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| You get your adjustment by putting the end links in the different holes. The inner holes make the bar effectively stiffer, the outer holes makes the bar softer. Bearings instead of bushings makes the car more responsive. |
First we replaced the rear sway bar. As you can see from the side by side comparison, the Progress rear bar was a desperately needed replacement and will make a huge difference in roll stiffness. Our tech guy Kojima says about 20-50% of our total roll stiffness.
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| Look how much thicker the Progress rear bar is compared to the wimpy stocker. |
You can tell the Progress bar is much thicker, measuring in at 22 millimeters. Having a thicker bar increases rigidity and thus reduces chassis flex. This in turn makes your car happy, because less chassis flex allows the tires and suspension to do what they’re supposed to do, making the car feel more like a go kart, and less like a boat due to weight being thrown around in uncontrollable directions.
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| The Progress bar on the bottom is very obviously more stout than the stock bar at top! |
Next, we replaced the front sway bar with Progress’s stout 33 millimeter bar. Though many front wheel drive race cars don’t run front sway bars because they favor heavy over steer characteristics and say it helps forward traction, Kojima says no and wants to run a front bar as he says it improves transient response and turn it and will allow a stiffer rear spring to be run later to help adjust the chassis frequency whatever that means. We will just listen to him. The softer springs we are now running will give us a more neutral setup. This will work for now until we became more comfortable with how to use oversteer to our advantage.
