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I want stiffer front sway bar for my NB8B.

I presume stock is solid??

Can hollow sway bars still have the same rigidity and stiffness as a solid ones? Or do the hollow ones have to be thicker again to get the same stiffness (I just want to save some weight)

After installing a thicker front swaybar does that lead to more overstear or more understear?

How thick can you go without having to get new swaybar mounts. Ie I dont want to reinforce the mounts, and I dont want to break them either.

Do they generally come with new D bushes? If they don't can you use the old ones with thicker bars?

Sorry for nube questions.

2 words:
Racing Beat

installing a bigger/stiffer front bar will shift the handling toward more front-biased. Not necessary cause it to understeer though, but it will make the car neutral instead of taily, which makes people think it's understeering. Vice versa if you install a bigger/stiffer rear one.

A larger front sway bar will induce understeer. The part of the car you stiffen with a sway bar is part that will get less grip. Hollow swaybars must be bigger to maintain the same rigidity but they scale better in terms of stiffness:weight. The problem is that to be as stiff at the 24mm solid the Racing beat hollow has to be 32mm IIRC. I havn't looked it up in a long time so someone may correct me. I think there's a table somewhere on the whiteline site.

All the solid bars don't require non-standard mounts. I believe you can still fit the big hollow bars with standard mounts. Most swaybars do come with the polyeurethene D-bushes.

You don't require the heavy duty mounts it's just racing beat that recommend them. I believe some of the guys doing autoX in America manage to break the mounts but barely heard of anyone over here doing it on the race track. AutoX is quite different to track racing.

Dodgy Dave broke his sway mounts at Natmeet this year. It does happen. They can be upgraded with stronger (dare I say heavier?) parts.

I don't know anyone who makes a hollow OEM-stiffness bar. Noone is that desperate.

Yup, I put the racing beat sways front and rear back when our car had standard suspension and an open diff, they made a dramatic improvement especially in reducing the inside wheel spinning away on sharp cornering.

I'm sure there's many here that will tell you not to upgrade the rear sway, I haven't gone back to the standard rear sway because I have a great suspension expert who's played with the sway settings and alignment and i'm not getting snap oversteer yet. I need more track time to see how it goes.

Thanks for the advice.

Yeah I was told not to touch the rear bar.

Im just shopping around for a thicker front and probably adjustable.

With a 24mm front bar on the softest setting I had horrible understeer with the standard rear bar. I already had a clutchpack diff and Tein Monoflex though at the time.

I had the whiteline 24mm front and 16mm adjustable rear combo meal on my car. I was a little bit tailly but not to bad. Swapped back to the 12mm stock rear bar like others had suggested and found it to be an understeering pig, especially in the wet. I got a 14mm rear bar made up and that seems like a happy compromise.

i have a 24mm front sway with a stock rear (for now, looking at a 16mm soon) and mine doesnt understeer at all, if anything it lets its tail out just a little bit.

mine is quite neutral with that setup. that said I have my teins 2 settings harder on the rear. I will be getting the 16mm rear one putting the front on hard and evening the shocks (matching the rear to the front).

I found some balance on my car with the 24mm front and 12mm standard rear by putting the monoflex on full soft on the front, full hard on the rear....It was close but not perfect.

The SE rear swaybar is 14mm standard if I recall correctly. So you can get it direct from Mazda or possibly a wreckers/mx5 racing etc.

when i put my whiteline sways to hard front and rear the car just skipped across all the bumps instead of letting the suspension work properly. i'm running teins

What is all this crap about not changing your rear bar, but putting a 24mm or even 22mm on the front is fine?

Is the whole world mad?

I've been told the Diff can have something to do with it. You've got a Mazdaspeed clutchpack which is slightly less aggressive than my Tomei which is VERY chattery. The clutch pack diffs lock hard early compared to Torsens so we really need more rear bar to stop the car pushing wide. I havn't actually had a torsen on my car for a direct comparison but I did do a trackday with and without the diff. Same suspension set and the car understeered a lot more. On the standard car I could understand it being closer so long as you had some adjustable shocks... I still wouldn't run just a front bar though. I had to use the whole adjustment range on my monoflex to stop it plough understeering ..atleast oversteer is exciting. I absolutely hate understeer...

I have an open diff