I already responded when you first made the comment a couple months ago, but apparently it didn't sink in.... feel free to educate yourself and become an 'expert', rather than trying so hard to make yourself sound right. -
A guide on how to choose a sway bar that will work both for your car and your driving style. Suspension components and vehicle dynamics are complicated systems, but a proper sway bar upgrade can make all the difference when it comes to performance handling.
axleaddict.com
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How and Why Sway Bars Work
Believe it or not, sway bars are actually very simple suspension components. Sway bars are intended to reduce body roll while a car is turning. When your car turns, the outside of the vehicle will squat while the inside will lift and "unload" due to centripetal forces. This reaction is what is referred to as body roll. We want to reduce the amount of body roll in a performance vehicle because you are taking the weight from the inside tire and applying it to the outside. By doing this, the car is using only one tire to turn instead of two. This reduces the grip of your car and negatively impacts steering. A sway bar reduces body roll by acting as a torsion bar that transfers load (force) from one side of the car to the other. Sway bars connect the left and right suspension components on a car so that when weight is transferred laterally, both the left and right suspension pieces will compress. This distributes the turning forces more evenly across both sides of the vehicle and helps it stay flat through the turn.
Rear wheel drive cars allow the rear of the car to pivot around the front, and as such they tend to oversteer. By increasing the stiffness of a rear wheel drive car's front sway bar you can help to decrease oversteer in a corner. Since, in this case, the rear wheels are driving the car, we want to keep them planted. To reduce body roll, however, the front sway bar can be stiffened without negatively affecting suspension dynamics. "
So to put it in layman's terms for Stratton, a big front anti-sway bar in a RWD car will help prevent oversteer.... and oversteer is exactly what we experienced, to the point of a loss of control. The bigger front anti-sway bar will help all 4 tires planted when pushed hard in a corner.
For a little more info on the situation,
we were going straight when the back-end came around. I was full throttle and the car shifted front 1st to 2nd and it WILL break the tires loose when shifting, under full throttle. It wasn't warm out, the tires and ground were cold. The tires crossed over the trail of mag chloride, then the car shifted hard into 2nd gear at high RPM and broke the tires loose.
Yes, I was driving hard and pushing the car. I had just told Jeremy how little body roll the car had and wanted to show him how it worked on a turn. I have driven up this on-ramp a handful of times with the car since the new anti-sway bar was installed and it has performed very predictably. It's a fun corner because it's a tight 90* flat corner on concrete with good traction, then it quickly straightens out as it gets closer to the freeway. I saw the trail of fluid on the road as we were accelerating, but I didn't realize it was Mag.
The combination of cold tires, cold ground, wet & slick mag chloride, full throttle, a car with very little weight over the rear end and a hard shift into 2nd all added up to spinning out. Yeah, it was dumb.... but no harm was done, the car is fine, we stayed on the road and got a helluva scare and a good laugh.
