Suspension is both simpler and more complicated than we generally think of it. I'm of the opinion that 2" of clearance on this particular component for this purpose is probably just fine. It is only going to get close hitting if the suspension is at, or near full droop and if it is there is a bigger issue that's being dealt with at that moment.
As y'all have noted, the reason Mitch's tires are sliding the scenario he describes is because the wheels are not in firm enough contact with the ground to maintain traction. That suggests the suspension isn't anywhere near full droop, and the sliding is caused by a number of interelated reasons. (NOTE: what follows is more about high performance driving. As long as reasonable street driving is done on a reasonably normal set-up there isn't much of an issue here. These are beam axle cars and driven within their vintage limits, which are sometimes lower than a minivan's, it's not worth staying up at night worrying about. If you drive mostly at the speed limit, and only get a little randy on occasion, you can stop worrying about it. If you find yourself sliding around on a regular basis, read on...)
The first reason for losing front wheel traction is obvious; there's hardly any weight on them front wheels (thanks Ferdinand). Another is that often the shocks won't let the wheels track the ground precisely so the wheel skips across the tops of the bumps. Balancing the damping of rebound (how fast the wheel heads back to ground) and compression (how much resistance there is to the wheel going up over a bump) is not easy. Top level shocks will allow adjustment of high speed and low speed compression, settings. (important note: when a suspension guy says high speed he means how fast the wheel is trying to move up and down, NOT how fast the car is traveling) Even with the latest most expensive tech you can spend hours at a track with predictable circumstances and still be far from an ideal set up for the whole track (more on that later).
As Stan notes, an anti-sway bar is designed to make the wheels work together to a degree rather than completely separately. This works perfectly on a billiard table smooth corner: braking and turning right will transfer weight to the front left wheel and away from the right rear tire. Too much transfer and the rear loses traction. An anti-sway bar helps by changing the wheel rate (the amount of spring force) on the left front weighted wheel by leveraging some spring force from the right front wheel. So as the left front wheel in our example loads up in a corner it gets a stiffer spring than it normally has to help manage the weight transfer. When we're not cornering we go back have a softer spring for compliance. That's awesome!
But it gets complicated because the anti-sway bar contributes to the damping issues. The lever (the anti-sway bar) is also a spring, so the amount of force it's leveraging isn't linear just because we're conering harder, but also because our road isn't smooth like a billiard table. The anti-sway bar can't tell the difference between a bump and a corner so it reacts to both the same way, by trying to leverage spring rate from one side to the other. Let's go back for a second to the damping of rebound and compression. We will be able to tune those to ideal conditions over a specific range of wheel rates. When we get away from those rates the effectiveness of the dampers diminishes. Most of us keep the car inside those rates by driving it such that it stays in those ranges. Stan and Danny are 10/10ths guys. They go to the edge of the envelope and prefer a car that's predictable if they exceed it (or if an unexpected bump mid-corner decides to exceed it for them). That's harder to accomplsh than it sounds.
Everything gets worse (more real) by putting random bumps in our corner. The wheels aren't hitting them in unison and now the anti-sway bar is reacting by leveraging varying amount of force from one wheel the other wheel. How much it's trying to get is changing rapidly as the wheels encounter the bumps. The spring rate of the anti-sway bar itself comes into play, too. So our tires are now seeing a rapidly changing amount of springing force an weight transfer. That's very difficult for the dampers to keep up with well and how hard the tires make contact with the road varies as a result.
We want the tires in firm contact with the road, pushed down so they stick. The degree to which we are trying to brake also effects the amount of load on the suspension (weight transfer) and then the tire's hystresis (stickiness) comes into play as well, stickier tires need less force on them to hold traction. Sometimes in threshold braking a wheel may start to slide as we LET OFF the brake because we're not holding it down on the road as hard anymore. Of course we can also overwhelm the tire's trction with too much force, like locking up the brakes on a smooth surface in a straight line or applying the full 2232cc's in first gear.
Even in a racetrack situation the amount of tuning one has vs the track conditions can lead to it being faster to drive around some of the bumps than to tune for those alone. A great example is the bump at Monaco in between Casino and Mirabeau. If you really want to have some fun look at that short straight over time as the weight, amount of suspension travel and ground effects changes how that lump is negotiated. It's a wonderful example of balancing trade-offs. The trade-offs can go so far in the other direction that anti-sway bars are avoided all together, like in a trophy truck or Baja bug.
As Danny or anyone who has driven on a track will attest, they are not smooth. They look like it on TV, but they aren't much different than a well maintained road (and some are worse than that). The asphalt acts like a viscous rug, rolling up where everyone tries to slow down (corner entries), and shreds where they scrabble for traction (apexes and such) just like what Mitch observed at intersections.
So have fun with it, but our car's cornering will always have more in common with a dog on linoleum than a scared cat on a carpet. Dogs smile more than cats, though, so I think that's a good thing.
