Strut your stuff

"A strut bar, or commonly known as a strut brace or a strut tower brace, is designed to tie the two opposing strut towers together to form a single unit. This is to minimize the strut tower flex during hard cornering.

When taking a turn, a car's strut towers normally flex. This may cause the losing of some traction. The strut tower brace keeps the strut towers from flexing. They distribute the pressure applied to one strut tower when taking a turn on both towers instead of just one.

This results in improved chassis rigidity. Understeer is reduced(not sure bout this part. Some sites say increase), the tire wear is improved and metal fatigue is minimized in the strut tower portion. Adding a brace between these two strut towers is a great way to solidify a vehicle's suspension."

That's a typical description of a Strut bar.

This Cusco site has a few videos which demonstrates the flexing of the car body and how using a strut bar can reduce this and improve handling.

Ultra Racing is a Malaysian manufacturer and they make all kinds of bars for improving chassis stiffness.

I have not been able to get a definite answer as to whether the bar will improve handling only in racing driving conditions or whether it will improve handling in normal driving too. However, the general consensus is that the amount of effect felt will depend on how stiff/flexible your car is to begin with.

Although many sites emphasize better handling as the main selling point of strut bars, I'm more interested in the frame and chassis support part of it.

Just like my hockey sticks that are designed to flex, they do lose their flex after a short while and become soft way before they break. So I can totally imagine this happening to the frame of a car over time. So it looks like in the interest of extending the life of my car's chassis and frame, this might be my first modification.

From the few quotations I received, this modification would cost around RM150 or less and is a really short and simple process of screwing the bar on to the tops of the struts.