Negative camber

wizzer

Road Burner
Points
202
Location
Lyndhurst, Hampshire
Car
VW Golf 2.0 TDi
Does negative camber improve cornering and how much should you apply?

I still can't get my head around camber, surely you want all the tyre surface equally on the ground?

Then you see those stanced cars, with massive negative camber and practically rolling on the edge of the rims, do these cars excel at cornering?
 
On a normal road car say -1 deg.

Think about the heavily loaded wheel/tyre in a corner, negative camber helps the tyre be more square to the road instead of rolling over onto the outer edge and sidewall when the body is leaning over in a corner.

IMO drivers of heavily stanced care are poseurs/tossers/muppets who have no clue as to what they are doing to the cars dynamics/roll centres as well as vastly reduced tyre life.
 
Stances cars are a look, not a performance gain. From what I remember when I had my high performance cars the camber setting comes into effect when cornering at high speed as the car will lean onto the edge of the tyre if there was no camber. There's lots of factors in determining what the setting should be for each individual car and manufacturers spend millions in testing to find the right one. Waynne has an article on the main site explaining all these and there's some good comments below it.
https://www.torquecars.com/tuning/suspension-settings.php
 
Suspension takes into account bodyroll, weight shifting etc... So you can't really set it up for a car being stationary, there are as has been said compromises to be made until you can dynamically control the angle pitch and roll of each suspension arm independently *(I'm sure this will come, the Audi mag ride system is pretty good)

You can't have a car that is only good on straight roads, or accelerating hard, or cornering left or right, or for bumpy surfaces. You have to choose a blend of all of these.
 
A daily drive car just needs the factory settings as the maker has decided that they are the best all purpose settings BUT if you are seriously tracking any car be it AWD,FWD or RWD then the settings can be tweaked to suit your driving style and suspension design but there will still be compromises involved IMO
 
It can improve cornering though it can lessen your straight-line braking. Had a set of nexen tires for occasional track use. The wear was on the outside edge of the tyre so I added negative camber to improve cornering response and stability.
 

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