I've been driving with the new bar for a little while now and thought I'd post my impressions.
First, any negatives?I can notice no change when driving over speed humps with a single rear wheel. This should cause the side of the car that has the wheel on the flat to "squat" a little (more than before) and potentially cause a greater rocking motion. The same thing (but opposite direction rocking) should happen when a back wheel falls into a pothole. As both these things can only occur when the car is already being unsettled both front and back, it's likely that any small change here is effectively masked anyway. So no discernible difference for general driving. I also travelled the road between Mortlake and Warnambool, a truck route, which has lots of broken surface, ripples and sunken dips. It was unpleasant to drive on but it was always so - again, no difference.
What about the positives?The reason to fit the thing in the first place of course is to reduce the severity of the inherent understeer - so how did that work out?
At first when just driving around, as I said above, I could detect no change at all and it seemed quite underwhelming but as I pushed on a little harder I began to feel the difference. I have not yet tried out any really tight turns (Great Ocean Road trip was overridden by the navigator) but have managed to try some sweepers at speed. The understeer is definitely much better controlled and it is now very easy to throttle steer to great effect with the steering switching from over to under with the throttle.
When not trying to provoke it, the balance is much more neutral at speed and doesn't have the ever increasing understeer with increasing speed as before. That was the bit that annoyed me. I now feel that I can add an additional 10 or even 20 kays to a high speed corner and keep the same balance as before when it was taken at the lower speed, i.e., fairly neutral.
While I said "over" above it really was just less understeer and when I tried very hard to see if the back would show any real signs of stepping out I got absolutely nothing. Of course it was always going to be thus with a heavy iron engine and FWD. I believe this to be a perfectly safe modification and a worthwhile improvement.
I'm happy.
