Factory Tour – Inside Whiteline Automotive HQ

By Stephen Oyoung and Joey Leh, Photography by Duane Uyeda

One of Australia’s most prolific suspension tuners, Whiteline Automotive was on the list of stops during our recent Australian tour for the World Time Attack Challenge. If you own a Subaru Impreza or Mitsubishi Lancer, you’ll surely have heard the name before.

The Somersby based suspension company has previously dabbled in coilover and damper design (we tested their old G4 coilovers years ago and yes, they’re good – Ed.) but in the midst of an overly crowded market, has decided to go back to the foundation that they know best.

Photo by Duane Uyeda

Focusing mainly on bushings, alignment products, tower braces, and swaybars, Whiteline Automotive has an application list that spans the Earth. Cars such as the Ford Falcon, Honda Civic Type-R, Subaru WRX STI, Nissan Skyline, and Toyota MR2 have parts available for them, ranging from swaybars to toe arms. Odds are, if you own a performance car, Whiteline has a swaybar for you.

The depth of Whiteline’s application list can be plainly seen in person as well since a seemingly endless sea of swaybars fills their rear warehouse. Rack after rack of bagged and labeled swaybars sit at the ready, prepped to be shipped to dealers and waiting customers.

Whiteline marketing manager Andy Nolan let us know that a recent packaging change took place for their swaybars, from cardboard boxes to reinforced plastic bags. This cut down on the possibility of swaybars stabbing their way out of too-large boxes and saving a huge amount of space. We couldn’t imagine their stocking area with boxes instead of bags.

Random golden swaybars in the stock area also puzzled us, until Nolan pointed out their purpose as “master” bars, against which production bars can be checked for fitment, shape, and clearance. Whiteline swaybars are precision bent, per application, out of solid steel bar.

Photo by Duane Uyeda

Perhaps best known for their swaybars, Whiteline also has a solid footing in the urethane bushings and alignment arm market. They are one of the few companies to have developed and marketed bolt-on parts to fix bumpsteer, improve roll center, and alter anti-lift/anti-dive geometry. Their philosophy is suspension tuning as a whole and thus swaybars are often matched up with alignment products, reinforced endlinks, and stiffer bushings.

We also checked out the rear of Whiteline HQ, where engineers were busy designing and checking parts on the computer using CAD. Pictures of red hot steel, liquid urethane, and raw bent steel managed to escape us, production manufacturing takes place in a different facility, but certain one-off production does take place in-house.

After R&D engineers are satisfied with their computer drawings of new parts, they pay a visit to the machining area and urethane shed to create prototype copies of new bushings, inserts, and arms. We spied more than a few control arms and strut tops awaiting design work during our visit.

Whiteline’s own project Mitsubishi Lancer Ralliart and Subaru WRX STI were on hand during our visit and each were still deep in development. Of special notice were the stiffer rear trailing arm bushings on the Lancer Ralliart and the rear upper camber arms on the STI, both still in prototyping but due to be released soon.



We got the chance to ride in the Subaru WRX STI and drive the Lancer Ralliart through the twisty mountain roads just around the corner from Whiteline Automotive. The Subaru WRX STI, which has a bone stock engine, was no louder or rougher than stock – an accomplishment considering the fact that it had more than a few harder durometer bushings. The swaybar package kept body roll to a minimum, noticeably sharper than OEM, but the suspension still had plenty of compliance to soak up bumps.

Photo by Duane Uyeda

The Mitsubishi Lancer Ralliart was the rawer project in the Whiteline garage, with an MRT Performance exhaust and tuning package that turned up the power by 50hp and the noise by quite a bit. With the all-wheel drive Ralliart roaring and blaring with every wring of the throttle, we could almost forgive Mitsubishi for refusing to offer a true manual transmission.

Pushing the Ralliart through the twisty turns of the Australian back roads before us, we found the Whiteline package to have sharpened and stiffened the response of the car. The ride was noticeably stiffer than factory but a stock Ralliart is, by our standards, a pretty soft car. Remember, we’re not talking Japanese race suspension stiff here; we’re talking Lancer Evo and RX-8 R3 stiff. The kind that will still have some drivers asking for more compromise.

With a similar paddle-shifted dual-clutch transmission and suspension feel, the Whiteline P-29 Lancer Ralliart project almost felt just like a Lancer Evo X. If the steering ratio was as quick as the Evo, we would call it a dead heat – at a lower price. More bang for your buck. Who’s going to complain about that?

Contact
Whiteline Automotive
www.whiteline.com.au