Track only alignment

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Shoman594

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Hey Guys, I am taking the turtle car in for an alignment tomorrow.

I was thinking of going with SHOmanBC's suggestion of..

Alignment:

Front -3 camber min and as much caster as possible, 1/8 total toe out.

Rear -2.5 camber, 0 toe.


Thoughts?
 

Toolman

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Before I give my thoughts, tell us your suspension and tire setup.

Also, refresh my memory as to why gene reccomends 1/8 toe-out?
 

firebat45

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Toe out increases turning response, at the expense of high speed stability. The caster helps bring the stability back a bit, and increases camber on the outside tire during cornering.

Camber seems really high to me, but that depends on whether you're running 16s with high profile tires (in which case it makes more sense) or 17s with lower profile tires.
 

SinisterSHO

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I would think if your running r-compound tires the camber would be excellent. I'm going to have my car aligned with -2 degrees all the way around
 

Shoman594

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I tried contacting gene with no response :/

Running coil overs with 16 inch rims with racing rubber forgot the numbers.
 

Shoaz

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I think you want about as much negative camber as you can get out of it. Especially in the front.

Yup, for the front, definitely. And as negative camber is added in the front toe-out should increase.

So those numbers aren't a bad place to start. I had -3.5 to -3.75 camber on the front and was going to increase it once it was clarified that the rules allowed the strut towers to be slotted more than they were. And I had about -2.5 on the rear.

That being said I stuck with zero toe front and rear, as that just always seemed to work well for me. I did try front toe-out a couple times, and it just didn't seem to be overall "better" to me.

When everything else was working right this alignment setup helped make the car very neutral and easy to drive as well as fast.

A handy tool for alignment setup is a probe-type tire pyrometer and careful inspection of tire wear. Setup also depends on the types of tracks you run on (and your driving style), so only take internet advice so far. In my experience it's hard to keep the outside edges of the front tires from doing most of the cornering work on a SHO, which is why aggressive front camber helps. However, if your tracks have lots of long straights and open corners, it may not be as critical and keeping the tire flat (i.e., less camber) for braking may be better. This is where the pyrometer comes in as getting the inner carcass temperature across the tire provides a rough average of how hard each part of the tire is working. I could never get the inside of the fronts nearly as hot as the outside, so more camber could have helped. But that was me, in my car, on the tracks that I run. YMMV.

Look at the pics of those Ninja Turtle cars when they ran in the Firehawk series; they had some really serious negative camber dialed in on the front, more than -3 degrees.
 

zak

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For each degree of negative camber, you want 0.1 degree of toe out (per side). This toe out mostly cancels out the camber thrust effect (negative camber on both front tires cause them to push towards the cetner of the car, the toe out compensates for this thrust), and gives zippier turn in and someone else mentioned above. For my dual purpose car I have -2 deg. each side, and if I remember the trig I did it came out to 5/32 total toe out. Actually left this in place over the winter with very minimal inside edge wear on snow tires, and, more importantly, none of the tramlining or "steer in bump" dartiness on rough roads I used to get with highly negative camber and very minimal toe out.

Question - what is the maximum negative camber on the rear that anyone's run on the street (assuming a minimal amount of toe in for stability)? I have run -1.5 average for many years with no problems, but would like to increase that number a bit (-2 or -2.5)

Still using SHOaz conduit string technique for toe measurements, works great with Gen 2/stock or similar rear muffler.
 
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DeaconBlue

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The most I have ever run on the street - Summer only car, is -1.75 with +4.5 caster or more and zero toe. Any more than that and the upper mounts rubbed the inside of the strut towers. I also run 245 tires on 8.0" wide rims.
 

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