My HS build

[CoryM]

Originally Posted by Jason@SportsCar

Swaybars build grip on the opposite end of the car they are attached to. They do this by providing a lifting force to the inside tire - as the outside tire compresses the swaybar transfers the load and pushes the connected tire in the same direction. You are in fact reducing grip on the axle the bar is attached to.

Swaybars in general are a crutch for a poorly tuned suspension. That said, you are limited in HS with the mods you can do, and one of them wont be fixing the lack of spring rate, so you do what you can. In a fwd car the last thing I want to do is remove front grip, and that is what a bigger front bar is doing.

I would go the other way and find a way to transfer as much grip from the rear of the car to the front. Go with a bigger rear bar, or get a set of proper rear shocks that will help suck up that back tire quicker, forcing grip to the front.

In our car we dont even run a rear bar, just droop limiters in the rear shocks that pick the back tire up almost instantly.

That way of thinking is definitely the right path for the vast majority of FWD cars. This is why I waited so long to try a front bar on my car. Where the traditional way of thinking goes wrong is Stock class when the CG is high and/or springs are too soft. High body roll, high neg camber and struts cause the inside front tire to lose a large amount of contact patch. In my car I was losing ~1/2 of my inside F tire contact patch. That's a lot of rubber, and it shows everytime I try to accell out of an element.

Yes the F bar loses grip by transferring weight to the rear, but it also gains grip by almost doubling the contact patch of the inside F tire (and gains a little outside F contact patch due to reduced pressures). Is this enough to net more F grip over all? No idea, but it sure feels like it. If I had the tire-curve, I could do a bunch of measurements and math to figure out which gains more grip (on paper). In practice, it would take a serious test and tune session to confirm one way or the other.

Again, this pretty much only applies to HS cars and maybe only over-tired HS cars. It's possible it needs R-comps to see gains, and maybe this winter running my street/wet tires will show the front bar to be detrimental.