively on our Lotuses. They test EVERYTHING. They magnaflux their springs two times during the manufacturing process. They measure free-length to 0.100”.  The best news is that we have been able to engineer a fitment of these shocks to use standard 2.25” springs reducing cost, minimize weight, and improving the selection of available spring rates. Blackwatch Racing is offering these Penske Racing shocks with Eibach springs, a baseline setup, plus all mounting hardware you need to give your car the performance suspension and ride it was meant to have. Bring your Lotus to life with Blackwatch Racing Penske suspension!