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| With the X brace bolted in and the strut tower mounts in place you can now climb your happy ass into the trunk to fit the tensioning rods. |
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| Or you can do it the better way and remove the rear seat finishers and sit inside the car! Hopefully you read the entire article before beginning your install! 🙂 |
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| With the rear seats and finishers completely removed the tensioners are easily accessible. Also notice the “Overhaulin” type trunk where when we hijacked the ride they didn't even clean out the trunk! |
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| Here is the final install of the x brace… Once tensioned you can hang your grocery bags on it so the contents don't spill with your newfound lateral G's! |
Once installed we headed over to the dyno. to ERRR… Wait we cannot dyno. bushings and braces. In fact quantifying the performance improvement of these types of suspension modifications can be not only difficult but also very expensive. Given that we have already talked about the lack of pay; it goes without saying that our F1 grade suspension data acquisition system is still on lay-away. This leaves us with what we do best… Using words to describe how the car feels AFTER these modifications.
“With the TIC X-Brace and the TIC super sexy bushing set I noticed a big difference in the rear end of the car. The car actually feels a lot stiffer and in a good way and the rear end of the car feels planted. When taking a corner before I would actually have to come in a little slower so I wouldn’t need to correct in the corner, or if I didn’t take the corner slow I needed to correct for the rear-end since it would feel loose and wobble. That would be its limit and that point I knew if I pushed it a little harder the rear would break loose and start to step out a little and I would just need to throttle out. Now after the X-Brace and Bushings I can take the same corner faster without the loose wobbling feeling which means the rear end is where it needs to be: following the front end of the car and not wanting to step out. In addition to the performance improvement at the track the car is much more composed on the street. For lack of a better term it just “feels right”; as if it should have come this way from the factory. The extra rigidity make the car feel more refined in terms of performance as well as NVH.”
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| OK fine you caught us! We are nerds and so are the brains at CarLab Development and TiC. Here is their dataplot for the torsional stiffness test. |
This brace was designed by CarLab Development and they went to great lengths to not just create a brace that looked like it did something, but rather, produce a setup that provided measurable results. In addition to the graph posted above they took a rather cool video during an autocross run where they fitted the X Brace but did not bolt the lower section to the car. You can clearly see how much chassis flex is occurring in the video without the brace bolted in place.
WATCH THE VIDEO RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW!
If you are looking to sexify, stiffen, dip, pimp, make fresh, renew, improve grip, breathe new life or any combination of these look no further than the TiC X-Brae and Super Sexy bushing set. Hell, just having parts with names like this gives you a minimum of +11 cool points!
