^agreed sir get your beast to the track i wanna see some results

on a side note, I think you might be onto something here, but the only way to compensate for no sway bar is the increased spring rate, hence making the car less friendly on the streets.

 

Yeah, I have 10k/12k F/R and it's not too bad on the street, it is at the upper limit though for my taste. I'd likely say my tolerance for pain to pursue speed is probably higher then average, if not most as well.

But I am considering possibly going higher depending on how it acts with the sway bars disconnected.

 

I've never looked at the swaybars F1 cars use, but it makes sense that they don't need much.

I would like to see some test results with the sways removed. The evo has pretty thick sways from the factory. My guess is that the rate increase required to compensate for removing the bars will make the car unstable in acceleration and braking.

without a spring rate increase i think the car would roll more than desired.

 

The F1 bars are just super compact and small because of the inboard suspension setup. They might be running really high roll stiffness, I don't know. I was mostly just pointing out that for F1 cars roll bars aren't much of a weight penalty because of their design, so adding them on gets all the benefits with minimal weight. When you figure the EVO packs 30 pounds with those bars and they may not be as beneficial, that weight might start becoming a penalty at some point with minimal reward.

I agree with needing to increase spring rates, and that is part of my premise. I'm already running stiffer springs then what many consider to be street friendly. With my current springs and stock bars, body roll is VERY low. I'm wondering if my spring rate is already high enough that I could pull the bars and not gain much in body roll.

I'm just trying to come up with the best way to get a good even comparison. I don't think I would get enough runs in at a single auto-X event to make a quantitative judgment between the two. On the other hand though, I may pull them off and know within the first few turns if it's going to work or not.

 

^Go for it, sounds like you've done your homework. I'm interested to see what the outcome is. The stock swaybars on 8 and 9's really weighs 30lbs?

 

Formula 1 back in its hayday (mid to late 80s) just used tire pressures for suspension. Those were the days of 1100 plus hp,turbos, mega wide slicks, and crazy aero packages.

 

24 pounds

 

A solid bar, which is most likely what we have, does weight quite a large amount...

Just keep in mind the functionality of a sway bar though. It is a torsional device. This being said you only get its added benefits with independent rear suspension movements from L to R, or a tramping condition. This locally increases spring rates and combats body roll. Any movement that is dependent, L and R vertical movement mirrored from side to side, you don't get any added spring rate. This is the inherent design benefit of this piece.

Just adding increased spring rates effects both types of suspension travel, which possibly isn't quite what you are looking for. I say unhook em, you'll learn something either way from it, but I doubt you want to remove them all together.

Hope this helps some way

 

After seeing how the car responded on wider tires, I don't think I'll pull the bars. I may go up in spring rate still though.

I'm considering the Tanabe 25mm front bar as it is the only hollow front bar I could find.
Also the Hotchkis 24mm rear bar as it is hollow and adjustable. Between the two, it should drop about 10 pounds and add some needed roll stiffness and tunability with the adjustable rear bar.