Best thing you stated, better tires can cover up mistakes. Spend your first season learning to drive and the dynamics of your car then get better race rubber.
+1,000,000! While the parts kit you're looking at is certainly a good overall package, I MIGHT be inclined to buy the stuff, stick it in the garage still in the boxes, and then go drive the car. When you get to the point where you're outdriving the capability of the stock vehicle (still do the pads, lines optional!), two things are going to happen... First, you're going to
realize that you're being held back by some stock part or another, and second, you'll have a solid grasp of what is happening in terms of vehicle dynamics, and how the part you intend to replace is going to
help with the issue you're having.
If you throw the whole thing at the car at once,
especially as a novice driver, you'll have no idea what's really going on. If the car understeers on corner entry, is it because your braking technique sucks? Is it because you just went into the corner wayyyy too fast? Is it because you have too much front bar dialed in? Is it because your shocks are set wrong? Is it because your tires are heat cycled or overheated? Is it because you snapped your hands over, rather than smoothly feeding in the wheel? With a stock car, you basically are forced to really learn to
drive the thing, and when you do, you can start sensing what the car is doing in terms of oversteer/neutral/understeer characteristics in the different phases of different corner types.
I'll give you a
hypothetical fer-instance... After a few days of flogging the car, you begin to notice that while initial turn-in is okay, the car starts to push on corner entry. You know this because you've been focusing on the driver mod, and not worrying about bar settings, shock settings, or anything other than basic tire pressures, and you're starting to notice this on just about every slow- to medium-speed corner. Because you now have an understanding of vehicle dynamics, you can intelligently and reasonably analyze the problem as excess body roll transferring too much weight to the outside front tire. Solution? Increase the wheel rate, and/or slow down the compression curve of the dampers. It could be bars, it could be springs, it could be struts, but with some time on the track, you'll have a pretty good idea as to what is REALLY going on.
Experience, in any form, will help you get to a level of understanding where your parts changes stem from desire to fix something, not just a knee-jerk reaction driven by a lust for a long mods list. If you get offered a ride-along with somebody, take it. In ANY kind of car. Possibly the most fun I've had in the right seat was NOT in an F430, or an F458 Italia, or a GT3RS, or a C6ZO6, or an Audi A8, it was in a Miata. It took two laps to get up to speed, it wouldn't accelerate out of a corner worth a damn, and every corner felt like we were scraping the door handles off the thing. That said, the amount of speed those damn things can carry through a corner is simply insane. I can honestly say that following that ride, I started to change a lot of my driving techniques, both physical and mental. When you get a ride with a good driver, spend the first lap or two just glorying in the sensation of imminent death, then start watching the driver, and see HOW he's doing things. Not just where he's getting on and off the brakes, but HOW he's getting on and off the brakes. The transition from being pinned in the seat (acceleration) to hanging from the harnesses (deceleration) to being thrown out the side window (corner entry) to being sucked back into the seat (corner exit) will be violent, but should transition smoothly from one to the next none the less. If it really doesn't feel all that fast until you look out the window and see the scenery MOVING past you, then you're in the car with a
DRIVER.
Bottom line is that the package you're looking at is a good solid non-hard-core bit of kit that you won't be unhappy with. I'd go for it, but maybe just hold off installing until you have some time on track with the car to know where you want to go...
