Unswayed
By Cathy Elliott
celliott@newsandpress.com

In a popular area restaurant recently, I was enjoying an order of fried pickles when I overheard a couple of guys conducting an animated conversation about something called a sway bar.

This raised several issues. First, when I hear the word “NASCAR” whiz past my head in any type of public setting, my ears prick up in much the same way as my dog Clancy’s do when the carpet shampooer shows up at the kitchen door. So technically I guess you could say I wasn’t really overhearing this exchange. Okay, I admit it; I was actively eavesdropping.

Second, yes, we do deep fry our pickles in the South, slap them in a basket with a cup of dipping sauce and call it an appetizer. Sometimes they even achieve vegetable status.

Third, although a lot of folks seem to have some pretty definite opinions on sway bars these days, and don’t mind sharing those opinions with you loudly and at great length, they seem unclear on the actual specifics of the subject.

I discovered this the old-fashioned way; I asked. I can always tell when someone isn’t quite up to speed on the pesky details of whatever is it he’s talking about, because when a pointed question is posed, like in this case—”What exactly IS a sway bar, anyway?”—the answer invariably goes something like this—”Oh, it’s just technical stuff.”

This response, generally delivered in a mumble with downcast eyes and ranking just slightly higher than my personal favorite, “Don’t worry your pretty head about it,” on the SOD (Scale of Dismissal), has been forwarded to dozens of international reading-between-the-lines experts. All of them have returned identical translations. “Oh, it’s just technical stuff,” really means, “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

We all know how frustrating, and sometimes downright infuriating, it can be to attempt a conversation with someone who hasn’t a clue what you’re talking about. Sway bars have been at the forefront of racing news recently, for reasons which have been outlined clearly and concisely by our many great NASCAR beat writers and therefore don’t bear further explanation here.

Still, I am exasperated. How can I engage in any sort of educated exchange on the topic of sway bars when I wouldn’t recognize a sway bar if I passed one on the street? It’s like trying to write a review of a movie that you haven’t seen, based solely on what you’ve heard other people say and your general opinion of the starring actors. 

So, with curiosity gripped firmly in one hand and “Engine Building for Dummies” held tightly in the other, I embarked on an epic quest like those which have intrigued adventurers, explorers and mythological figures with unpronounceable names since time began—to actually try and figure out what the heck all the fuss is about. What is a sway bar, and why is it so important that many hours of racing-related TV and radio programming have been devoted to it?

Let’s get some of the obvious, and obviously silly, things out of the way. “Sway bar” doesn’t refer to one of Mowgli’s tropical cronies in “The Jungle Book.” It isn’t an aerial circus prop, so you’ll never hear anyone singing, “He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, the daring young man on the flying ... sway bar.”

It isn’t a famous gourmet food shop in Manhattan (that would be Zabar’s), nor is it some cute local hangout up the street with a great Happy Hour special on fried pickles.

According to our increasingly good Internet information source Wikipedia, the definition of a sway bar is “an automobile suspension device. It connects opposite (left/right) wheels together through short lever arms linked by a torsion spring. A sway bar increases the suspension’s roll stiffness—its resistance to roll in turns, independent of its spring rate in the vertical direction.”

Huh? Is that even English?

There are a whole bunch of additional words in this lengthy definition that make about the same amount of sense to me; namely, none.

All I’ve been able to figure out is that a sway bar is a gadget designed to keep a car from “rolling,” or pulling too much to the outside, while traveling through a sharp turn.

Roll is bad. It can actually make your car flip completely over in certain conditions. The sway bar helps to distribute weight evenly.

There’s a lot of technological mumbo jumbo involved, but boiled down to its bare bones, it balances you and keeps you stabilized.

If you’re driving a race car through a turn and you can maneuver with a minimum amount of lateral movement, and keep going straight ahead rather than side-to-side, it can help get you out in front of the other guys.

Which is the whole point of a race, right?

It goes back to the old mousetrap mentality. Build a better sway bar, and it can help you gain the advantage over your competition. This is why deep, dark sway bar secrets mean so much to those who develop and keep them, and helps explain why some folks would get upset if a “special” sway bar went missing.

But here’s the real question, in my mind at least. How much does detailed information such as this really matter to a race fan?
Is a baseball game made more enjoyable by knowing how many stitches are on the ball, or is The Masters more beautiful to watch after learning how many azaleas are in bloom at Augusta National?

The answer? Probably not. Like the inability to see the grandeur of the forest because of an obsession with a couple of trees, we run the risk of being so focused on a single mechanical part that we might miss all the fun and excitement of the collective engines’ roar. What a shame.

On the other hand, learning something new is never a bad thing. While becoming casually conversant on sway bars, I also ran across a fair amount of information about torsion.

What exactly IS torsion, you ask?

Oh, it’s just technical stuff. Don’t worry your pretty head about it.