I removed the lower brace causing the interference with the damper and put the damper back on. Pod does indeed seem plenty stiff without the brace.
Unfortunately putting the damper on ruined my new battery hold down method so I flipped the black battery mount on the chassis and cut Velcro to length and put that round the battery & under the mounts and it works great.
If the angled servo mounts do induce under steer I'm going to stick with them because I can control under steer with the throttle but oversteer will end up with me spinning out which is harder to recover from! Finding front end traction is never a problem on our surface.