ANZE is a dealer for all the name brand suspension companies, but what makes them interesting is they manufacture their own line of struts using Penske internal components that are complete customized. There’s no random placement of parts here, and after talking to them at PRI we can see how dedicated they are at what they do.

Penske has struts for the Mustang, Camaro, Porsche, and others. But what happens when you need a strut for your BMW E36, WRX, or older Camaro? That’s where ANZE enters the picture. ANZE also specializes in suspension kits for many racing classes, not just older vehicles, and can be uniquely tailored to fit with the rules of many racing specifications. Essentially, the outside is a Penske Racing strut, but the insides have been completely modified depending on which vehicle its for. They’ve been at it since 1997, and the return customers prove what they do works.

We started asking about how they choose the components for different vehicle setups and Andrew Wikstrom said, “We make a boutique product, and so everything is literally a custom order. We don’t have any boxes of parts sitting on the shelf ready to be sold. If you want something for your car, it’s gonna be custom made to order.” Their head tech then chimed in with “Even down to the pistons. They’ll do different setups for different cars that take different pistons, different characteristics on the [shock] dyno.”

When we asked about how ANZE chooses to recommend products to customers, Wikstrom let us know that its a variety of factors. Price is a big one, but “it all depends what a customers needs are and what the car in particular is-and sometimes it’s just what the customer is used to working with.”

But don’t think ANZE is the most expensive option, often times a competitors 3-way shock will be more expensive than an ANZE-Penske shock. So looking at just the attribute of what a shock does, how it’s going to work for the customer, what do they need out of it-that’s always going to be an individual basis to make sure you get the performance that you need.