So, his head is entirely up is own *** on torsion bars and sway bars. He’s completely wrong.
He doesn’t understand suspension load at all. The load doesn’t come from the torsion bar or the sway bar, it comes from the connection with the road. If you run stickier tires, those tires will allow you go faster in a turn. They stay connected to the road where a harder tire lets go. So then basic physics, if you go faster and don’t slide, you get more load in the suspension.
So you don’t run stickier tires to “fix” bad suspension, you run bigger torsion bars and sway bars because your sticky tires have increased the load going into the suspension and you need more wheel rate to keep from bottoming out your suspension.
Can you run bars that are too big and cause the car to push? Of course! But that doesn’t mean that bigger torsion bars aren’t right for some set ups. You have to match the amount of suspension travel that you have to the amount of load that you can put into your suspension.
My Duster, for example. I run 200 tread wear tires. My suspension is set up so that I still have the factory ~5.5” of suspension travel. With 1.12” torsion bars, I can still use every inch of that travel, and I DO, just driving in the street. I can go to larger bars and not be tire limited. Now, if I put a set of BFG TA’s on there, I’d break the tires loose before I used all my suspension travel and I’d have to go to smaller bars if I wanted to maximize my handling.
As for road courses, again, he’s wrong. You need larger bars, because your higher speeds will mean more suspension loads. Can you run too stiff? Absolutely. You want to have as much suspension travel as you can get, and you want your wheels rates set so that you actually use almost all of it. But that means larger, not smaller bars. And your suspension travel has to match your platform, you can’t have 6” of travel if it means your headers bottom in the road or your tires bottom on the inner fenders. Again, that depends on your tires being able to hold the road. If you run lousy tires, you need smaller bars than someone that runs stickier tires because you'll slide long before you use your suspension travel.
His comments on AutoX are ridiculous. Completely laughable. Corners still have “middles”. Just because the corner is short doesn’t mean it’s not there, the exact same physics applies, the car goes through all the same handling modes. He just doesn’t have a clue. It would be like comparing one of our cars to an F1 car on the same road course corner and saying there’s no “middle” of the corner for the F1 car because it goes through the corner in a fraction of the time.
Nope. Dude lost ALL of his credibility with that video.