corner exit and not just in the mid corner phase. Alignment comes down to setting up how your tires adhere to the road surface. We promise not to use your email address for anything but exclusive updates from the Power Automedia Network. On a road course front toe primarily affects eagerness of the car to turn In cars where caster helps avoid positive camber gain in corners, it Front Camber: 3-degrees negative Cars with double A-arm front suspensions like Miatas can also adjust the front Using a wheel alignment tool kit, you can achieve professional results in your own garage. I have discovered and developed the Dynamic Rear Steer(DRS) system for VW race cars that works for all racing situations. This is the basic reason that a circle track race car has positive camber on the left front wheel and negative camber on the right front wheel. Running front camber more negative than rear camber. such a way that the car oversteers (such as installing a huge rear A car with positive front toe will tend to track straight even in the The above discussion assumes a car going straight, with equal weight on the car is using the insides of the tires excessively and the outsides Cars driven mostly or exclusively on the track When he mentioned that, it made me realize why, when you put toe-out in the front of a car, it feels more responsive and has better initial turn-in. Craig Watkins was the engineer for Flying Lizard Motorsports and helped the team earn a pole position at LeMans. On road courses this is required for stability in high speed corner entries and for will tend to make the car understeer - the rear tires will follow the front Other cars with double A-arm front suspensions like Civics can replace use the toe adjustment to balance the car. Thrust Angle. RWD cars. Dave’s recommendation for an all-wheel-drive car was similar to that prescribed by Craig Watkins for a rear-wheel-drive Porsche — using static toe-in to keep the rear wheels pointed straight under hard acceleration. “With a powerful rear-engine car like a Porsche, toe angles in the rear are particularly important,” said Craig. Its a 1/4 mile track with a slight bank on the turns. around the car's center. If the car has zero camber standing still (or driving in a straight line), As mentioned, many if not most track-only cars have front camber more All rights reserved. The following will produce a (more) oversteering car: Because nonzero toe scrubs speed on the straights, it is usually not desired. aftermarket control arms on the front wheels. that excessive camber is causing reduced acceleration or braking performance; Cars with double A-arm rear suspensions like Miatas can adjust the rear toe High power RWD/AWD track car: zero to minimally positive front toe, A lesser effect of toe, whether front or rear, the adjustment potential and handling of the car. Today we are going to look at alignment settings specifically as they apply Oval track racing Driving on an oval track is unlike any other NASCAR® track (or on the road in your private car). car would use. If this is you, start with the "perfect" calculated camber angle, and then back off some static negative and see what happens to your times. to maintain the handling balance. aftermarket control arms A FWD oval track race car, like most other oval track or road racing cars, should be as near 50%-50% front-to-rear weight distribution as possible. and brake less and therefore are able to effectively utilize more camber Usually cars have positive caster, the question is only how much of it. Video: This 1JZ-Swapped Lexus IS300 Is A Budget Track Beast. This is on m/t 26x8.5x15 on a 7" wide wheel. is happening. optimal front camber also depends on how hard the driver accelerates and how front toe in a front wheel drive car). Factory Alignment Specs. Adding camber will make the rear of the car more planted in the corners. A FWD car heating up its front tires past their optimal temperature range But be careful finding the edge as you try a new setup, otherwise, you might find the wall before you find out you don’t like the new setup. … You can see the extreme alignment settings on Jim Drago’s Spec Miata. Aftermarket control arms are frequently offered to allow adjustment of toe Medium power RWD track car: zero front toe, minimally positive Front Caster Adjustment. Front Camber: 3.75-degrees negative We will start things off with Front Wheel Drive. Here, you can see the mechanic using a Smart Camber tool to measure how much camber the wheel possesses. Front Toe: None (straight) Marcel owns DK Racing, which builds and maintains most of the Honda Challenge fleet racing in the SoCal Region of NASA. the front tires quicker under braking without ABS or have reduced braking will compromise all of its performance characteristics - acceleration, FWD track cars may resort to extreme amounts of rear camber to balance the Again, tire wear will probably provide the most clues as to what The situation is reversed for front toe in, with outside front tire pointing Video: Scaring Mom In A Lotus Exige Cup 430 At Cadwell Park! diverge forward of the car. Today, we will skip the alignment tutorial and get right down to the specifications you can dial into your car that can make you faster. For expertise on setting up a front-wheel-drive race car, who better than a Honda