Quote:
Originally Posted by Dwnshift
Haven't been on here in awhile and just came across this thread.
Just throwing out my 0.02
You can throw out the whole... By adding more front bar it induces more understeer ...
It can add more rear grip... But also keeps the front hooked .
I can say this... We are well more than twice the "spring rates" for these front bars... And very close to "stock" spring rates on the rear bar.
It's just t nature of the beast.
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B.J. I am going to have to agree 100% that front bar can increase front grip.
However, I personally think it has to do with the physics behind the way a swaybar works. As you increase thickness of the bar you find that you will increase the resistance across the bar. I generally just think of it as making a independent suspension less independent and more linked to the other wheel to a degree. So as load is applied to one wheel the far side starts to apply load to the ground. So by increasing the bar size you can increase not only spring rate but the unloaded wheels load. (if that makes sense) However, that being said sometimes when I see this it really really makes me question the amount of caster in the car. Since, we know that caster will change load across the car in a pure mechanical fashion as you increase caster you can change the geometry of the loaded and unloaded wheel to achieve similar results from the ratio of camber gain/loss. Altho, I certainly think there is a limit to what can be achieved through caster and its entirely possible you already found a sweet spot on that setting. Another thing I have not messed with all that much is King Pin Inclination and I can certainly see that having some effect on this as well but I don't know enough about it to comment.
I think this is one of the problems we had on the BMW in 2011 since we had to sacrifice caster to increase camber. I think we might have had 4-5 degree of caster in that BMW and a number of 7-8 I think would have been a nice improvement. I know the 3 series cars had this caster advantage over us and as a result we were trying to compensate with a larger front bar to find this grip. As a result our larger swaybar setting made our compliance over curbing less then ideal. Then again this is just a theory.
-Ron