OMGuar wrote:Careful about spring rate advice.. circle track calls for a differant mind set than road race. Dirt track is at one end and banked ovals another.. Even relatively flat tracks call for differant springs than a road racer uses.. Finally things like a tube frame car will respond differant than a space frame car especially one without subframe connectors..
Trying to make a spring do the job of a sway bar will produce that sort of result.. If you finally do get them to hold up the corner in a turn you'll find out they are now too still and your cornering speed drops as a result.. Cornering speed off? Means you're slower in and slower out of the corner. Lap times suffer a lot and trying to make up for it you tend to push the car too hard. Not good in an enduro.
Check out pickup truck sway bars. Find one of the right diameter and make it fit rather than trying to find a stiffer version of the bar you're using.. Your Firebird will be narrower than most newer trucks so look in older truck junkyards. Check 3/4 ton and 1 ton chassis..
Hint, most major towns have a spring shop someplace where truck springs etc are re-arched etc.. It used to be real cheap to get bars bent into the correct shape and reheat treated..
The advice was from a guy who spent several years driving thirdgen f-bodies in SSCA road racing. I wasn't trying to cross advice from dirt to black-top. We have adressed some of the things he recommended, but definately not everything. We basically hit the things that could be done very cheaply or free. We have also swapped out for a bigger OEM swaybar off another car. That should help as well. Surely, getting the cheapest shocks on the market will help compared to the blown shocks we took off the car. In the corners, we get taken to the cleaners by the light weight cars anyway. Even if our balance isn't optimal, and our lap time suffers very slightly (which I highly doubt), then it will be worth it to actually get a whole race out of 340 treadwear rated tires.
The frequency response is a good rule of thumb, but alot of other factors come along with it. Considering the limitations of Lemons and the mismatch of valving rate to spring rate, we are just bumping the rate up high for cheap and calling it a day.