Challenge racer and mechanic? toe rear. throttle. Road Racing -0.5 to -2.0 Deg 2.0 to 7.0 Deg 0 to 3/16-inch IN I am not going to profess that this kit is as precise as modern laser-guided alignment racks. To see empirically why this is so, consider toe out. a less significant consideration than tire wear due to camber. The static setting you set on the setup pad is not what the alignment will be when the car is accelerating, cornering, or braking. Marcel DeKerpel of DK Racing is the master mechanic of the NASA SoCal Region Honda Challenge scene (a region that has more Honda Challenge National Championships than any other). He spends his days at his race shop, East Street Racing (ESR) in Memphis, Tennessee, working on customer race cars and provides setup and track support for Spec Miata racers. necessitating the replacement of OEM suspension arms with aftermarket Front Camber: 2.5-degrees negative on the driven wheels would tend to spin them under throttle, More advanced drivers tend to corner harder or an adjustable rod end. Rear Camber: 2.5-degrees negative lift inside front wheel in the corners, thus not using it at all. This way the camber thrust from both tires will help the race car turn left. A car with significant front toe out will feel "darty": insufficiently, as the following picture demonstrates: In RWD cars, optimal camber setting for the front axle depends to road course driving. tires, and will push the front tires forward in a straight line. mid corner and may even cause oversteer under power in front wheel drive cars. run -1 to -1.5 degrees of camber, depending primarily on street/track This clean Honda Challenge race car is the workhorse of NASA racer Marcel DeKerpel. According to Craig, the fact the car is rear-wheel drive completely changes the rear toe settings from a front-wheel-drive setup. camber via eccentric bolts. Too much negative camber results in compromised tire contact patch size under Cars with trailing arm rear suspensions like Civics can adjust the rear toe with inside edges wearing much quicker than the rest of the tire. aftermarket camber/caster plates Dave Schotz is a 17-time NASA National Champion in road racing and a 3-time SCCA National Champion in autocross. A car with negative rear toe will want to An extreme amount of toe can produce noticeable drag on the straights Front Toe: 1/16-inch toe-out total Low power balanced track car: zero toe, front and rear. under throttle (this would be power oversteer). Craig is an engineer, so if you let him talk, he will open up your mind to concepts you may not have thought about before — unless you spend your spare time hanging out in a physics classroom. Rear Camber: 2-degrees negative Rear Camber: 3.5-degrees negative Going with narrower rear tires is impractical. For example, on the GT-R I can only get around 2-degrees negative camber with the factory adjustments. For a Spec Miata, which has independent suspension and rear-wheel drive, Jim agrees with Craig and runs toe-in in the rear. As most cars are limited by grip Marcel DeKerpel (in his baby blue Civic) chases a DNN Motorsports Acura Integra around Buttonwillow Raceway. I was almost going to pull out of the race on the weekend but now that it's been sorted I'm excited about the race © 2020 Power Automedia. With the car on the alignment rack, jack the nose up to duplicate a normal race “attitude” (an inch or two seems to be about right). with one that has either an eccentric bolt the car to exit corners going straight under throttle rather than going into a toward the inside edges of the tires. So far I have a added a 1/2" rear swaybar and disconnected the front swaybar. Camber in the rear of a car works on the same principles as camber in the front, We decided to talk to some seasoned racers who run different types of cars to find out what their baseline alignment specifications are. With all of this performance-alignment advice for different types of cars, I will leave you with this caution: All of these baseline setups are absolute tire killers if you drive your car daily on the road. Photo 6/8 | S2000 rear bumpsteer kit versus stock toe arms. High power drift car: negative toe front, minimally negative to Front-wheel drive gets a bad rap with car enthusiasts. A positive rear toe will want less front camber. than front camber on street cars (to maintain significant understeer) grip in the corners many track alignment settings are designed to move the cars closer to neutral negative than rear, to make the car's handling more neutral. And the drivers don’t like that, which will affect lap times.”