Quote:
Originally Posted by dradernh
Bottom Line / TLDR: skip the sway bar unless you're racing or running with NASA or another hard-core time trial club and are looking for every last tenth of a second. Or, you simply want to get the most out of your car with an upgrade that doesn't significantly degrade your DD/street-driving experience.
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I followed your explanation until the Bottom line, which (in my humble opinion) is off and doesn't follow from the rest. You had a handling problem, and the sway bar solved it pretty easily. Bonus point, now you have the adjustability for other tracks where exit speed from an off-camber corner is way less critical.
In the costs thread, you had your running costs at roughly $800 / track-hour. $400 in labor is ... half an hour of track time. Or one (1) track tire. Or repainting half a body panel after a ding in a parking lot. On a car that's so heavy on consumables usage, that's next to nothing for the improved handling.
(Though to be fair, I'd be surprised if a bigger front swaybar only generated a better-balanced car overall. I'm sure it solved that particular corner problem. But I've ran my car in a very similar config to yours for quite a while, and its defining handling characteristic over several tracks was corner entry understeer, to the point of really needing the brakes to get it turned. A bigger front bar is the opposite direction of how I'd try to balance it.)