Opinions: Fast-ratio manual steering, suspension upgrades

The bilsteins are light years better than KYB's. The difference will be more noticeable with better torsion bars, but better shocks are better shocks.

If you're planning on tubular UCA's, sway bars and bilsteins you'll be a lot happier with a set of ~1" torsion bars. PST sells some nice 1.03's that will match nicely with the Bilstein's, and FABO members get a discount if you call them.

20:1 shouldn't be too bad. Not sure how much positive caster you're planning, most cars can get up to around 3.5* or so with just the Moog K7103 offset bushings and stock upper control arms. That's not bad at all for manual steering on a daily driver, so really you could do without the tubular UCA's and save the some money. The torsion bars would be a bigger bang for your buck. More positive caster will make the steering effort heavier, although it will also improve the stability of the car and camber gain on turn in. The latter you probably don't need, although the stability is nice on the freeway. Steering effort also has a lot to do with the tires, on an early A they'll be smaller so they shouldn't be as hard to deal with. It's a trade off. But for a daily driver/cruiser you'd probably be pretty happy with +3.5* for caster with manual steering and most cars don't need tubular UCA's to get that.

You can run more, I mean I run 16:1 manual steering with +7* caster and 275/35/18's on my Duster, and it's my daily driver. Parallel parking is not one of my favorite things to do though. And my car is basically set up for autoX, not daily driving. Even if daily driving is what I do with it. Overkill is my specialty. It handles really well, and slow speed maneuvering doubles as a shoulder workout. :D