Bilstein over tanabe (and most others) always for me. I'm just a big fan of Bilsteins dampers and what you can do with them. Without opening them up, they will usually work with a good range of spring rates and can be a very good and affordable setup for most people's cars. After opening them up or using their motorsports dampers, you can pretty much do anything that you would ever want to do with them. And you can see this in some of the work I have done with them and I haven't taken them very far yet, there are still adjusters and remote reservoirs and other options that I would like to add to them.
The Tanabe stuff seems to be one of the better offerings, but it's still not that great. If these Fives use the same type of setup as the Sevens did, then there's a lot to be desired. The adjuster on the Sevens sucked and it was hard to tell what you were actually doing with it and adjusting it. And if it worked the way they make it sounds like it does, then the adjusters are too cheap to actually take advantage of the design. The design seems like an interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it's as complcated or effective as I'm imaging it to be, it might just be wishful thinking. And the spring rates don't seem right for the Fives either. The rear seems too stiff relative to the front.
As for the TEAS system, I think the TEMS system is a much better and thought out system. The TEAS system only takes speed into account and while some things could be adjusted purely based on speed, they are things that can't be adjusted with these dampers. High speed compression would be one of the things that could benefit from speed based adjustment, but that's not something that can be adjusted with the Tanabe dampers. So I think it's an overpriced gimick and not really worth the money. It just doesn't seem like it offers anything. At faster speeds, things will happen faster, so an input will cause the suspension to see this acceleration quicker than at slower speeds. But dampers are velocity sensitive, meaning that they generate more force as the piston speeds increase. So at higher vehicle speeds and higher damper speeds, more force will be generated than at slower vehicle speeds and slower damper speeds. So stiffening the damper with the TEAS, wouldn't be necessary.
Tim
