Well I will give you an idea where I got various parts from the statement you quoted.
I have been on here for a long time, and I have seen people move on from these cars. Many of them raced these cars in road courses and autox, and they moved on. Some of these people raced higher end cars at the same time, and made threads here trying to figure out why they can't get faster times out of their 185. They found it was easier to go faster in other cars. I have seen weight reduction, nice suspension setups, and lots of off the shelf parts on these cars, and they all perform alright based on user results but other than those with a lot of money or research in their setups, they were not winning events. This didn't make sense for me for a long time considering this car is a racing legend. The more I have researched as of late, I find there is not near as much resembling the production car in the race car as I imagined. These are high dollar, fine tuned and perfected setups in a lot of these real race cars. A street 185 with a handful of performance parts installed on it, isn't in the same ball league.
Now I have not given up on this car, and I have been talking to chassis engineers, and suspensions companies and reading all the while trying to get a clue to some of the drawbacks of the suspension design.
I know that people like Martin, Adrian, and Beaty all have gone fast, and ranked high in events with their research and modifications. I know they all have dealt with bumpsteer as a result. Even whiteline claims bumpsteer is a problem on these cars when lowered too low.
I misunderstood bump steer. Sadly the internet is a misinformation super highway and anyone can post something and lead others astray, then that will spread forum to forum. I found the best info on the subject from dirt racers. Seems that rather than try and keep everything secret there is a lot more support for the community and a lot of the companies that make the parts provide a lot of data. I was thinking bump steer was a jolting of the steering when hitting a bump, and I was way off. I actually had reduced my travel too much and was having a shock from increased spring rate by bump stop contact. Once I figured this out, I spent more time reading and less assuming, as spending money to change things via trial and error is a waste of money. Especially once I learned I was not near as low as I thought I was. I decided to abandon any of the bumpsteer correction ideas until I actually had some data that showed me I did need to change something.
In my research I was able to find a lot of measured data from Adrian's celica. The front suspension is the same, and he was able to discover that more than 1" lowered causes some geometry changes that he did not feel benefit the car. The thing that was not talked about was how travel effects these same geometry characteristics. When you lower our cars, you increase camber. When you increase camber you change toe. Toe effects turn in, and when things are not going the same way you can get unpredictable results. But I had still been thinking of things as in going lower causes a change. Extending the suspension causes changes as well, and you need to measure bump for both directions. In a turn you are compressing one side more than the other, so you might be getting toe out on the outside tire and tow in on the inside tire, but maybe not to the same degree. Then there is the whole issue of turn bump steer that most people don't even tune for, that needs to be addressed.
So without going on and on, that leaves me to determine just how much of an issue this is on our cars. We can speculate, and assume and ignore and it all may be fine. I may have followed some ideas that may end up not needing a lot of changes, or have much effect on the car at all. But I will feel better knowing I have the tools to measure and find out and share with the community in hopes that there will be faster 185s out there, even if its not mine. Once this weather clears up I will do an alignment and hook up the stock shocks and try and get some data, and hopefully we can all work together to make some sense of it and build what these cars need to succeed for us low buck racers.