Suspension

Installing a stiffer rear stabilizer bar has made an absolutely "night and day" difference in the Mini Cooper's handling. The suspension is pretty tight out of the box, but it does have a fair amount of understeer that is rather unpleasant when driving near the limit. I started out with the soft setting on the H+R rear stabilizer bar, but have since been running this bar in the stiffest position. However, I find it causes too much oversteer. With the stiff setting, I really like the reduced body roll, but it just oversteers too much when pushing the limit and is too twitchy for a street car. I've recently moved it back to the softer setting and that brings it back to more neutral handling. I'm still running the stock front stabilizer bar. If I should ever change that out with a stiffer bar, the stiffer setting on the rear bar would most likely be required to keep handling neutral.

I put in the ProMini links to go with the stiffer rear stabilizer bar. They are of a turnbuckle design to adjust length (and thus load) and feature Heim joints. It seems the majority of street Minis out there running a larger rear stabilizer bar are still running their stock links, but I've just seen too many instances where the stock links have either bent or broken under the increased stress. I didn't want to deal with that and besides, these ones look way kool.

Just some pix of the initial install. What a treat. Because of the tight fit under there, the rear subframe had to be pulled to get the stock bar out and the new bar in. A great job to start after work at 11:30pm. Needless to say, my neighbor was a bit surprised when she pulled into the garage at 1am only to find me with the back end of the Mini apart;-)