By If you have taken your car to a circuit you will be very familiar with understeer and oversteer. The two enemies of good lap times even if one of them is quite fun! Understeer is when the front of your car washes out towards the outside of the corner giving a lack of steering feel and pushing the car wide. Oversteer is when the back of the car swings out to the outside of the circuit, rotating the car and making it slide to the outside of the corner.
3 Reasons Why You Should Not Fit Wheel Spacers To Your Car
Spacers are a cheap & easy way to improve wheel fitment & increase the track width of your car but a fast & easy way to ruin the geometry of your car.
Anti-Roll Bars
How to Measure Unlike coil springs, anti-roll bars very rarely have the spring rate marked on them. This means that the rate either needs to be calculated or measured. If you are designing your own anti-roll bar or have a relatively simple shape roll bar then it is often more
Caster
How to Measure The first stage of adjusting and tuning your caster angle is to first measure and understand what your vehicle currently has. There are two main ways to measure your caster angle: Turning plates and a digital or bubble camber/caster gauge Measuring the location of the upper and
Camber
How to Measure Before you can begin to adjust and tune camber you must first be able to measure it and measure how effective a camber change would be to alter the grip. Ways to measure camber are: Spirit Level Camber Gauge Digital Camber Gauge 4 Wheel Laser Alignment Tyre
Coil Springs
What is a coil spring? A coil springs is a piece of bar that has been twisted to form the shape of a helix (spiral). It works in an up and down motion as a spring by using the vertical displacement to twist the bar making the spring. Therefore, it
Anti-Roll Bars
What is an Anti-roll bar? An anti-roll bar is a tube of metal that works as a spring between left and right wheels. An anti-roll bar connects the vertical motions of the left and right wheels and works in parallel with the coil springs. During cornering, the outside wheel (be
Dampers
What is a Damper? A damper is an oil filled tube with a piston inside. The piston moves through the oil, passing the oil through small precise holes and past a sprung shim, at a certain designed speed. Damper Construction A damper consists of: A main body A piston with
Tyre Slip Angle
What Is Slip Angle? A slip angle is the difference between the steering angle and the direction in which the tyre footprint is taking. Tyre slip angles play a major part in steering systems and have a large effect on aspects of steering geometry such as Ackermann and toe. When a
Toe
What Is Toe? Toe is the angle between each wheel with relation to the longitudinal axis of the vehicle. It is usually measured when the car is static and is measured either in degrees or in millimetres. If it is measured by distance then it is usually the difference in
Grip
What Is Grip? Grip, put basically, is the force generated between the tyre and the surface. The amount of grip generated and maintained is influenced heavily by the mass of the vehicle; the acceleration of the vehicle, the compound of the tyre, the compound of the road surface and by
Caster
What Is Caster? Caster is the measure of how far forward or behind the steering axis is to the vertical axis, viewed from the side. This is measured by drawing a line between the top and bottom pivot points of the front upright. The angle between the drawn line and
Camber
What Is Camber & What’s Its Purpose? Camber angle is the angle between the plane of a wheel and the vertical. It is described as positive when the top of the wheel leans outward and negative when the top of the wheel leans inward. Camber angle alters the handling characteristics
Bump Steer
What Is Bump Steer? Bump steer is a change in the steering angle of the wheel when the wheel is in bump or droop without turning of the steering wheel or lateral movement in the steering rack. This is due to the arc patterns of the wishbones and the steering