ok so I got some more good information with pictures. I know I am boring just talking all of the time without pictures. So I got the RE-11A's mounted on the car and the wheels are back to silver for now. Damn these tires have a lot of grip. I am really looking forward tot he autocross nest weekend with them. Then the wheels will be painted white.
So I decided to look into strut bar stuff for our car. I started to look into the rear since molex7 started a thread asking about them. Now before I go on, I want to say that by no means is what I did the end all of if strut braces are needed or not. These are just somethings I did to see if the chassis flexes and how much. Not saying that they are truly accurate, but they make sense to me. If you guys have any further thoughts on how I did it let me know I would love to hear them. So first I needed a way to get the rear to be loaded. So I put one of my extra wheels under one of the rear tires like so.
I figure that since the other rear tires is up in the air that this would be as much weight transfer I could get in the rear. I then noticed like molex7 mentioned that the rear hatch closed and opened differently. It had to center itself on the latch before it would close. So time to measure. I put 4 pieces of tape on the weather stripping of the rear hatch. I tried to get them to be the same length when you measure the X that they create. Basically I wanted to set them so the rear of the car was "square" Then I could measure the change. Here is a picture of where I put the tape.
So with the car sitting flat when you measure from the top right to bottom left I got 43 3/4" and the same from the top left to the bottom right. I then put the rear tire back under the wheel and measured again. From the top right to the bottom left it was 43 5/8" and from the top left to the bottom right it was 43 7/8" So one moved out 1/8" and the other moved in 1/8" which makes sense since the rear hatch area is just parallelograming (when a square falls over into a diamond shape). Now I did repeat these measurements twice to make sure they were accurate and I was getting the same thing both times.
So thinking where a rear strut brace might be, I measured from the mounts where the rear seats snap into place. Seemed like a solid location which you could bolt to. Loaded and unloaded like above they both measured the same distance apart, 44 1/8" so the distance between them did not change so your typical strut bar with ball joints on the end would not help since the distance did not change. A bar that had solid mounts might help to stiffen it, but I could not come up with a good way to measure the change in the angle of that mounting point. I could use an angle gauge, but I don't have one at the house.
Now moving to the front I measure from one of the top hat mounting bolts on the chassis to the other on the other side.
On the ground it measured 39 13/16" on the dot. I then jacked up the rear of the car a lot to make the front roll. I measured the roll by the distance between the ground and the top of the fender on each side. The difference was 4 1/4" which was as much travel as I have in the front of the bilsteins so yea it was a lot.
I then measured the bolts again and I got the exact same number so it looks like a front strut bar won't really help out at all from what I can see. Not surprised since the top hats are so close to the firewall, but Mini's are the same way and a strut bar helps them a lot. Then again I couldn't measure the angle of the top hats to see if maybe the angle of the tops changes with respect to each other, but I don't really see that as how the chassis would shift in the front.
Thoughts anyone?