Ice Racing

M-XQuad-
Dude are you drinkin to much of that Hennesey, roll bars c-mon!!! Were not in sprint cars here. how do you have an inch of ground clearance in the back ? skid plate? and up front 2.5" what the?? 50" wide maybe a little wide I mean you don't want to wide sometimes ,cause' it will take weight off of the tires and traction might suffer. Think of it as P.S.I.(pounds per square inch) your trying to get the studs pushed into the ice. The harder the ice the more weight you would want on your tire. If you go to wide then you don't have the leverage on that tire to force the studs in the ice, and that goes for tire pressure also. Hard ice= high pressure, soft ice =low pressure. High pressure makes the tire bulge in the middle a bit and puts less studs on the ice which gives you more pounds on those studs and they can dig in better. To many studs on the hard ice will make it seem like it's skating or slipping alot, usually. Imagine studded tires on concrete it would spin alot correct? Soft ice you usually want more studs on the ice= lower pressure to flatten out the tire surface. Not saying what I run for pressures but, this is the way I have always thought about it, and well not to brag but, the results have spoken for themself.

Ok, yeah sway-bars are usually a good thing. Ice racing is more like T-T set-up. Nice pic of the racing BTW. Well with your Long Travel shock, weight transfer will come into play. If you can slow the rebound down enough it might work. When you get on the gas the front end will have to go all the way thru all the long travel to top out. Like when you try to pull a wheelie. It takes alot more to get it to sag in the back and transfer weight to the rear tires for traction. Then again shorter swingarms come into play, but not so much with the new 4-strokes either though. I have seen guys use suspension limiter straps like off snowmobile suspensions to limit how far the front end comes up thru the travel. Seem to work well.
The width might be something, are you narrow offset 4+1 already? Look at the race pic, looks like those are stock a-arms , or +2's with stock offset, and I know the 2 guys in second and third are fast the last time I raced, and the guy leading must be too if he's leading those 2. #41 looks like maybe stock arms with flipped wide rims?? #28 looks like +1 or +2 arms with narrow offset. All look like fairly short shocks or stock length roughly. I know this one guy local here had an early Gibson LT front end with Axis LT's, and he used limiter straps and it worked well he was fast. So..... there's yer' sign.

Quad-16, yeah would like to get down that way for races. I know for sure there used to be a few real fast Banshee's from that way. As far as the name goes send me a "PM" here and maybe I'll tell ya'. The no sway-bar thing is kinda more toward the LT250R and its chassis design. Rake of the a-arm pivots(the LT250R was like zero rake), camber, caster, length of a-arms all come into play. The LT250R just seemed to handle flat oval, arching corners better. Less tendancy to have to twitch the bars back and forth like counter-steering to avoid spin-out. Unlike the Honda's and Yamaha's, which were known for quick spin-outs, and you would have to turn the bars back and forth alot more which scrub's alot of speed thru the corners. A nice constant "slideways" pitch thru the corners is always faster! Now TRX250R and newer chassis design's might work good on T-T because you have 180 degree corners, which is the equivalent to spinning out quickly and going the other way. One of the reasons I built the "HONZUKI" was because"IMO" the TRX250R has a better geometry for M-X racing, as we all know most newer style chassis are based on that design.
It was a few years back, that I was able to do well without a sway-bar against other machines that had all the stuff you could get on a Quad. Then I got into longer a-arms, lowering kits, and changing things around and I felt I needed a sway-bar then. With proper set-up and practice sometimes you can achieve excellent results without one.

M-X Quad, well you said you don't want to be switching around to much stuff. Another way to limit travel is to get Limiting spacers installed in the shocks you have now, instead of buying new shorter shocks or lowering kit, ect... Just run out to the local "sled" snowmobile shop(I know you have one of those snow snakes if you live in Minnesota) and get some of those suspension limiter straps and strap them on.
OMG did I just say that (strap them on) :huh: