Lowering blocks have a negative effect on handling.
Kings do a lowered leaf spring.

A good set of tyres will make a huge difference to the handling. It wont matter how good your shocks/springs/sway bars are if you have no grip.
My ute has king lows (i think) in the front, and 2" blocks in the back. Once I binned the 15's and fited my 17's with a good set of tyres, it handles like a cat on carpet. I dont get a lot of body roll, and the handling is very responsive, with no surprises. If the road surface is wet or loose, the rear will break away on acceloration, but apart from that I am very happy with it. I can run down cars with much more sophisticated suspension systems thru the windy stuff.
A few guys I work with have commonwhore utes or monaros, all with v8's, and all with 20" wheels. Under power they get away from me, but under brakes and cornering I can get under them every time. The 20" wheels just do not have the grip, and if the road is a bit rough, they will just skip straight off the road. The commonwhore IRS is more of a hassle than it's worth, especially in a ute.
Get yourself a nice set of rear springs, not too hard, match the fronts so the front is a slight bit lower than the rear, and get a nice set of tyres. You will have loads of fun. Just remember to drive to suit the conditions. Cheers.

i thought that the utes never had irs

yer i got 17" 235\45 superlows and the front and 2" lowering blocks on the back it goes pretty quick but i just want the extra response and less body roll. if that makes sense

Then sway bars are your next stage.

BenJ

What he said ^^^

Alright cheers thanks heaps

Commodores do... My mates VX does and it is a completely stupid idea... do not agree with it at all... but anyway thats what they did...





20" wheels aren't good for grip... a really good example of this is the V8 supercars, they'd have to be the most highly engineered things for grip and are slightly lighter than our sedans, etc (are the 1400 odd kgs?) but you see them and they'd have to be 16's or 17's by the look? This size seems to give optimal tyre wall flex to allow the maximum area of the tyre grab the road when 20's with much less profile seem to be too stiff and can flex enough to get max grab on the tar...

I do agree with the IRS business too...

Some good info in this thread...

17"s

Ditto to the older (vt etc) IRS anyway as I am not sure if they changed it since then? That semi trailing arm set up was a piece of s**t.

If you wanted IRS in a wagon would be better using a BA system (they are very straightforward in putting into other cars as have their own holder thing. I don't think this is cost justifiable though to the improvement it would offer, would be more of a fun thing to do if you have welding/fabricating skills.

VX2 brought in an update to mostly stop the camber scrubbing on the rear tyres occurring under load (or excessive lowering).

VE is a new system entirely. (shame it's let down by the s**t mac strut front)

commodores seem to always have done cheap things with the suspension, don't know about where you guys live, but here there is an overwhelming of vn, etc commodore drivers that cut the spring to about a 1/3 of their original height, and due the panard bar that commodores have it offsets the diff to point where you can bet on one side of the car you can't get a finger between the guard and tyre and the other side you can get a fist... but there is so many... all on the cheap and nasty... often see lots parked with defect stickers too, but that's another story...

overall i like Falcons suspension set ups... watts link is much better for those of us with live axle and i think the Falcon IRS is much superior too?