Spring rate help?

wstar

You'll see mentioned by some (I forget if it was mentioned in this thread) that in theory swaybars shouldn't be necessary on a perfect racecar. You'd just set the springs and dampers correctly to avoid the worst of the body roll, and you don't want the swaybar doing other possibly-negative unrelated things. The reason swaybars make so much sense on a production car in general is that springs which are hard enough to kill significant amounts of body roll are going to be way too hard for normal use, so the swaybar is making up for lack of spring in one particular area: body roll.

But then again, even on some dedicated racecar designs that aren't based on production cars, you see some version of a roll bar on one or both ends of the car. It does have its purpose in fine-tuning sometimes. It's usually not nearly as dramatic in spring rate as a production-car rollbar, though. But yes, on our car you apparently just can't ever adequately kill the roll in the front, so you need both stiff springs and a stiff bar up there to help bring it under control.

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