Sage Carli's Brand Promise

Sage developed his Dominator package to being the smoothest street riding shock tune on the market, and took it to the ragged edge of bolt-on off-road performance. If you were to timeline the development of Carli Suspension, you would see years of steady growth in tuning advancements, innovation and engineering leading up to where it is today.



Right now the latest Dominator 3.0 shock tune is out-smoothing the Performance 2.0 in town and on the freeway, Sage's piston and the bigger displacement just does everything smoother... and when it comes to throwing down in the dirt, you can go rub fenders with race cars.

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Thousands of tuning miles

Sage brought his pistons to market in May of 2009 with the first 3.0 run. Two years later, the finished tune really is the next level.

Suspension engineering and tuning time is the Carli signature. Sage spent years finding the smoothest combination of port size and shims for our trucks.

Lighter valving means easier initial shaft movement, which is where all of the comfort comes from, the shock starts moving before you even feel a terrain change. Incredibly smooth and fluid transition from low to high speed dampening.

Smaller, low-flow ports create bottom out resistance, when you stab the shock with high shaft speed, the piston ramps up pressure smoothly and finally hits the wall. Massive bottom out resistance. No tubes, no ACV's, your production smooth body King tune.

What you get is a single tune that does it all in town, does it all on the highway, and if you wanted to, you can go put points on the board in Baja with it.

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Daily Driver Limits

This is the ceiling of the truck, the next level isn't a shock tune, it's safety, and steering. Until there's a bullet-proof upgrade from spindle to steering wheel and a roll cage, this is about it.

I attended ESSOR's poker run, or Paseo de Pre Runners 2011, just outside of Ojos Negros, Baja California. It's a fun event and basically a family day for the off-road racing community in Ensenada - everybody's there to have a good time. It's not about going as fast as you can possibly go, it's about driving at the upper limits of your setup and bringing your truck home - this is how far you can take Sage Carli's off-road systems.

I was the only vehicle running it without a roll cage, and when I was told it was a pre runner rally, I actually expected to see a pre runner or two. Turns out, if you mark off a course in Baja, post up the start/finish line and open the doors, everything on a trailer with numbers on it shows up. It was game on.



12 miles of ranch roads tied together made the course, small dirt roads with nothing on them that would ruin your day. It's the perfect situation to push your truck; one-way traffic on a marked course, on-site medical and most of all, permission. This let's you process only your driving and the course.

This wasn't your average weekend off-road drive, even for me... You put a bunch of guys in their trucks with helmets and parker pumpers on, they flip right into race mode and go ripping. There was blown motors, snapped axles, busted lower control arms... all this event was missing, was lap times.

Mixing it up with race cars is fun, especially when you're rolling with your iPod and 800 foot pounds of torque, but you have to keep it in check. It's really easy to overdrive a truck. You just keep having more fun and more fun until something feels or sounds different, then you learn something. And if you don't have an immediate indicator, then it could turn out to be a creeper and rear it's nasty head about 3 years later in the way of coil bucket cracks or a motor perch nightmare. The learning curve is the hardest thing on your truck.

Once you learn the course, your speed just depends on how hard you want to throw your truck at it. At the bottom of half of the low spots was a g-out turn with a little rut. At prerunning speeds, you roll into it, connect with the rut using your first front tire, then drive out of it. If you pick up the pace and start driving through things like that, you're talking about cresting a rise, shifting all the weight to the front and taking an edge at the bottom of a hole with your tire turned while carrying speed. Those kinds of maneuvers are incredibly hard on front end gear, ball joints, track bar hardware and your steering.

There was 3 ramps out there with an either-or around them, they were optional and about half the time, half the people took the big line. Jumping diesel trucks is a fine line and you're always about 2 mph away from too fast. I over did it on one of the hucks on lap 7, taking the course back to the pits, and used every last millimeter of travel... and after that, I was just riding the chassis. It goes like this - shock travel, bump stop, tire sidewall, axle truss, coil buckets then anything that can deflect to distribute the load. That's when you're about a step away from bending or breaking something... the limit of everything you got. The next level isn't bolt-up stuff, you want to go custom.

Anyone that wants to race off-road needs to bring about $10,000 for every 10 miles per hour after 30, that's about what I figure.

These roads break everything and it doesn't matter how much money you spend, the ground will eventually win. 

We put six laps on the board for points, collected our cards, then posted up in the pits and made some friends. There was some carnage out there for a few people - my seventh lap was to help our pit neighbor get his rig off the course with a snapped axle. My truck got to do some 4-low Chevy dragging around a 4-Runner with a broken lower control arm freeing up a bottleneck.

This is what it looks like when you take your Dominator 3.0 equipped daily driver on a points run in Baja... but if you want to ride this shock tune's limits, you're going to need some more parts.

I have to tell you guys, that when I said it is the limit of the truck, I wasn't kidding. A day like this costs Sage about $500. I drove just about every bearing and my steering off the truck in an afternoon.

Everything else takes it but the steering... and steering is something you have to do all of it, or none of it. Right now the limiting factor on hardened steering is the sector shaft and after that its the spindle. Doesn't matter how strong your drag link or tie-rod is, you'll always wind up moving the load to something else that can break... bulletproofing one piece isn't a solution. The next level is a real steering box, a Carli ball-joint process made sector shaft and billet spindles. If you had all that, you could probably do this everyday and just replace heims as they blow out.

A gear box, full set of tie-rods, brace bearing, 2 shock bearings and 2 rod ends... in less than 100 miles. Before ATS Diesel built my transmission, 48RE's went out like steering boxes.

That's the price of admission if you want to max out this shock tune for an afternoon. This is the ceiling, for now, and the Dominator 3.0 can take you there, while still being the smoothest riding shock tune everywhere else you use your truck.

That's exactly what Sage promised... the best of both world's.

Trackside with the Dominator 3.0