Which front strut brace?

[Andrew Edwards]

Its about time i did something more about my cars handling, but with a hefty bill for a turbo conversion just around the corner i'm on quite a tght budget!!!
Does anybody know of any reasonably priced front srut braces? pics would be a great help if poss.

[jonno]

Cusco OS are the dogs - Dont bother wasting your time with anything else, just find a Cusco

[karammander]

have you done your antiroll bars, i just put tein type flex coilovers and before i strengthen the cassis i'm looking into sway bars or anti roll bars. if you dont hav em its definatly something to think about and there not too dear.

cheers karam

[steve b]

To be honest you won't notice much difference with a strut brace. Remember 50% of ones on sale are only cosmetic. The www.twosrus.co.uk ones are steel, cheap and functional.

A bigger difference will be seen as said for rollbars,.... but in my opinion the best chassis mod you can do is get poly bushes fitted all round, you notice a massive difference.

[jonno]

Very true, I would do ARB's and pulybushes first - they made the biggest difference to my car after a decent set of tyres

[Mikejc]

I would have to say that I did notice a great deal of difference after having fitted the the anti roll bars and then shortly afterwards Cusco strut braces.

No doubt the effects on my own car were even more noticable due to having the T-Bar

Mikejc

[Rogue]

To be honest you won't notice much difference with a strut brace.

I strongly disagree with the above comment. I too once thought that strut braces were next to useless, but that didn't stop me buying a pair of second hand cuscos for the bling factor. I fitted them one sunny morning, stood back and admired a job well done (all ten bolts!) and then went inside. I didn't drive the car afterwards for a few hours and when I did, I'd completely about the morning's upgrades. The car (a '92 T-bar) felt noticeably sharper, and it took a couple of minutes of driving for me to remember why!

That said, uprated ARBs are the unsung heros of mk2 handling. Just a thicker front ARB with standard Bilstein suspension was giving me the edge around the tighter bends at Anglesey over other similarly specced cars with uprated shocks and springs but standard ARBs. Definitely worth doing.

Mk3 owners could do far worse than fitting the TRD chassis braces that go underneath the car. These came as standard on our VM180 (with full TRD suspension - fixed rate shocks, springs, bushes and ARBs) and the increased rigidity is obvious when compared to my own MR-S (also with full TRD suspension, but this time the shocks are adjustable). I have a video of a stock MR-S doing a time cone run with and without the braces, and the TRD equipped car completes the short run around one and a half seconds quicker.

Rogue