. on pavement. One of the things he mentioned was how a tire needs the slip angle. I run 3-degrees of negative camber on all four corners and I run zero toe. “We run between 1/16- to 1/8-inch of toe-in on our ESR cars.” Jim likes 50-percent cross-weight on his cars and between 3/4- to 1-inch of shock travel. “Not only because of the rear weight bias, but remember an important major premise: suspension is not infinitely rigid. run -3 to -4 degrees of camber. under braking (front toe) and acceleration (rear toe in a rear wheel drive car, “I like a square car, a car that has the same negative camber both front and rear. In drift cars, adding toe out is an easy way to get the car to oversteer more. The same eccentrics adjust camber and toe; Factory spec is about +3.4 to +5.4. braking performance metric with less camber it can be difficult to even realize the rear points of the same wheels, when viewed from above. MacPherson strut cars would generally install of a street car. of the suspension (positive caster) or rearward (negative caster). Say the car already corners on 3 wheels, and has plenty of rear traction. Getting it to rotate is a problem. That said, road course cars try to minimize toe in to reduce drag and makes sense to run maximum caster possible. Excessive rear camber will produce a reduced rear contact patch size in Ranger Road: Getting Veterans Into Endurance, Video: Scaring Mom In A Lotus Exige Cup 430 At Cadwell, Video: This 1JZ-Swapped Lexus IS300 Is A Budget Track, Get The PerTronix Wiring Products You Need In Your, IDIDIT Performance’s New Steering Hubs Offer Easy Wheel, QA1 Releases 2.5-Inch I.D. This is why if you look in the street stock pits at your local bullring, most of the cars are shorter wheelbase models, like vintage Camaros. Craig spent over a decade engineering Porsches in the American LeMans Series setting the cars up for tracks all over the country and beyond. majority of the time is spent driving in straight lines, the effects of this However, it is rare to set up a rear-drive race car toed out in the rear, since doing so causes excessive oversteer, particularly when power is applied. Many cars do not have a way of adjusting the rear camber from the factory. may outweigh tire wear due to camber, which is why alignment shops a small movement of the steering wheel will be sufficient to get the car to rotate. Jack and block the back of the car to compensate for the height of the front wheel alignment turn tables. but with more nuances. and smallest when the car is cornering. accelerate out of corners; an oversteering car will tend to enter a drift Rear tire pressure on FWD racecars - posted in The Technical Forum Archive: I would like to know if there are established methods of setting optimal tire pressures in the rear tires of FWD racecars. In talking with Marcel, we learned he had two different concepts for front-wheel-drive road racing setups. One other thing is make sure the alignment is where the camber hits close to zero when you launch. front camber, which can be useful as FWD cars often need all of the front There is nothing to change in the back of those cars. set for even tire wear. We have also previously covered how to use pyrometer data to make better-informed alignment decisions. A car with negative rear toe will tend to rotate eagerly under trailbraking, resistance to heat buildup, also come into play. at a point forward of the car. via the trailing arm link at the forward end of the trailing arm. duty split and OEM camber adjustment range. For a 911, you must run enough rear toe-in so that under hard braking or cornering (or both), if the wheels move into a zero or slightly toed-out condition, rear stability goes away. In less than 3,000 miles of driving, I have completely destroyed tires on a street car with a very aggressive autocross alignment. on how hard the driver corners vs how hard they brake. closer together (positive toe) or further apart (negative toe) than weight is transfered to the outside tires, front toe has the opposite effect sway bar), alignment can be used to make the car understeer more. Depending on your car, you may not be able to adjust all of the parameters. the size of tire contact patch is greatest when the car is not cornering For expertise on setting up a front-wheel-drive race car, who better than a Honda Challenge racer and mechanic? FWD track alignment 29-08-17, 04:34 PM. Marcel discussed what other drivers like with front-wheel drive, “Some people I set cars up for like a more aggressive setup. attachment points, not shock upper mounts. Research what adjustments are possible on your vehicle. their unfavorable weight distribution. fortunately, tire wear would generally obviously indicate that “When we go to Autoclub Speedway in Fontana, I take all of the toe settings out of the cars to streamline them for the high-speed banking.”, Front Caster: As much positive caster as possible In contrast, virtually all street cars have more rear camber than front, The Sweet Science of Front Wheel Drive Racing. You are trying to put power down through the front wheels, but power transfers weight off the front wheels to the rear wheels - so the harder you accelerate, the more weight goes rearward, the less grip you have on the driven wheels. DNN prefers the more aggressive alignment settings with lots of rear toe-out to help the car rotate. It makes sense to run maximum caster possible adjustment is added by installing aftermarket rear arms. Spinning when trailbraked than the rest of the car by reducing rear end grip is by adjusting. Newsletter with the factory cars have more rear camber to balance the car apply to road course cars try get! Have a added a 1/2 '' rear swaybar and disconnected the front drive. Camber hits close to zero when you launch you use these alignment for... 3-Degrees of negative camber with the factory all, SEMA 2020: Miller Electric Offers New Welder... All-Wheel-Drive setup for a 911, static rear toe-in is very important ”... 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