rear sway bar

Well Patrick u know i cant drive yet.But my dad said he does notice that the rear is tighter.the rear struts are shot so with the new 1 on the ride will be better.the rear us to hop and the sway bar made it a little tighter and on the corners it doen't roll as bad as it did before with the new struts will make a big change to the ride and the handling of the car.But the sway bar did make a change on the car.

Patrick wrote: tk_85redgt wrote: Well Patrick u know i cant drive yet... Sorry, I keep forgetting how young you are. Good to hear that your dad notices a difference with the rear sway bar installed. I wouldn't mind trying one on my '84, but I've read numerous times that a duke powered Fiero doesn't really benefit from a rear sway bar as much as a Fiero does with a heavier (V6, V8) engine. Colby seemed to have mixed feelings about the rear sway bar installation on his duke. I'm not sure what he eventually decided. Maybe he'll see this and comment.

Well, I can't say with certainty that it made things better or worse (in terms of an autox run time), but I did in the end decide to keep it on as I did find it made the car more enjoyable.

With it, there is certainly less body roll, and it does help with the excessive understeer (although it's probably not best way to deal with it). The downside is that it also makes it a fair bit easier to lose control and spin the car, so you need to be more careful not to enter into a corner faster than you can handle and you need to be a bit more careful with the throttle. This makes it a bit more difficult to experiment a bit during your run, as unintentionally passing the limit of your car can quickly lead to a spin rather than just a whole lot of understeer. Also, if you care about the classing for autox, adding it puts you into the more competitive "street prepared" class.

May 19 i turn 16.

Patrick wrote: Colby, this is with a rear sway bar the same diameter as the front, isn't it?

Yes, I'm pretty sure it's the same diameter.

Patrick wrote: If I was to install a rear sway bar, I'd want the front one to be stiffer than the back. It probably wouldn't be a "cure-all", but perhaps it would help to alleviate some of the issues you've mentioned.

It probably would help with the issues on my car (at the cost of having a bit more understeer), but my experiences won't be the same as yours since your springs are so much stiffer, your car is lower, etc.. What I suggest is to autox your car as is until you're fairly comfortable with it and it's characteristics at the limit (you might be at this point already), then try this stuff. That way be you'll less likely to accidentally go past your limit which will make the potential drawbacks not so much of a problem, and you'll also be more able to recognize how the changes effected the handling.

We used to "auto x" up at SFU late at night.  Lots of parking lots and nobody around.

No more though.  You'd probably get shot or something.  They have an army of security people up there now....:(

The Dawg