Suckerfish horizontal sub-items

I am using newsflash and need to theme the suckerfish menu to have horizontal 2nd level (sub level) menus.
I believe this can be achieved with either css or adding code to the theme's phptemplate.
I would also like to make the 2nd level background-color and text color different from the top level.
But I am horrible at doing either and would appreciate some guidance.
For reference, a suggestion I was given for a different theme (acquia prosper) was to do the following to inject the sf-navbar class:

function acquia_prosper_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
  // Add Superfish navbar class if dropdown enabled
  if ($vars['primary_links'] && theme_get_setting('primary_menu_dropdown') == 1) {
      $vars['primary_links_tree'] = preg_replace('/<ul class="menu sf-menu/i', '<ul class="menu sf-menu sf-navbar', $vars['primary_links_tree'], 1);
  }
}