Quote Originally Posted by 03Silver View Post
from all the looking around ive done...and trust me ive done A LOT the last couple of days because of this handling thing... 25mm was the biggest ive seen for the Evo 8. I haven't looked at other Evos
I have a 27mm rear bar made by Progress. Agency Power makes a 27mm and Robispec makes a 26mm. They are Evo 8/9 universal, not specific to one or the other.

Have you made any decisions yet? My advice is first, buy a good set of tires. Second, drive the car as-is and figure out what its deficiencies are and what you want out of it. Personally, i think that at the level you'll be driving the car, all those braces are going to be a waste of money. You likely won't be pushing the car hard enough to realize any noticeable gains from them.

Once you've become comfortable with how the car behaves with grippy tires, you should start looking at areas of improvement. Start with your coilovers. 5kg/6kg rates are too soft for anything but street driving. Most track setups are at least 7kg/8kg. Most autocross setups are somewhere in the 12-18kg range, depending whether you run street tires or r-compounds. For example, my spring rates are 12kg front/16kg rear. The problem with off the shelf coilovers is that you can't really add much stiffer springs without causing some detriment to the valving. With stiffer springs it's recommended that you revalve your dampers. Depending on the coilover, you might be able to get away with +/-2kg before you need to revalve. KWs for one are pretty resilient. I'm running mine with the off the shelf valving, although I'll probably get them rebuilt and revalved soon.

Once you've figured out the rates you need to get your car closer to how you want it to behave, you should start adding sway bars to tweak it. Most people just go with an aftermarket rear bar and leave the front stock. For a track setup, you'd likely go with a 24-25mm rear bar. For autocross a lot of people prefer the 27mm rear bar.

It might be a lot to digest, but it's important that you take baby steps and figure out how each thing you do affects the car instead of throwing a bunch of stuff at it simultaneously. It'll help you learn the car and make you a better driver in the long run.