Lowered Q7 for towing
 

Hi everyone,

I recently bought a 2011 TDI and almost immediately installed a set of the
H&R lowering springs (my wife and I both felt there was too much fender gap with the stock suspension. This was a nice upgrade and lowered the front 1.6 inches and the rear almost exactly 2 inches.

Overall the H&Rs are a good upgrade. The ride is a bit stiffer obviously and a bit bouncier in the rear, but nothing objectionable and certainly not like my A6 2.7t was with lowering springs. It is just fine (in my opinion at least) for daily driving.

I have towed a car trailer both with and without the lowering springs and can report that the H&Rs handle the trailer and towing easily as well as the stock springs. And the trailer is a 24 foot enclosed car trailer; with the race car inside I'm sure it is pushing the maximum of the 6,600lb tow rating. When hooking up the unloaded trailer, the rear end sags just under an inch which is perfect. Then I just load the trailer to maintain that amount of sag. I've attached a pic of the Q with the H&Rs hooked up to the trailer. Take the trailer off and the rear will be an inch higher.

As for towing the trailer, the Q handles it like a champ. I can easily maintain 70mph on the highway, and the brakes and suspension keep everything easily under control (I obviously have a trailer brake controller wired in as well). Fuel economy takes a hit for sure, but what are you gonna do? 😉

Anyway, just wanted to share that the H&Rs are perfectly acceptable for towing if you are thinking about doing it. The only 'mod' I had to do was turn the hitch receiver around so it was level instead of dropping a couple inches. Otherwise, the car itself was great.

Hope that info is useful to someone!

Nice to see someone else tow a big trailer with one of these. I have a 20ft Haulmark that I pull occasionally with 4.2 w/adaptive suspension and a Hopkins insight brake controller. It also handled a 9k lb dump trailer (not fully loaded, but probably weighed 7k lbs) with out much fuss. The 4.2 suspension is set to dynamic almost all the time, and it sits quite a bit lower than the 3.6 on steel suspension. I have the hitch balls flipped as well, the only one that isn't is the factory 2" ball I keep in the 3.6.

My wife asked if the 4.2 would pull our boat, which is a 26ft Wellcraft w/454, because she wants to take it from it's rack space on Lake Erie to a cabin on a lake in TN for vacation in the near future. Supposedly it weighs 4500lbs dry, so with a trailer it would be just under the rated limit. I have a sway control I could put on a boat trailer, but it may not need it with the air suspension (it has sway mitigation logic from my understanding).

A lowered suspension would not work for me with my Kimberley Karavan. I frequently need to put the Airmatic in Off-Road mode to raise it enough to deploy the jockey wheel. Gott sei Dank for the Airmatic.

Take a look at the attached photos. The enlargement of the hitch shows that I even have the receiver bar turned to raise the ball; and I still need the Off-Road mode in Airmatic to deploy the jockey wheel.