Photography by Tim Suddard
Our 2018 Honda Ridgeline celebrates its fifth birthday this week–100,000 mostly trouble-free miles to date–so it got a special present: a bigger rear anti-roll bar.
More rear bar for our hauler? Let us explain.
While recently visiting our friends at Good-Win Racing, we got talking about Honda Ridgelines. The name long associated with Miatas also caters to owners of the Ridgeline as well as the Ford Maverick and Rivian’s new EV truck lineup.
Good-Win Racing recommended their anti-roll bar kit for our Ridgeline. The setup retails for $329 and comes complete with hardware, instructions and even a little packed of silicon grease for the polyurethane bushings.
The bar is adjustable with two positions for the factory end links. Not wanting to get too crazy, we opted for the outboard mounting position, the softer of the two settings.
The original Honda Ridgeline Anti-roll bar measures 26.5mm thick and is seemingly hollow. The Good-Win Racing anti-roll bar is a full 2mm thicker and is solid.
As the Ridgeline is essentially a front-wheel-drive vehicle until it needs the auxiliary rear differential to kick in, it behaves like any other front-wheel-drive car. And any racer will tell you the easiest path to improved performance on a front-drive chassis involves more rear bar.
The Good-Win Racing kit is easy to install. If you use a lift, you could get the job done in about 30 minutes. Everything fit. Nothing rubbed. There were no issues whatsoever in the installation.
But the big question is what did this simple, inexpensive change do for our mighty Ridgeline? And, of course, what were the downsides of the modification?
To put it simply, this modification really improved the handling. While a Ridgeline is one of the most comfortable, best-handling trucks out there in stock form, this modification just transformed how it goes around corners. We knew it would help, but we didn’t think it would be this much of a difference.
As for downsides, there were not. In theory an anti-roll bar change has minimal if any impact on ride quality. In this application, we noticed no difference. There were also no clunks of squeaks.
We would highly recommend this modification to any Ridgeline owner and have found ourselves perusing the Good-Win Racing pages to see what other tricks we might employ.
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