GenVibe - Community for Pontiac Vibe Enthusiasts

F1 sports strut tower brace. 20 minute install. 42 bucks shipped. A little stiffer up front but not any significant change. It looks good though. Can't beat the price.

I think it made a decent difference. I can't complain because of the price.

TRD's is pretty stout. Its more $ too. I would like to hear from someone who has driven the different brands and could give a comparison.

I've been in a couple vehicles with different sturt bars. Really no matter what brand you get, there is not a great difference. So i think the cheap one works just as good, just paying for the name.

quote:I've been in a couple vehicles with different sturt bars. Really no matter what brand you get, there is not a great difference. So i think the cheap one works just as good, just paying for the name.I agree.

I have one too. The strut brace looks good and appears to be good quality. The bar section is a bit flimsy, but for the price, you can't go wrong. I know for a fact it didn't HURT the front end rigidity. With the strut towers that close to the firewall, no strut brace is going to have that big of an impact on increasing structural rigidity.

If the bar is "flimsy", then you may not be getting the full benefit of something more rigid. In tension (the tops of the strut bars pulling apart / trying to get wider), then I would expect all bars to be equivalent. It is the compression phase, where the top of the towers try to move closer together, that the rigidity of the bar comes into play. (Moment of inertia in engineering speak). Picture you standard yardstick - push together on the ends, and the center of the yardstick wants to buckle out. Glue another yardstick along one edge in an L shaped configuration, and the situation improves. Make a box (like TRD) and it gets better yet. Stronger materials, thicker materials etc improve it still yet. For some mods like a CAI or an exhaust, you get a noticable return in the form of sound or performance. With an STB, its a much more subtle benefit. The jiggle and flex that an STB helps eliminate is like a tooth ache - onces its gone, its easy to forget about it what it was like in the first place.