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Vehicle Dynamics

Anti-Roll Bar

A torsion bar connecting the left and right sides of a suspension. Stiffer anti-roll bars reduce body roll but increase weight transfer to the outside tires in corners, which can be used to tune understeer and oversteer balance.

Deep dive

Milliken's Race Car Vehicle Dynamics explains the mechanism: "Anti-roll bars typically affect the total axle lateral force through tire load sensitivity — which is seen as nonlinearity in a plot of tire lateral force against load. With the classic use of an anti-roll bar, one end of the car resists more of the lateral load transfer than the other. The resulting differences between the tire loads effectively reduce the lateral force available (when compared to the more-equally loaded tires on the other end of the car)." Adams' Chassis Engineering adds the practical perspective: the anti-roll bar "creates forces at the four points where the bar is attached to the vehicle — forces on the suspension increase weight transfer to the outside tire, forces on the frame resist body roll. Because the total weight transfer due to centrifugal force is not changed, the opposite end of the chassis has reduced weight transfer."

Sources

  • Chassis Engineering Adams
  • Racing Chassis and Suspension Design Carroll Smith
  • High-Performance Driver Education (HPDE) Techniques by Skill Level(p. 10, 26)
  • Analysis Techniques for Racecar Data Acquisition (Jorge Sergers)(p. 12, 13, 15)