What do you set for your suspension height?

[begins]

Hi all,

I would like to find out what is the height that you gentlemen set for your suspension of your earlier C5? I’m trying to find a balance between looking sportive (lower) and comfort (taller) in setting the height. I’m sure you guys must have trial and tested various height and derived at an idea height for the C5.

Please advise me and Thank you very much.

Regards,

[Chlorate]

If the manual ride height adjustment is anything like the previous generations of hydropneumatic suspension, i.e. you have 4 options (normal, low, high and intermediate high), then the only setting you should be using to actually drive on is the normal setting.
High is used for inspection purposes and changing wheels, low is to hitch trailers and depressurise the hydraulics and intermediate high is for crossing rough terrain/fording floods at very low speed.

From what I can tell, the C5 does have an automatic height adjustment function optimised for performance, but the adjustments it makes are really quite small (15-20mm either way).

[myglaren]

There is an option to adjust the ride height using a Lexia. I have heard somewhat anecdotally that lowering the normal ride height by about 15mm will improve the ride but have no personal experience of it.
The ride height can also be altered by shifting the height sensor clamps but it is nowhere near as accurate as using a Lexia.

[VertVega]

In mine C5 II height adjustment is in normal mode and as far as I know car adjusts the ride height according to the cruise speed.

If the heights are from low to high: LOW, NORMAL, INTERMEDIATE HIGH and HIGH
In car washing (automatic) I select INTERMEDIATE HIGH and after washing lower to NORMAL.
Also during tire change to HIGH. Otherwise i leave it alone

PS: I guess you also have the buttons for height adjustment next to the hand brake handle.

[Mandrake]

There is an option to adjust the ride height using a Lexia. I have heard somewhat anecdotally that lowering the normal ride height by about 15mm will improve the ride but have no personal experience of it.

Seems unlikely, although I haven't tried a C5 its always been my experience on older Citroens that lowering the height slightly (up to 20mm) improves the cornering and handling but worsens the ride quite considerably, whilst raising the height up to 20mm improves the ride but considerably worsens the handling!

After a lot of playing around with tweaking the ride height of Xantia's and test driving the results I came to the conclusion that the factory specified height is in fact the optimal trade off between ride and handling...

In fact its rather critical, I could notice a ride height error of 10mm either way on a familiar car just by the change in handling/ride characteristics, and 20mm out was very obvious.

That's why when people ask about checking and adjusting the ride height I always recommend doing it properly (measuring the radius of the wheel, calculating the correct height to the chassis and all that mucking about) rather than "this many fingers between the wheel and guard" which is highly inaccurate. (How fat are your fingers ? What size tyres do you have ? etc )

It's also why its important to check how much overshoot a height corrector has for upwards and downwards corrections and take the half way point otherwise you introduce further errors, and if the overshoot is excessive due to sticky linkages (like the 35mm on the rear of my Xantia) then it leads to intermittent poor ride no matter where you set it. Getting the ride height exactly right and consistently right goes a long way towards getting consistently good ride.

So no, I wouldn't go messing about changing the factory set ride height on a C5 - only if it wasn't correctly set.