To me, the bottom line is that the Z06 understeers too much during off-throttle cornering. The road race guys have figured out the answer, which is to reduce tires stagger to only 10mm, Unfortunately i dont have the money to go with new wheels to put wider tires on in the front.

With my old Nissan i had the same problem, and i simply took the front swaybar off and it was great. With the Z06, i dont think i want to do that. So i was thinking of upgrading only the rear sway

Do any of you guys out there run a custom F/R sway bar combo. For example a Z51 front with a Z06 rear, or a Z06 front with a Hotchkiss rear?

Right now i'm thinking of either down-sizing the front to a Z51 or up-sizing the rear to a Hotchkiss.

 

Either way will work. It depends how bad it is and how much is driving technique vs setup. You could also play with tire pressures a little too.

If corner exit is good, then you might try varying the corner entry with some light trail braking to keep the fronts loaded a little more.

For the price of the sway bar, you could almost get 2 more front wheels. When your current tires wear out, then voila!

 

Trail braking is a problem for me. I dont know if it's just MY '01, ALL '01's or ALL Vettes that do this.

Are you familiar with the VSES system? Mine seems to kick it even under the slightest g-loads going around corners. I've been looking for a way to disable it without disabling the ABS or Traction control. Sometime i think i can literally go faster without ABS because i would be able to take full advantage of braking going INTO a corner rather than BEFORE the corner. I drove my friend's '04 Z06 for a tiny bit but i wasn't able to conclude if his acts the same way.

If you're not familiar with the VSES, it's a (stupid) strategy used by the car to not let you apply too much braking force during cornering. The pedal feels like the ABS is kicking in but it's actually not. It's just limiting your braking and i've almost crashed a couple times because of it. I feel like it's cutting TOO MUCH of my braking out. I wonder if it's a problem with my car or all Z's.

 

I put 355 tires on the rear of my car and I'm worried about that throwing me too much understeers so I installed a T-1 bar on the rear only. I have not run it yet to know what it will do, still in the build stage. The T-1 bars are huge, probably the stiffest bar out there for the C5, many say they are too stiff for the street, but many run them on the street and love them. The T-1 bars are fairly cheap from GM, check one of the forum vendors that are GM dealers for a good price. If you use the T-1 endlinks you will get lots of noise, some say you can use stock metal endlinks with the T-1 bars but I have not done that either, yet! Will wait and see how noisy mine are.

 

You seem very knowledgeable, so I'm sure you know that a lot of guys run the Z51 front with the Z06 rear, since all OEM Z51 suspensions are that way.

I had that setup on mine, but I prefer the Z06 front bar, especially on the street.

 

Z06 sway bars and shocks

 

all too well.



when i first started driving my car i learned about this system the hard way, a hard cut of the wheel plus full braking power plus balding tires equal hitting fire hydrant.

ouch. a hard lession to learn.

 

I actually didn't know Z51 and Z06 rear sway bars were the same.. Maybe i should upgrade the rear to a hotckis then, since the front seems to be well suited for this car.

 

I already have Z06 sway bars since my car is a Z06 and i have the C6 Z06 shocks(which are great BTW). But the only thing i dont get is..someone told me i have the wrong rear endlinks. Is there a difference in endlinks between:

Z51 and Z06?
01 Z06 and 02andup Z06?

 

Well i've done that myself, but i guess i didn't consider that a crash for some reason. I'm used to my cars have battle wounds from driving around in the mountains. But yeah..i was making a left and went wide and made a mess of my radiator support and the lower part of my front bumper.

 

If you want more oversteer, then increase the diameter/stiffness of the rear bar with a T1 or Hotchkis.

T1:
Front = 38.1mm, hollow, wall thickness = 6.35mm
Rear = 26.98mm, hollow, wall thickness = 6.35mm

Z06:
Front 30mm, hollow, wall thickness = 4.5mm
Rear 23.6mm, hollow, wall thickness = 3.0mm

Base:
Front 23mm, 3.81mm wall thickness
Rear 19.1mm, 2mm wall thickness

Z51: (00 and up)
Front 28.6mm, 4.15mm wall thickness
Rear 23.6mm, 3mm wall thickness

Hotchkis:
Front = 31.75mm diameter, hollow, wall thickness = 4mm
Rear = 25.4mm diameter, hollow, wall thickness = 4mm

 

To increase oversteer, you can also go to a stiffer rear spring i.e.if you have z51, you can go to z06.

 

Here is a little racing trick that you can use and it works great on Z06's

If you want just a bit less understeer remove some of the preload on the front swaybar bushings. You can space the bar brackets down about 1/16 of an inch, front and rear of each front bar bracket and that will usually do it. It only takes about two minutes and if you use alignment shims you don't even have to remove the bolts, just loosen them up and slip in the shims to taste. We do it at the track between autocross runs and dial it right in.

The reason this works is that the bars are really stiff anyway and a lot of the softness in the system is in the bushings. Don't let it get loose, that would cause some strange handling, but if you soften the preload a bit it you can tune it to your liking. Never shim more than 1/8th of an inch. What we do is 1/16 in the front bolts and if that isn't enough, go to 1/16 on the back bolts, which is usually plenty.

You can also add stiffness to the rear bushings by putting a piece of sheet metal inbetween the rubber and the bracket, or you can go to poly bushings in the back.

A bar change is a lot of stiffness change, and we have found that you almost never need that much change unless you are dorking with springs or have changed tires and wheels around a lot.

Since this is cheap and takes about 5 minutes to do, try it and you will be amazed...

 

Sounds like some interesting, inexpensive techniques to try here..

 

BTW: Nice set up SpeedyZ.

 

Might try a bit more neg camber in the front as well. You can run up to -1.5>2 degrees on the street without any real impact on tire wear in my experience.

 

I just got my new tires on which are 10mm wider in the front but the same size in the rear.

The alignment was way off before.

Now i have -1.0º camber in the front and -.5º in the rear.
-.16 total toe in the front and 6.9º caster. I want to heat cycle the tires a few times before i take them to the limits but it feels a lot better already. Rotation is way better.

I'm taking the car to Thunderhill on Sunday, but most of my driving is done in the mountains where the turns are auto-x speeds so the car needs help rotating. I'm sure on the racetrack at higher speeds the car will rotate just fine.

 

Oh yes, it will.

Be sure those tires are good and heat cycled first.

 

how many times?