Mitsubishi Lancer EVO X - Maximum Traction

Andy Hope On Sway Bar Tech
"Setting up an AWD car for the track is actually very similar to setting up a FWD car. We've all seen the drifters out there with their rear-wheel drives, hanging their tails out with massive slip angles. The drivers can give more gas to get their cars sideways, or ease off to straighten out. This ability to throttle steer the car also applies to track driving. In RWD applications, the driver can adjust the slip angle through the middle of each corner in order to power out onto each straight. With AWD and FWD cars, you don't have that throttle steering luxury. If the car begins to understeer, your only option is to get off the gas, which will hurt your exit speeds and lap times. Therefore, it is critical that the car is able to rotate at corner-entry and be able to maintain its slip angle as the car accelerates through the exit of the corner.

To visualize what an AWD car needs to do to charge out of a corner, think of how rally cars work. They enter the tight corners so sideways that they're almost going backwards. Then they use all four wheels to claw through the corner and accelerate out of it. A fast AWD track car works in the same way, just not to such an extreme degree.

Increasing the stiffness of the rear sway bar is an effective way of freeing up the rear end. The bar will allow both sides of the rear suspension to support the outside rear wheel. On a FWD car, the leverage of the rear sway bar will frequently lift the inside rear wheel in the air. With only one rear wheel on the ground, sliding into a corner gets pretty easy. Typically, you won't be able to see this leverage on an AWD car, but you'll be able to feel it when you're driving.

Unloading the weight on the inside rear is only a small side effect of having a stiff rear sway bar. The real benefit is that when the outside rear wheel doesn't squat, it keeps the inside front wheel from lifting. This allows the wheels that steer to maintain maximum traction so that the car can be steered through the corner, while still accelerating forward.

Finding the right amount of stiffness to make the car do what you want all comes down to fine-tuning. Typically, the rear end needs to be set up much stiffer than stock, because stock cars are engineered to go straight when the driver gets too crazy. Therefore, the larger-than-stock Hotchkis rear bar used in this test helped the car tremendously. Initially, I didn't want to bother with the front bar, but after learning that it is really not that much stiffer than stock, it sounded about right, and the adjustable settings certainly didn't hurt. Between the multiple settings permitted by the sway bars, and the adjustability of TEIN dampers, This EVO is now ready to be dialed in for maximum on-track performance."