Wow, Matt is totally right. I attempted to write a simplified version of what's going on but it was never ending, every paragraph I wrote necessitated three more paragraphs. After about 5 fairly long paragraphs I decided I was making things worse. I don't envy vehicle dynamics book writers. So I condensed it down to this ultra summarized version:

In a turn, weight transfer will be balanced based on roll stiffness. If your front is stiffer than your rear, then the front will transfer weight more than the rear. That total weight has to be transferred regardless - by making the front stiffer you're not suddenly transferring more weight front + rear than if you didn't make it stiffer, you're just splitting it up differently where the front gets more transfer than the rear.

Non staggered (obviously) gives you more grip in the front. Then you can use that grip to take some of the weight transfer by stiffening the front relative to the rear, thereby distributing the increased grip of the front to the rear again. So you're taking grip back from the front and giving it to the rear. The notion that all of the grip you're adding you just take away again with the sway bar is false - in actuality you're giving most of it to the rear wheels.

At the same time, it should be noted that any time you unequally distribute weight transfer, you lose some overall grip because of the property of tire load vs grip that Matt mentioned.

I know I said this was the simplified version but I'll take this couple sentences to at least mention that it also needs to be kept in mind that the car is accelerating a lot of the time to some degree. Braking is generally done in a (mostly) straight line to maximize braking. When you're accelerating you transfer weight front to rear, which serves to transfer some of that load back to the rear tires again, which lessens the effect that takes away overall grip (the less load is on the tires, the more linear they are).

Back to the simplification, in summary it's basically more grip given by wider front tires that you then redistribute equally vs grip taken away by the fact that you're weight is transferring unequally. Although it makes intuitive sense that putting more tire under the car will ultimately lead to higher overall grip, especially given the acceleration factor I mention above, and I'm sure that's true in most or even all cases - there's no way I know to calculate which is bigger in this case of S2000 on hankooks, etc, so that'll take testing to be 100% sure. I think there has been quite a bit of testing, particularly on the track, that shows that nonstaggered S2000s end up faster. So there you have it.

Hopefully that helps as opposed to confusing more. If any of that is incorrect someone let me know.

 

awesome reads.

Getting that book!