WANTED: TiC GD X-Brace

A rear X-​brace is some­thing that I’ve always been inter­ested in. The Turn in Con­cept piece looks extremely solid and robust. Unfor­tu­nately it does look a lit­tle heavy and takes up a good amount of the rear pass through for my car. I’ve noticed that my car is not rotat­ing as well as I would like it to at my last track day and stum­bled upon this MotoIQ arti­cle about the TiC X-​brace.

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Los­ing half my pass through!

 

The ben­e­fits of this brace seem impres­sive. You can see how much the body flexes in this video:

It does seem like the rear end of the GD chas­sis squirms around a lot under stress. The only down­sides then are that I would lose so much of my pass-​through as well as so much of my money. At $450, the TiC Rear X-​brace is quite pricey.

Since the force on this brace is actu­ally a pulling force, the folks over at Lite­speed have actu­ally made a three pound solu­tion. Their rear chas­sis bridge is a mere $125, and from online and my per­sonal friend’s reviews this option seems just as viable.

Eric Noble, designer of the X-​Brace, is on record as say­ing you could dupli­cate the func­tion of the X-​Brace with cables. That and his video, almost iden­ti­cal to Dan’s, con­vinced me he was right — so I did.

If you look at the video, what you see is the top of the rear chas­sis mov­ing lat­er­ally a greater dis­tance than the bot­tom which of course is chas­sis flex and part of what makes up body roll. Since this can only hap­pen in one direc­tion at a time as you turn, you don’t nec­es­sar­ily need a fully rigid brace to coun­ter­act the motion. I have read the crit­i­cism that you “can’t push a rope” which while true shows absolutely zero knowl­edge of the physics involved here because all we’re try­ing to do is allow the bot­tom of the chas­sis to get a tighter hold on the oppo­site side top of the chas­sis. This is a pulling force and obvi­ously not a push­ing force so a cable sit­u­a­tion works just fine.

Now, as far as ini­tial ten­sion of the cables, they don’t need to be gorilla tight to try and pull the strut tops together. The goal is to limit the lat­eral twist­ing motion of the chas­sis only when turn­ing, so the turn­buckle is ini­tially adjusted to “taut” (I say about as tight as an alter­na­tor belt in the install instruc­tions, with a bit of deflec­tion left in them), so when you turn, that small amount of slack is imme­di­ately taken up and resisted by the cable/​turnbuckle.

Does it work, yes it def­i­nitely lim­its the chas­sis flex in the rear. I’ve always meant to make a video but just haven’t got­ten around to it due to being busy, but I have a lot cus­tomers that agree. Does it work as well as the X-​Brace? I couldn’t say for sure because I’ve never been will­ing to pay even used prices for one, but I wouldn’t be sur­prised at all if the X-​Brace felt tighter. After all, it does limit the very small amount of ver­ti­cal flex that may be present too, but I doubt it makes an enor­mous dif­fer­ence. — Litespeed

I am most likely going to pick up a Lite­speed rear chas­sis bridge because of the weight and the price. As Bob Barker always said, “The price is right, bobby!”

I’ll post a review once I get and install one!

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