We will be shooting for neutral steer. Neutral steer is when both the front and rear tires slide equally under hard cornering. Neutral steer provides the best cornering power because both front and rear tires are used to their fullest potential
The sway bars for Project SE-R were supplied by Progress. The Progress front sway bar is a stout 1-3/16-inches in diameter, up from the stock bar's 1-inch diameter. It uses polyurethane for the mounting bushings, which is much harder and more durable than the stock rubber bushings.
Harder bushings allow the sway bar to be more effective by transferring the roll forces directly to the sway bar instead of compressing the soft rubber first. The rear sway bar is 13/16-inch instead of the stock part's meager 9/16-inch diameter, and bolts to a reinforced bracket attached to the car's spindle instead of the stock part's flimsy, failure-prone shock body mount.
The Progress bars feature three-way adjustability for both the front and rear bars, which makes them the hot tip for racing or ultra-high performance street cars. This allows tuning of the understeer/oversteer balance by placing the sway bars' end links in one of three holes. The hole closest to the end of the bar is the stiffest position and the hole farthest from the end is the softest.
To increase understeer, stiffen the front bar and soften the rear. To increase oversteer, soften the front bar and stiffen the rear.
Unlike many aftermarket swaybars, the Progress units are designed to be at the proper angles on both stock height and lowered cars. Most sway bars are designed for a car at stock ride height and bind or contact parts of the car's suspension on a lowered car. This causes a stiff ride and even unpredictable handling as contact can increase wheel rate drastically.
The Progress sway bars also feature spherical bearings on the end links instead of the usual rubber or urethane bushings. The spherical bearings get rid of all sticksion and bind inherent with bushings and actually improves the ride. The bearings also have no give so every bit of the car's body movement gets instantly transferred to the sway bars.
Strut Tower BracesChassis flex is a no-no for high-performance cars. Chassis flex makes for a rougher ride, allows squeaks and rattles to develop, causes the suspension geometry to shift under load and negates some of the ability of changing sway bars and springs to tune the handling balance.
The old B13 was designed in an era where chassis stiffness was not such a design priority as it is today. The B13 is a flexi flyer, which makes suspension tuning more difficult and reduces overall handling precision. Our foam injection that we used previously helped considerably, but our chassis still needed more help.
Short of a tube frame, a carbon tub or a not-so-practical- for-street, eight-point roll cage, strut tower bars are the most cost-effective way to stiffen your ride's chassis.
Strut tower bars stiffen the chassis by tying the shock towers together, keeping the suspension geometry from changing under load. The trick, elliptical, aircraft-aluminum-tubed front strut tower bar on Project SE-R was made by Eibach.
This bar is fairly rigid and is compatible on top of the shock tower-mounted Ground Control camber/caster plate. Since no one makes a rear strut tower bar for the '91 to '94 SE-R, we made our own out of a piece of 0.060 wall thickness 4130 chrome-moly with a one-off bracket we bent out of some sheet steel.
We bolted our home-grown special to holes drilled in the rear shock tower with some stainless-steel Allen bolts. The stress bars tightened up the Project SE-R's body noticeably. The difference in turn-in and cornering stability was actually noticeable