davidrc517

I want to upgrade the handling of my 06 V6. I'm for sure gonna get new springs and dampers. Can someone comment on the marginal value of a tower strut brace? For those who've added one, how much of a difference does it make in the feel on the road? Do people think they're worth the $150+?

illin

I think I paid only $50 for mine (or somewhere around there). I can certainly feel the difference. The most obvious feeling is on small backroads that change direction often...the front end feels allot tighter and doesn't seem to twist. It is money very well spent IMO.

BigGameHunter589

they have em on ebay now for $75 shipping included! I just bought one about 5 minutes ago

tx_zstang

If you dont have a rear sway bar, get one of those instead.

davidrc517

If you had to pick between putting in a rear sway bar and a tower strut brace, which one would you pick? Do they pretty much do the same thing?

tx_zstang

I haven't felt the effect of a tower brace but HAVE noticed a big difference by adding the rear sway. Of course that's with all the other suspension stuff I've done in my sig +gt front sway; it it handles like a charm around corners now.

Legion5

We did some testing with people who upgraded the handling of their cars with no previous experience in making a car go faster and by far I found that the STOCK car actually preformed both better in cornering grip and handling feel (how easy it is to drive fast) than people's cars who tried to make their car handle better. The only thing that people seemed to do is reduce body roll and make the ride harsher which only made it SEEM faster at low speeds but made it hard to drive at high speeds and slowed it down.

If you want to really improve your handling you can for all intents and purposes max it out for $3000 installed, you can get the car 90% maxed out for $2000 installed, and the bargain basement handeling package would run $1000 installed.

So before you spend $200 on a dubious mod, save a very small amount of money to make your car handle decently.

Think about that.

ODDYSEY

Legion, not sure where you were going with that, but I don't see how you could even compare stock suspension. I have put springs, shocks, panhard and larger rims/tires and yes my ride is more harsh, but it handles 10x better than over stock.

That being said the suspension/handling isn't a go fast mod, its about sticking the car to the road.

157dB

Rear sway bar FTW.
They dont do the same thing hence the different names.
Strut Tower braces are for those with better gripping
bigger tires to handle the increased turning G-Forces.
The stock tires dont benifit from a brace.
I would be looking to see if you have an A-Arm brace
as Ford left them off some S197s for some reason.

Norm Peterson

Ideally, a matched set of front and rear bars. I'm a little uneasy adding just a rear bar where there wasn't one before without adding a little stiffness up front to keep the balance from going too far (and having the car end up being being oversteerish to drive).

Not really.

A rear sta-bar will dial out some of the understeer by making the rear tires work a little harder (and the fronts less hard).

A STB is intended to tie the two towers together better and improve front camber under cornering loads (giving the front better grip). But the S197 structure is quite rigid already, so a STB won't help the handling/cornering performance as much as it might on a less rigid chassis. What you might notice is a little less vibration and cowl shake because even in a stiff chassis a STB will still eliminate some vibrations.


Norm