Yesterday something hit my car from underneath and it sounded horrific...a loud BANG!! When I check, the M shaped brace under the car was pretty crumpled up in one section yet the rest of the underbody was intact. This brace has been hitting everything all over the place and it has me sick so I just decided to remove it all together.

It seems to weigh about 10lbs which is a lot lighter than I expected it and it's removal will give me exactly half an inch more of ground clearance which should be enough for most scrapes ( a grand majority of the time the car just barely scrapes ). The sedan doesn't have this so hopefully this won't be much of an issue with the coupe.

How does the car feel? Pretty much the same...tomorrow I'll drive it some more but I couldn't tell the difference in the few minutes I drove it. I guess they did it more for chassis stiffness when cornering hard, something I never do, so hopefully I'll never notice the difference.

In the end, my short term analysis says that if anyone is having trouble with lowered cars scraping the m-brace.....try removing it. :P

 

Pic? If it's the one I'm thinking of it's right in front of the rear wheels. If so, mines a solid peice of rust and I was going to remove it and replace mine with the GTSpec braces.

 

No pics but you are correct in thinking it's the one in front of the rear tires.

 

I drove the car today some more ( about 30 miles )... car feels, dare I say, softer of bumps on the road and seems to ride smoother. I like it. I don't know if it's mental or not but for now I see no reason is putting it back on.

 

Maybe it's just me, but that brace seems like a pretty substantial piece of the underbody of our cars. It if were me, I wouldn't remove it. It's certainly there for a reason and if it didn't need to be there then Infiniti wouldn't have delivered it from the factory without it. I'm no expert, but it seems like a bad idea to me.

 

I cut mine and flattened some, to gain some more clerance with out loosing it totally.

 

Yeah, been hitting mine all over the place. Does an aftermarket company make a better piece that would also give more ground clearance?

 

There is a reason for it...it's just not a reason EVERYONE cares about. Better steering response and hard cornering are good examples of what the brace is put there for but I could care less about those two things.

 

I might do something like what the sedan has. It has a small stiff bracket in the tunnel instead of the M-brace the coupes have.