Camber Camber is the inward or outward tilt of the tires when looking at them from the fro
Your car and your driving style together determine how much negative camber you need. Aggressive drivers should use more. Those concerned about tire life should use less. Suspension design also matters. MacPherson strut cars need more negative camber to work well under cornering load; unequal-length A-arm and multilink suspensions generally need less negative camber. Softer suspended cars that lean over in turns generally need more negative camber to grip well.
The following table provides a rough guideline on how much camber to use based on your driving style and accounting for tire wear. Surprisingly, the baseline settings are roughly the same for all typical chassis layouts: front-engine front-wheel drive, front-engine rear-wheel drive, front-engine all-wheel drive and mid-engine rear-wheel drive. Keep in mind that many drifters prefer a road-racing setup to create even tire wear and allow the most possible control.
Unfortunately, camber is not adjustable on most modern cars. Even if camber is adjustable, it's rarely adjustable enough to align a lowered car correctly. The best way to adjust camber on the typical MacPerson strut is to use a camber plate. MacPherson strut camber plates use an adjustable top mount that locates the upper shock mount in a retainer plate that slides laterally on a slotted track.
A less expensive (but inconvenient) way to make your camber adjustable is to weld a U-channel bracket to the lower control arm mounts at the chassis and install a lower control arm bolt with fixed eccentric cams riding in the U-channel. Turn the bolt and the eccentrics move the lower control arm in and out to change camber.
Simply enlarging one of the two lower mounting bolt holes in the strut housing about 1/16-inch with a drill, leaning the upright into the strut and retightening the bolts can give you quite a bit of no-cost camber adjustment.
Avoid using undersized shaft or eccentric bolts sold as crash bolts. Crash bolts are sold as a cheap way to adjust camber on crash damaged cars. Because of the small shaft diameter, they usually stretch and allow the camber adjustment to slip under the load of hard driving with sticky tires.
Cars with a multilink or unequal-length A-arm suspension can sometimes use adjusting shims in the upper control arm mount to adjust camber. Many multilink or unequal-length A-arm cars have adjustable camber from the factory. And for some popular cars like the 240SX and 300ZX, there are plenty of adjustable links on the market to adjust camber.
Toe Toe is a measure of where a car's tires are pointed relative to each other. It's measu
Adjusting camber is well worth the effort. Optimizing the camber for your car and driving style can often make a bigger difference in the amount of grip the car can generate than any other mod except tires.
Step Six: Tune Your Toe
Toe refers to the direction a car's tires are pointed relative to each other when viewed from above (see graphic, pg. 150). Toe-in means the front of the tires are closer to each other than the rears. The opposite is toe-out. Toe is measured in inches relative to straight ahead, or zero toe. With zero toe, a car's tires are exactly parallel to each other.
Fine-tuning toe settings will allow a measure of control that's often overlooked. It also has a significant effect on how a car behaves in a corner. Front toe settings make a big difference in how a car handles in the first third of the turn, the critical turn-in phase where cornering force is initiated. Rear toe settings can be critical for allowing the driver of a rear-wheel-drive car to accelerate harder and sooner out of a corner.
Like all chassis tuning, too much of a good thing will cause problems. Too much toe-in or toe-out will create tire wear on the inside and outside edges of the tire. Any toe setting past 1/8-inch will cause excessive tire wear. Aggressive toe has probably ruined more tires on lowered cars than any other chassis adjustment.
Below are guidelines for setting toe and how it can affect feel and handling.
Front Toe-Out
Just Right
Reduced understeer at turn-in Improved steering response Counteracts natural tendency for front- and all-wheel-drive cars to toe-in under throttle load
Too Much
Instability during braking Straight-line instability, especially over single-wheel bumps or split-traction surfaces Unrecoverable understeer
By Mike Kojima
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