Front Sway Bar

SCrazy

SCCoA Member
Since I installed the tubular front K-member I have not reinstalled the front sway bar. I've not pushed the car in corners but it has handled fine.

The car is rarely driven on the street and used mostly at the track. With the K-member the sway bar is easy to install and remove.

Can anyone provide a discussion or experiences of our car in various situations without a sway bar.

It's my impression that for straight drag the car is better off without a front sway bar at all. One other consideration is that with the tubular k-member the car has quite a bit more body flex than with stock chassis.

Thanks
 
Brian,

I drove the XR7 for literally years with no front sway bar. I even drove it with no rear sway bar also for awhile but that just plain didn't feel good and it didn't handle well at the track. So I drove with a rear bar only for a long time and many many street miles.

The car will handle fine with no sway bar. You won't be drifting or burning up corners, but the car will still handle just fine. Consider that old cars often didn't have any sway bars either and people drove them around in relative safety.

I did not experience any quirks or ill temper from the car that way. I even ran it at high speeds (well over 100mph) on the highway. The front end starts to feel slightly floaty at those speeds, but nothing alarming. You will find that you tend to take corners a little slower than you used to, but not any worse than driving a mini van or something like that. It gives plenty of warning about what it's going to do before you get in trouble.
 
>It's my impression that for straight drag the car is better off without a front sway bar at all.

Perhaps, on cars with a solid rear axle :)

I'd think anything you can do to help the vehicle to resist chassis/tub flex would help keep the drive wheels in contact with the track...even in a straight line.
 
When you have a rear bar that's dramatically stiffer than that in front--or in this case, there's no front bar at all--you run the risk of loading your outside front tire so hard in a turn that it will actually pick the inside rear tire up in the air like a FWD car. This will probably only happen in very hard driving in slow corners, but it's amazing how hard it is to put down power coming out of a turn with one rear tire off the ground. The car will definitely be more prone to oversteer.

Will you die? No...but your car will handle better with a front bar, no doubt about it.

And Dave, while you're right about a lot of old cars having no sway bars at all, I've never seen one that left the factory with a rear sway bar and no front sway bar. I've seen the opposite a million times, though.
 
Many of the old cars without sway bars(in performance apps at least) used very heavy coils/leafs/torsion bars to compensate for roll
 
I found that the rear sway bar really helped keep the car stable. I didn't run the front bar because it is heavy and in the wrong location for weight transfer.

Probably because the SC is long wheelbase, heavy, and IRS, I did not find that oversteer was increased as one would expect when faced with rear sway bar bias. Instead the car simply pushed and plowed it's way around with the rear end staying firmly planted. I didn't try any 90mph sweepers at high speed, but in generally the car understeered so much from lack of front end traction that the rear could never get to the point of breaking loose.

Of course I drove responsibly too. :eek:
 
I've been driving the car with no front bar all summer and have not found it to be disagreeable at all. This has all been taking it easy around town type of stuff.

I do have the stock rear bar on. I used to have the big Addco bars on the car (front and rear) but since I don't drive it often and like to race it I decided to go back to the stock bar in the rear and try the car without a front. I haven't weighed the two bars but they are HEAVY.

So far I can't say the car has done anthing stupid or suprised me in any way.

I did some interesting reading last night and in pure drag cars the concecus seems to be no sway bar. Mainly because this allows the two front wheels to act truly independantly as the car twists on a hard launch.
 
I'm really talking about the front bar...I understand the need for a rear bar but I don't get what IRS has to do with running a front bar or not??
 
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