I was reading a recent issue of I believe it was modified mag or one of those import mags, and they wer talking about Tanabe sway bars, and Tanabe says that adjustable sway bars are not as good as fixed one, because the manufacturer does all this R&D on their fixed setup, and when you start adjusting sway bars, you mess up the manufactuerers ideal setup. Perhaps I should go back and find the article I'm talking about, but it made sense to me when I read it. What do you guys have to say about this?

 

Adjustable sway bars allow you to adjust the balance of the car and have it handle to your own personal preferences. Adjusting the sway bars will make the car understeer or oversteer more or less. Some guys prefer understeer, some oversteer this could also depend on a given track or daily driving. Being able to tune your suspension to various conditions is mighty important to alot of folks.

Hope that helps.

 

A professional driver [in a race car] can feel a 1 psi change in tire pressure or each gallon [6 pounds] being used and removed from the rear weight. A race car will have inside cockpit adjustments of the sway bars to adjust for changes that occur during race as tires wear out every hundred miles.

For street drivers and stock cars, the sensitivity may be 5 times greater something like 30 pounds of roll stiffness change in tires or weight to be obvious. Obviously there is a difference with full to empty or adding a passenger.

So much easier to adjust a sway bar stiffness than change spring stiffness at the track.

Usually springs provide more than 50% of roll stiffness [55-70%]. So 20% increments in bar stiffness are really like 7% differences in total rolll stiffness.