Understand how this affects straight line performance but how does it affect cornering behavior?

 

Hi 2007GT/CS,

Imagine viewing your carfrom the rear as it turns right. The body is leaning to the left and the left wheels are being pushed up and the springs are pushing them back down. On the right side the springs are pushing the car up. By connecting the right side suspension to the left side suspensionwhat you are in essence doing is using the right side suspension's springto increase the left side's resistance to roll by pushing the left side down. What you are doing when you increase the size of the anti-roll bars is to increase the coupling between the sides effectively making the roll stiffness higher.

HTH!

 

It helps a lot. Thank you.

I was actually looking at this:

BMR 05-07 Mustang GT XTREME Anti-Roll Bar Kit [XSB005] - $430.00

when asking my question. What I understand now is that this is a 'drag' only' kit as it does not flex at all giving you roll rate = zero (or roll stiffness = tons in your example) in the back which would not be too good for going around a corner at speed. Thecar would be all over the place.

So let me take this a little further....

If what we want to achieve is 'neutral' handling (balance between understeer and oversteer) we need a balance of roll rates between front and back (because whoever rolls first breaks traction first right?). There's some math involved in figuring all this out including the 'roll couple' (relationship of the roll rate between front and rear).

I've hear people say here *don't* buy a kit of matched components (I think mostly because they include an aftermarket front sway bar that you don't need?) but you would think somone like Roush or BMR, etc. would be much more capable than the average hobbyist in designing that well balanced system?

 

Ended up here from a link . . .

Roll doesn't happen at one end of the car independently of the other end. Simplified, it's more a case where the more equal you keep the vertical loading on wheels at the same end of the car the more total lateral grip they will develop, and they will run at a lower slip angle while doing so. Highly unequal loading 'saturates' the outside tire at one end sooner than less unequal loading does at the other end and that's more what results in a really heavy "push" or extreme "looseness" - huge increases in slip angle occur at the one end without providing much (or anything at all) in the way of additional grip.

Be aware of who you are listening to. Not necessarily for reasons involving technical understanding, but for the sort of driving or competition (if any)that they're involved in, and for some hints as to driving skills. Also keep in mind that if you're in the business of developing a kit to be used by a wide (and unknown) variety of customers/drivers you're still better off maintaining at least aslight amount of understeer. It's true that some folks prefer a somewhat "looser" (or at least"less-pushy") car than OE. But such a car could be too "loose" for other customers.

There may be a definition of "well-balanced" somewhere, though I doubt that it would quite match up with "neutral". At some point you have to start considering what happens to that handling/cornering balance when you add either acceleration or braking. I do know that at the OE level there are requirements in place for the response to either of those while cornering to be "understeer" (for which there is a definition involving much more than just the front:rear distribution of lateral load transfer).


Norm