The car felt fine in San Diego, but we wanted to reduce some of the roll. Since I still had to drive the car every day and deal with Tucson's wonderfully-maintained streets, we decided to try a stiffer front bar first instead of going right to springs. Here the two options are a) buy a bigger front bar, or b) drill a new set of holes in the oem bar.
Option (a) involves spending about $250, then dropping the front subframe, disconnecting the power steering lines, and a bunch of other junk I didn't want to do. Option (b) sounded a lot easier. It turned out to definitely be cheaper, but not much easier. Total costs ended up to be about $60 for a decent corded drill (I didn't have one) and $60 or so in drill bits and cutting fluid. Drilling through the steel bars took forever though, and in total I probably had 5-7 hours of time into the project.
Running the stiffer setting up front we balanced that by going to a stiffer setting in the rear as well. Everything felt great on the street. Turn-in was better, the car stayed a lot flatter, and overall I'd recommend it for that purpose. At the limit it was another matter. The car felt pretty good in slaloms and such, but understeered a fair amount in steady-state turns, and it was particularly bad in slow turns. The way the car's weight loaded and unloaded with the bars just felt, for a lack of a better term, unnatural. It wasn't something I had ever experienced before. For autocross purposes, I wouldn't do it again. At least I got a new drill out of the project.
While drilling the swaybar I made some upgrades to my endlinks. Originally they were all just rod ends, and while that works ok with the stock bars (and is really very inexpensive), you don't have the range of movement that you need for adjustable bars. The links didn't reach the new hole in the front bar and all, and we had never been able to use the softest setting on the rear bar. I swapped out one rod end on each link with a ball joint and that solved all of the problems. Downside? Rod ends are about $5 and ball joints are about $18. This brings the price of DIY endlinks closer to that of aftermarket links. Still cheaper, just not significantly so.
The next route was stiffer springs. Default spring rates for Robispec KW Clubsports are 8k/9k, which works out to about 457/514 lb/in. Tried bumping that up to 600/650, and overall it felt great. Less roll, balance was pretty similar, and the car felt more "natural" again. Will probably try a little higher in the back and see how that goes.
Next up, aero. I bought a spare trunk lid a while back in case I wanted to try a wing, as I didn't want to drill into my stock trunk. I was able to borrow an APR GTC-200 from a friend who wasn't using it, just to see if it would make a difference. I ran it at one event and honestly didn't feel any difference. I think it's just too small and too low to be of any kind of use at autocross speeds. Logically then you'd think a bigger and taller wing would be more likely to work...
Finally, we'll have the chance to do a back-to-back tire test pretty soon. I have a set of new Dunlops sitting in the garage, and ordered a set of Enkei RPF1s with Yokohama Advan Neova AD08s. Everything should be ready to go in time for the July event in Taylor when we can run them at the same event. Whichever tire comes out on top will end up going with us to the Vail National Tour, then another set ordered up for nationals. :-)
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