Strangely enough, if you did swap the front spheres about, you really don't notice all that much difference with the ride as much as you do with the handling, if you start playing around trying to make it ride softer.
I've never done too much investigating as to why, but I would expect a bit more stiffening via the sway bar (higher pre-load or thicker bar) and wider wheels/tyres could be part of the reason; whether these are even there I'm not even 100% sure.
The "softer" spheres have longer travel which may make it that bit less jarring, if in fact you feel as though it is jarring, on small bumps, but this is also a safety issue if you go overboard and start using things like CX spheres or as happened in the case of one of our fire cars where spheres of unknown origin had been used and I had spoken to a couple who were contemplating buying prior to the fire and all had commented on its instability. I guessed this was the same car when we got it home, so I swapped the spheres to my car just for curiosity.
I discoverd that when entering a sharp corner, when under hard braking, the front dipped so far that it threw the entire geometry of the car off to such an extent, it would "tail wag" on the approach, proving it was these spheres that were causing this instability.
My common response to anyone wanting to make a 16V ride softer, is to advise them to buy a CX Pallas; they were designed for comfort whereas the BX16V was designed for performance and both do what they were designed for particularly well. To change either to do what the other was designed to do is to aspire to mediocrity in that department. :crazy: :crazy:
Alan S