i have a 04 g35 coupe that i’m completely refreshing. it’s at 200k so lots of bushings and grease boots are torn and leaking. i want to completely rebuild the suspension for the track and hard street use but should i use OEM or aftermarket parts for it? i plan to get coilovers and drop it a bit as well as doing a full drivetrain rebuild. i don’t mind to spend a bit more money i just don’t want to have to deal with anything being janky.

 

Buy the Energy Suspension master bushing kit for the car so you can replace everything on it with poly while it's all apart. You can source complete suspension kits for a pretty good price, usually sold as front or rear kits if you don't want to go full poly. I don't know that it's going to make much difference which brand, the compression arm lower ball joint is going to fail someday and is part of the compression arm so maybe get Moog arms?? Everything else is just cast aluminum and you'll replace the bushings on your existing ones so it doesn't matter much. Get a set of adjustable upper control arms though. Same with the rear, adjustable components will replace much of the stock ones. If you're going TRUE COILOVERS then everything is replaced, if your coilovers use the existing lower spring bucket you will want to swap out the bushings on it.

Depending on how much track use you plan on getting into it might be worth your time to upgrade the rear wheel bearings to the 370Z ones which are SIGNIFICANTLY beefier, it does require the 370Z axles as well, direct bolt on upgrade and I have a lot of track laps on my rear and the bearings have held up great, I'm on my 3rd set of fronts though (originals had 100k on them, replaced with Timken and got about 50 hard laps and 2 years of street use, went with another set of Timken last spring and car hasn't been on track at all this year). There is no upgrade for the front wheel bearings other than just buying from a reputable vendor, they're not really WEAK but front bearings get destroyed when pushing a car hard on the track when doing consecutive hot laps.

I have the Bilstein B6 shocks, probably should have gone with a full adjustable, they're great shocks don't get me wrong but a rebuildable set of adjustable ones like Koni is what I should have went with from the start. I'll be getting some when I finally smoke the Bilsteins.

The Hotchkis sway bar is great, your earlier G has a REALLY soft front sway bar so it's a big upgrade. I have an '06 so it was already fairly stiff and I use the second hole on the front bar. Rear bar was the same on both and I use the first hole on the rear which is significantly stiffer than stock.

You WILL need better sway bar end links! For street use you could probably get by with the stock ones but when you're pulling 60mph around a track corner and bump the curbing it's going to DESTROY your OEM ones. I have some cheap set of adjustable ones front and rear, can't remember exactly what I put on but they've survived a lot of abuse for around $150 for all 4. They are noisy though and click when I'm going into parking lots and over speedbumps at an angle. I assume a better quality brand wouldn't be so loud.

While you have the rear apart replace the diff bushings and subframe bushings. If the rear diff bushing is still the stock one it probably blew out 100k+ miles ago. I also strongly recommend replacing the engine and tranny mounts with poly for hard track use. They're not going to last long so might as well just get them out now rather than breaking one. OEM propeller shaft has a carrier bearing, not sure if there's an upgrade for it but you should plan to replace it with a 1 piece aluminum driveshaft at some point, whenever you end up changing the clutch and flywheel to a single mass lightweight one.

I'm still using the stock VLSD diff, 130k miles and it's still really tight but I'm sure it loosens up significantly after a couple laps, I've never lifted the rear when it was hot to see just how loose it has gotten.