Thickest sway bar
 

So right now we have an 86.5 and an 88 NA 5 speeds that we use to run the 24 hours of lemons races. 5 top 10's in a row - 4th at our last race. anyway - in seeking to reduce body lean we have cut down the springs. Now we are looking at the sway bars. Does anybody know what year and trim would have the thickest sway bar? would the turbos have a thicker one? - we can't put an aftermarket one on there - we will get penalized - but we can replace it with another supra unit we dig up in a bone yard!

Carl Johansson

1991 turbo front sway bar is 27mm.

yeah, but is that any different than other years. the only difference I ever knew of is that they neutered the away bar with the plastic end links in later years... I doubt they would have done that and gone to a beefier bar. I'd just look for any knee with LOW miles...less stress from wear. fresher bushings would probably help too.

thanks Cree,
I was afraid of that. Now I'm wondering if i could frankenstein some sort of reinforcer pipe sleeve over it - don't know how I would deal with the bends.

Who makes an aftermarket? how much fatter is it - anyone have some real world feedback on how much difference it made - on a road race track or drifting or Autocross?

Carl Johansson

I have ST's on mine and they made a big difference. They are significantly bigger in diameter than stock. I would say there is a large amout of twist on the straight section between the wheels. So you could probably make that section of the bar stronger. I would think the ends act as leverage.

ST's are by far the cheapest. On top of welding in a couple cross members to reinforce the bends on the stock you could look closely at the ST's and add a new mounting hole to the stock in the same location as the second drilled hole in the STs. ;)

Do be warned though, you should also weld reinforcements to the tab on the control arm before beefing up the sway bar and modifying the mounting location... the whole reason Toyota switched to plastic endlinks was that they were easier and cheaper to replace when they snapped than the control arm.

Hey I found an idea that might work. I found it while searching the celica forum. It involved redrilling a hole in a place for the links to go. They redrilled it further from the end on the bar on theirs. Maybe you can give it a try and experiment. On the celica it made a difference in the rear on turns. It kind of goes along with what cre is saying to do.