07musclemustang

ok PAL well maybe true for you. i guess my sway bar is "special" and I hope your weight savings you actually notice. from what ive heard its no were near a 1/10 more like maybe 5/100s. I bet with a driver mod you could gain more

alexthejew

drag racing is boring anyway


road course FTW

So_Cali

Well if you're looking to get rid of the sways, I'll take them off your hands

Norm Peterson

Actually, a tenth per hundred lbs of nonrotating weight is a pretty good rule of thumb for cars running about 13's. It's less than a full tenth for much quicker cars, more than a tenth for really slow cars.

freaknazty - For strictly street driving, even 100 lbs is almost totally worthless, and ~30 lbs for the front sta-bar is only 30% as good(?) as almost totally worthless. IOW, this is about as totally useless of a street performance mod as it gets.

0.030 seconds at the strip is at least occasionally going to be enough benefit, but that's an entirely different story with the track's 0.001 second electronic timing sorting it all out.

It's not that the lack of a front bar is going to cause your car to suddenly dive off the road at each and every opportunity. Most normal driving doesn't involve cornering anywhere near hard enough for a front sta-bar to matter much.

Keep in mind that I said "MOST normal driving", meaning that every once in a while, for just about everybody, "poo happens" as Sam has suggested (and what Ford has designed in anticipation of). Gambling that you'll never ever need to make an emergency maneuver and that wet corners will never surprise you by suddenly getting much tighter is a sucker's bet.

I've driven cars with front bars whose endlink bushings were in such poor condition that the front bar might as well have been removed, and an Expedition in which an endlink itself had failed (broke the long bolt). IOW, I'm not just talking theory here.

My son (the Expy owner at the time) and son-in-law both know first hand that even Expys will oversteer given the right (wrong?) conditions.


Norm

2005mach1

I want to take mine off and pull wheelies

Norm Peterson

If you aren't almost pulling them already, 30 lbs off the front won't be enough to make it happen for you . . .


Norm

Jazzer The Cat

This is very topical for me as I just broke my front bar over the w/e at an autoX event. I decided not to continue without it as didn't want to drive that hard w/o any knowledge of how it would do, so I removed broken parts and went home. I picked up a replacement bar from John Griggs under warranty and we spoke about it. He said that I should have just continued with autoX as it would have been just fine. If fact, if I was running a Watts-Link, I could have just lowered that a peg and may not have noticed it at all!

On the way home, I decided to test a bit on some turns. Sure enough, car was VERY tight still and only a very small amount of additional body roll without front bar. Until that point, I was just overly careful as I had read Sam's reply above prior to breaking my bar.

Jazzer

freaknazty

yes i never said this was a miracle mod lol just a little trick to drop weight and give a lil better weight transfer .... and i agree if this is strickly a street car really has no big effect , but then again if he doesn't race y would he be asking about this ?

but it's little things like this that can give you an edge at the track , swaybar , spare , jack , ect. its alot cheaper to remove weight then buy parts to gain a little better et's.

Norm Peterson

Given the OP's sig, he probably is looking to see how much help this mod might be worth toward him getting into the 10's (or at least into the low 11's).

I see maybe an 11.75 as the result of this mod taken by itself . . .

or else he was in the low 11.8's previously and thought that it should have helped a little more than it did.


Norm

Sam Strano

I have to completely disagree. If it's not doing anything, what broke it? Further why did they sell you an aftermarket one if even when it breaks you'd not notice?

The facts are bars work by twisting, they are in fact torsion springs. When you just cruise you aren't flexing the bar, and so you might not notice much difference. When you do is when you really toss the car around. Maybe you aren't a corner carver. But trust me, when you have to make an emergency avoidance manuever, you are asking a LOT from the roll stiffness from the bar. How can anyone think a 34mm diameter bar (on a S197 GT) doesn't offer a LOT of roll stiffness.

Bluntly put you can get roll stiffness from springs and bars both. If you run mountainous springs you don't need much bar. I prefer to get my roll stiffness as much from front bar (not necessarily rear) as I can because I feel it makes for a better driving street car since we don't need as much actual spring rate to get the wheel rate we want for roll control and stability. There are those that don't understand it, and fancy themselves great drivers, but in reality never drive a car hard enough that a stock Civic couldn't keep up. For some reason there are groups of folks out there that I guess just assume the bean counters @ Ford or GM, etc. look the other way and just toss on bigger and more costly bars for the hell of it. The biggest suspension difference between a GT and a Rental Mustang V-6? The swaybars (smaller in front, none in the back).