Aftermarket sway bars for 458?

Have you checked parts for the 458 Challenge car?

 

Try nopi

 

What are you trying to fix?

 

Speciale sway bars

Rear 289880 (Bushing 240824,Mount 244778)
Front 289876 (Bushing 233210,Mount 245822)

458 Challenge sway bars

Rear 269419 (Bushing 265698, Mount 265689, Tie Rod 265789)
Front 269418 (Bushing 265694, Mount 265688, Tie Rod 265784)

 

You might want to do a bit more research before ordering up the Challenge sway bars. The challenge cars might have sufficiently different enough geometry/mounting locations that it wouldn't be plug and play (as evidenced by the different part number for the tie rod).

 

Don't rely on diameter, it's basically a useless parameter since geometry, thickness usually change between components.

The Speciale bar has the same p/n as the 488 GTB, 488 Pista, F8. So basically within the 458 generation (458,488,F8, all road variants), ONLY the Italia/458 spider have a different bar than everything else.

It's not an expensive component so if you're even considering it, just do it, itll be like <1000 USD inclusive of labor.

If you really want to be fine tuning your front/rear roll stiffness you could always go full custom. That's a far better option than going to an aftermarket bar which typically doesn't have THAT much adjustability (maybe 3 holes or something at best)

Karcepts makes great sway bars that have LOADS of adjustability and are actually built for guys who auto-x and track their vehicles as opposed to guys who just mod their cars because they think "that's what enthusiasts do". They don't make anything for Ferrari but I'm just sayin something like this would be what you'd need if you REALLY want to dial in that roll stiffness and load transfer distribution.

It honestly wouldn't even be that hard to make on your own. The design is a splined steel tube (very easy to calculate torque from a textbook) + aluminum arms. You'd be able to get approximate figures for stock stiffness if you are willing to sacrifice a stock bar (cut it for ID measurements). But this would be super hardcore and would probably cost in excess of 10k once you factor in the time you're taking to do all this on your own and all the machining/prototyping.

The below pictures are the bars for an ND MX5 and they're basically 1000usd an axle compared to the "normal" aftermarket bars which are like 300-ish per axle.




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Difference will just be the speciale will be stiffer than the standard and challenge stiffest

I can't speak as to how the balance would be affected but I would imagine that both options would reduce understeer (increase oversteer)

Do you have an italia or a spider ?

Honestly I think on a spider just stick with what you had from the factory, at most move to what the speciale had (speciale aperta had the same swaybars as speciale coupe).

Unfortunately the convertible chassis is floppy. There's nothing you can do about that. Unlike mclarens and Lamborghinis the chassis is all aluminum and there simply isn't a lot of stiffness in the chassis and that limits how stiff your suspension components can be before all that load just goes into the chassis flexing it as an undamped spring.

Convertibles don't make good race cars .....especially those that were not designed as an open top from the ground up.

If you have an italia you can go as stiff as you'd like.

Body roll isn't really a bad thing. Especially for non-professional drivers who can "feel" these things better, roll is one of the characteristics which allow a driver to understand what is happening. It's a vital "communication" tool. Simply reducing roll will not measurably increase grip, cornering speeds, handling, etc.

Roll doesn't appreciably contribute to load transfer. The car won't ACTUALLY perform any better simply by reducing body roll. There's a "base" amount of load transfer that occurs simply due to lateral acceleration and a CoG that's above ground level. This will transfer load to the outside wheels even if your suspension was infinitely stiff (imagine replacing the springs with a solid element). Roll will contribute extremely marginally to load transfer as the CoG physically moves marginally towards the outside of the car during cornering but this is so incredibly tiny it's not worth mentioning.

Roll provides valuable information to the driver as it's an obvious cue for how hard you're pushing and how close to the limit you are.

If you really hate the roll that much, get the speciale bars and install em. It's not a lot of money and it's not a permanent change so you can always go back. You can also keep the speciale bars on the front and go back to standard in the rear if you want to give it more natural understeer, or keep the speciale bar in the back and keep standard front if you want to induce more oversteer.

All the stock bars only have 1 hole so there's no adjustment beyond swapping out bars.

Stiffer springs and stiffer sway bars both will lead to things "happening quicker". Transitions take less time to complete, so changing from moving straight ahead to a steady cornering state will take less time to complete. It doesn't mean your cornering Gs will improve and it won't mean you will neccesarily under/oversteer. Quicker transitions will obviously feel like "better handling" and to a certain extent that is true by definition but things moving "too quick" is also possible.

Don't overthink it though, for ~500 usd for OEM speciale parts, just do it if you're even thinking about it.