My FX, although designed to be pretty rigid, and decently sporty, was not a sports car by any stretch of the imagination.
I bought the most advanced air management system on the market. The bags and struts I bought are arguably the best bag/strut/shock combo in the market right now, and they were designed and engineered specifically for the platform I have put them on.
All of the above, and my not so sportscar-ish, sport-utility-vehicle, became even less sporty after the install. It wallows in the corners, turn in is dramatically less predictable, and in general it just isn't as tight.
It isn't anything to do with budget, it isn't anything to do with parts, its nothing to do with installation. The technology is simply not there yet to make air as performance oriented as a quality set of coilovers that are dialed in properly. Some would even say just plain physics will never allow air suspension to reach the same level as a few other systems out there. That remains to be seen though.
Now lets step back and look at the air industry today, AirRex, the biggest name in bags and struts right now. They have an application for a seemingly endless number of vehicles. They don't engineer shit into their struts, they spend their days taking their generic single bellow, double bellow, or triple bellow strut and making it fit as many vehicles as possible, they don't revalve their shocks they don't adjust for geometry etc.
Compared that to the setup which I purchased by JDM Air Runner which they actually ground up engineer each and every bag bracket, strut, and pair shocks to those setups for every individual platform they support. It is why they support about 10% the number of cars that AirRex does.
Comparing AirRex to Air Runner is like comparing a set of KW V3's with a set of Megan Racing Coilovers, yeah they both work, but you're not seriously going to tell me the Megans are even in the same league as the KW's? are you?
Based on the information above between the difference between air runner and AirRex, who would you imagine would be more renowned for their product? Well you would be wrong, AirRex gets constant praise about their generic China Grade struts, while Air Runner is relatively unknown by the generic crowd.
And that's just the stage that the air industry is at right now, it's basically still in the infancy stage, where people are still learning, and unfortunately right now the companies that are represented the most are the ones that are winning the battle, people who don't know see 100 cars at Sema running AirRex gear and they assume that it's the best, when in reality it's just the most mass marketed thing.
AirRex is like the Vossen of the Air Struts. A lot of marketing behing a product that looks semi decent, but in reality isn't worth the money.
And before you think that I am just saying this because I am running Air Runner gear and not AirRex, you obviously don't know me. If something is shit, I'm not gonna front. I'll tell you it's crap.
So let's delve further, my compressors, they are made by ViAir, they are ViAir's newest and most advanced model the 444c. ViAir compressors are run in an overwhelming majority of cars (like seriously 90%), and the compressors are CRAPPPP. Seriously. on the other hand Air Zenith builds the beautiful, massively better engineered, and completely documented to be more reliable, and they sell like 5% of what ViAir does. All because they got into the game a little late, they didn't have the same companies pushing their products, etc.
Alas I digress. Air ain't a performance thing, if you want performance get yourself some ohlins, or whatever.
