HiFlite999

iTrader: (2)

Okay, a few comments on the two. I installed the lower brace first, working alone with the car on ramps. Working room is tight, but it goes alright as long as one has a 2 foot long breaker bar handy. (With some lucky numbers for MegaMillions, I'm gonna put in a lift.) The stock part weighs about 4.5 lbs, the GTSPEC part runs 6.5 lbs.

So, with just the lower brace installed, I went for a drive on my test loop. While it would be nice to run long sweeping corners at 90 mph on a racetrack, that's not my world, and a well-calibrated butt will have to do.

The important part of the test is a significant length of road that has been patched and repatched so often that its surface is entirely chaotic (no cross-road expansion joints), but without major holes. The car body responds to the shocks sent to it through the suspension by the wheels following the bumps. How it responds depends on a lot of stuff. Suppose the car is has a live rear axle and independant front suspension, like a basic S-10 pickup truck. The front end can deal with the bumps much better then the live axle, so the body motion over the bumps is dominated by what the back wheels are hitting. That's an extreme example, but the stock 8 seems also bump-dominated by the rear. Take the stock strut tower off, and the bump-dominace shifts even more rearward.

With everything else stock, and the GTSPEC lower brace installed, the bump response of the car is to me, clearly moved forward. Good news as far as I'm concerned.

Afterwards, I installed the GTSPEC front strut brace. One slight change is shown below where I added thin foam tape underneath the mounting brackets which clamp on both sides of the engine bay wall. The surfaces of the three don't match exactly and I wanted some cushioning to protect the paint and eliminate possible squeaks. The stock bar and brackets weight about 5 lbs, the GTSPEC pieces come to 14 lbs.

On the chaotic bump region of my test loop, the results were rather amazing, with both ends of the 8 responding to bumps very equally. Another way of saying it is that the spring rates on the front seem higher, which makes some sense if the body is now less of a spring with the bracing than without. (It reminds me of back in the day when motorcycles started to switch from wire to cast wheels. Bike suspensions were tuned assuming a certain amount of flex in the wire wheel which went away with the cast type and gave us all fits for a while.)

So I'm pretty pleased with the two mods at present. I think turn-in is also quicker, but that may be my confirmation bias. In this limited test, the lower brace seemed to give about 1/3 of the improvement and the upper 2/3. I suppose if I got extraordinarily ambitious, I'd remove the lower and try it with the upper only, but I don't want to work that hard. I am sure that the $300 price of the upper brace has a bigger effect on the car than a $300 CAI. (Flame suit on). The net weight gain amounts to 11 lbs, which I can make up for by cutting pizza from my diet.

As far as a rear brace goes, I'm not too sure about that, thinking at the moment it would shift the balance rearward again.