Upgrading rear control arms and a sway bar on a 1000 horsepower 1993 Mustang from TRZ Motorsports.
This 1993 Mustang started life as a 5.0 ragtop, a respectable street cruiser at the time, but the owner wanted to take things up a notch or two. So now, it’s hiding a 1000 horsepower supercharged monster under the hood.
The problem is that when you light this thing off and mash the throttle, you get loads of tire smoke rather than the speed rush you wanted. The fix is going to be increasing traction, and we’re starting with the rear suspension and some new parts from TRZ Motorsports.
Mustangs use a 4-link rear suspension design, and the’re pretty simple and effective, but the factory stuff just wasn’t designed to handle this kind of power. The first stage in this upgrade is to safely support the car on jackstands, remove the wheels and rear exhaust pipes.
The stock suspension pieces come apart by supporting the rear axle with a floor jack under the side you’re working on, then looseing and removing the bolts on the lower control arms. This will allow you to lower the jack and pull the spring out.
Next, you can remove the front bolt from the lower control arm and remove it. We recommend only changing one side at a time to keep the rear axle in place. Now you can move to the upper arm, take out the bolts, and remove the arm.
On the bench, it’s easy to see the benefits of the TRZ Motorsports suspension pieces. The lower arms are a tubular design for strength, and the bushings are polyurethane for less deflection. They are also adjustable to allow tuning the rear suspension for better launches.
The upper arms are also adjustable so you can set the pinion angle, and they’re much stronger than the stamped steel originals. TRZ also supplies these spherical bearings for the upper rear axle mounts for a solid connection.
TRZ also makes this killer rear sway bar for FOX-bodied Mustangs. This bar welds to the inner rear frame rails and attaches with spherical rod-end link bars to minimize body roll. The end bushing housings are stepped to fit the stock chassis.
We’ve learned it’s best to set the length of adjustable suspension parts to match the factory pieces when you first install them. This way, you’ll know they will fit, and you can make your adjustments from there.
Installing the TRZ rear suspension arms is just like the old Chilton book says… “installation is the opposite of removal.”
Next, clean the area on the rear frame rails and you can position the TRZ swaybar up between the rear frame rails. They supply some thin shims to take up any slack if your rails are wide enough to need them. After you get it in place, you can weld the ends to the rails. Be careful not to burn the car down while welding.
Attach the link bars to the sway bar arms and rotate the bar down to see where the links should attach to the rear axle. This should be done at ride height, so you’ll need to jack up the rear axle again. Clean a spot on the axle and weld the tabs on.
So we’ve shown you how to install this stuff, but the car will have to be dialed-in at the track to set the optimum pinion angle and alignment of the rear axle. If the lower and upper control arms are of different lengths, the car may not go straight, so some adjustment will be needed. The important part is that the rear suspension is now much more equipped to handle the 900 ft.lbs. this engine cranks out. Suspensions like this live happily under 8 second Mustangs all day long!
TRZ Also makes killer race suspension parts for 2005 Mustangs and a variety of other cars, so check their website at www.trzmotorsports.com for the complete list.
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