SN95 rear suspension options- Mild to wild?

[CJK440]

I bought my Cobra from a fellow that wanted to go drag racing. I bought it to drive hard on the street and perhaps give AutoX a shot.

I'm a noob when it comes to chassis setup for the turns and figured this might be the most appropriate forum to get my questions answered.

Recently I did a little poking around on the web to educate myself and found that I need to ditch my drag race rear control arm setup ASAP. I have UPR pro arms with spherical balls on all ends including the axle housing. No compliant bushings at all.

I promptly installed stock rubber bushings in the axle housing to get some compliance for a little cruise this weekend and have a set of low mile stock uppers en-route that I will be installing next week. I'm thinking I might be able to get away with keeping the UPR pro lowers even though they only have heim joints on the chassis side and a rigid tube on the axle end. Maybe I am wrong.

It will be interesting to see how the stock uppers make the car handle on the street. The car is pretty darn sensitive to any imperfection and I wonder if the solid arms are the culprit.

Anywho, I got this far by poking around by myself but what I need help understanding is where do I go from here? I read about a PHB with a PM3L but as I understand it, not the best in the streetable durability dept.

The next option I see for the SRA is a torque arm and PHB or Watts link. Seems like one of if not the best route to go but where does IRS fit into the equation??

From what I understand, I can drop $1300 for a TA and PHB and keep my beefed up SRA or I can find a cobra owner who wants to go drag racing who's interested in my fully modified SRA setup in place of a their IRS setup. With luck my SRA to IRS swap would be a wash $ wise.

So how does the stock IRS stack up against the TA/PHB setup? Some people claim the TA/PHB setup is superior to the IRS, but is it $1300 better? What if I throw some $$ at the IRS? What needs to be done to correct its evils?

I'm not going to enter any competitions that have rule requirements to follow, so anything goes. For what I am doing, spirited street, possibly autoX and zero drag, what direction would you go in and why?

 

[SVTCobra306]

Correcting the IRS evils is a little pricey, the gains would depend largely on what kind of autocross courses you are running on. The PHB setup will keep up well with a modded IRS on a smooth course, but will shine a lot over bumps. I run a PHB with a 4 link with aftermarket control arms upper and lower, and I used to autocross with a buddy that had the same year car but with a heavily modded Termi IRS.. his car wasn't significantly faster than mine, actually I'd beat him sometimes but he was overdriving his, and I had more tire, more HP, but more weight.. we would drive each other's cars, his was built waay more than mine but they were pretty close on street tires.

Bottom line, acquiring and modding an IRS would probably cost about the same as doing a PHB/TA setup, there probably wouldn't be a huge difference on smooth courses, but on the street and rough courses the IRS would shine Put good bushings in it everywhere, put in an IRS brace, and think hard about billet tie rods for the IRS.

I'll say this for the PHB.. it was absolutely the single biggest difference of any suspension mod I've made. I have Steeda uppers, HPM lowers, Termi A arms, SFC's, an Eibach front bar, with all that on we installed the PHB and it was a different car from the get-go. I now also have an EvM adjustable swaybar, if you find one of these jump on it, it is also an excellent thing to have on a solid axle.