| Shaun, I'm glad we could get this resolved for you. I hope you don't mind if I post our discussion the way I remember it. As I told you over the phone, there was some confusion on our end regarding which bar was broken. I had heard from someone that it was the rear bar, it wasn't until later that we realized it was the front bar. Once that became evident, the process moved right along. As far as Ultimate Z's involvement. Chris and Ultimate Z have been a great distributor of ours for many years and we value the relationship we have with them. However, Chris was not involved in these decisions to replace your bar. In fact, I don't know if anyone here actually spoke with Chris, the decision came from STILLEN 100%. Very early in this ordeal you (along with everyone who orders STILLEN products) were asked to contact Ultimate Z for the warranty. It was you who said that you did not want to do that. In regards to designing the front sway bar as a solid bar, just like we discussed over the phone, we won't be making that change as we feel it would upset the balance of the car. To see what I mean, simply take a look at the rear bar and see how small it is. Then take a look at the front bar and see how thick it is. If we made that front bar 100% solid it would be way too stiff and you could not get a balanced rear setup with the size of the rear bar that is available. There is a lot that goes into suspension setup and it all starts with balance. If you stiffen up the front too much it could cause serious understeer and not allow the car to rotate. For example, on our Nissan GT R rally car we play with different sway bars all the time, sometimes even going with our STILLEN rear bar and swapping out to the stock front bar. If it's raining really badly, we like this setup because it allows the car to be very compliant and rotate nicely. However, if we're on a race track and we're able to run good, grippy tires, we like running the stiffer front bar and stiffer rear bar. In this environment the car is much more stable and planted and works well. A lot of people think that stiffer suspension is better...That is only true to a point...You want to run the car as stiff as you can given your exact situation. If you have the tires, shocks, aero package, and horsepower and you are keeping in mind what you're trying to do then yes, you can run a stiff bar and 1,000+ pound spring rates. However, most street cars shouldn't be doing this because the tires won't be able to support it. Another example is the #75 IMSA 300ZX. On some tracks like Daytona where the car saw high speeds on the high banked oval they would throw a lot of bar into it and a high spring rate simply to hold the car up from all the aero downforce and from all the grip those massive slick tires provided. But, when they would go to Lime Rock which was a smaller, tighter road course with changing road surfaces (asphalt to concrete) they would run 600-700 pound springs and less sway bar otherwise the car would bounce itself off the road. Sorry for the long response, just wanted everyone to know that my response was not just B.S. and that there was sound reasoning behind it.
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11:51:43 12/07/10
