If you're serious about your car's handling performance, you will first be looking at lowering the suspension.
In most cases, unless you're a complete petrol head, this will be more than adequate. However, if you are a keen driver, you will be able to get far better handling out of your car by fitting a couple of other accessories to it.
The first thing you should look at is a strut brace. When you
corner, the whole car's chassis is twisting slightly. In the front (and
perhaps at the back, but not so often) the suspension pillars will be
moving relative to each other because there's no physical link between
them. A strut brace bolts across the top of the engine to the tops of the
two suspension posts and makes that physical contact. The result is that
the whole front suspension setup becomes a lot more rigid and there will
be virtually no movement relative to each side. In effect, you're adding
the fourth side to the open box created by the subframe and the two
suspension pillars.
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| Simple straight brace(highlighted). | Complex brace (highlighted). |
Later models of Jaguars XJS ran a advert saying how a CAD program had helped jaguar stiffen the chassis by over 15% for only the cost of a few pound of extra metal. The evidence of this could be found under the bonnet where the flimseyest looking strut brace on earth was located above the mighty V12. Still despite appearances it obviously worked.