When comes to modify a car, stability and chassis strengthening are always a MUST part to upgrade. High Performance Chassis Reinforcement, S...
STRUT BARS
The most common upgrade is strut bar. A strut bar and many of us knows as tower bar or strut brace is designed to tie the two opposing strut towers together as a single solid unit.
Strut bars are used to reduce flex of the car during hard cornering. When taking a turn a car's strut towers normally flex, resulting body flex and losing some traction. As strut tower bars are designed to keep your strut towers from flexing, they distribute the pressure applied to one strut tower when taking a turn to both towers instead of just one. This keeps the wheels in position. Keeping the wheels in position helps keeping the tires in the desired position on the road, and this will help to improve traction on the turns.
Rear strut tower bars are designed to work like the front bar by tying the two rear strut to work together, increasing the overall chassis stiffness. Rear strut bars minimize under steer due to less chassis flex and improves stability during corner braking.
Strut bars not only reinforce the sub frame and improve chassis stiffness but also make steering quicker and more responsive. In the market, there are a lot of strut bars do look good with shiny and cool finishing but looks have little to do with performance. To reduce the flex between struts, the setup should be as rigid as possible. In fact, a true strut bar doesn't have joints and look like an 'X', so go for it for a more rigid frame if you have time and money.
ANTI ROLL BARS
Anti Roll Bars affect the handling of the car on the lower end of the suspension. Anti Roll Bars tie the lower suspension components together across the front or back, and affect a car’s over steer and under steer.
Anti Roll Bars help to keep the car flat when turning corners. Its distribute energy from the car with all the force from the turn on it to the other side of the car, bringing the whole car down flat instead of leaning to one side. However this does not means that the car will not lean to another side but Anti Roll Bars will definitely help to reduce much of it.
Anti Roll Bars provide better cornering especially at high speeds and work very well in conjunction with strut tower bars. However, they can have an adverse affect in off-road situations by leaving one tire completely off the ground.
ROOM BARS
FENDER BARS
As most of the vehicle’s front chassis over hanging is designated to carry the vertical loads from the front suspensions, it is vital that this part of the chassis is strong enough to take the bounce and rebound force of the suspension. Else, the effort of a good suspension will lose its meaning if the chassis absorbs all the forces from the suspension and not letting the suspension does what it suppose to do.
Advantage of the fender bar
Improve handling, stability at high speed and cornering.
Provide a better braking and stopping performance.
Increase the safety level of your vehicle.
Reduce NVH (Noise, Vibration and Harshness).
Increase stiffness of chassis and reduce body crack.
REAR BARS and REAR UPPER BARS
Rear Strut Bars are designed to reduce the understeer behavior by stiffening the rear chassis of the car. High attention is taken during the design and development stage to ensure the rear chassis is reinforced and strengthened in a proper way that it will not cause the vehicle body under too much of stress.
Rear Upper Bar is invented specially for the 5 Doors Hatch Back cars. The 5 Door Hatch Back cars have weaker rear upper body due to their wide opening rear door. Under extensive investigation and actual road proving, it corrected the shortcoming of the vehicle’s swaying rear upper body.
This is the comparison between a lower grade strut bar and a higher grade strut bar.
All photos are taken from Ultra Racing website and credit to Ultra Racing.
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