For road racing? but i want to be able to drive the car around town without to much camber wear also.

my set up
93 hatch SI
16" 215 45 16 azenis
f2 susp.
type R front and rear sway bars
ASR brace
sk2 control arms
camber kit front and rear SK2
BENEN tower braces
pilar bar
gsr front brakes

 

For a start you can't have one without the other...
Any extra amount of static negative camber that will be of use in Racing Will cause inner tire wear.
With decent Hardrace Front and rear Camber and Toe Kits you can quickly adjust at the track and have the best of both worlds. Assuming you are able to do your own suspension set up?

Kiwi

 

good = as much as it takes.
Camber is adjusted to achieve optimal tire contact patch in a given suspension position, given load and given G-force. Anything other than that situation is a compromise.

It's not as easy as set it "here" and you'll be set. Personally I tend to start with around -3* on street tires and check tire temps to adjust from there.

Just keep in mind, changing camber changes toe... toe kills tires. (on the street)

 

What's the correlation of -3 degrees of camber and checking tire temperatures? How would you decide if you need more or less camber by tire temp?

 

depending on what part of the tire is the hottest (inside, middle outside) you adjust from there. You want a fairly even spread across the tire, no more then 10 degree F.

 

Ideally, for best performance you would want no camber for braking and anywhere from negative 2 to 4 degrees during cornering. The reason why the range is between 2 and 4 degrees is because different tires generate maximum lateral grip at a different camber angles. Of course this cornering camber is dynamic camber, which is to say it is the camber angle of the tire on the road. So to find the static camber, you would need to know how much your car rolls and how much your suspension picks up negative camber. The EG, thanks to having a double wishbone unequal length design picks up negative camber quickly, especially at lower ride heights.

I don't believe in running tire temps on the race track because it gives erroneous information. The temps you will obtain in the hot pits will be a combination of the braking done to stop the car in the hot pits, in addition to the cooling done between the last corner, and the temperature rise in the tires from the corner. Therefore, when you get a tire temp, you can't possibly know how hot the tire got across the tread and so how can you even make any determination about the camber or other other alignment number for that matter.

A much better method for determining static camber is to use a skid pad. You will want to do a few easy laps and then a couple max grip laps to get the tires up to max. temperature and then try to slow the car where the brakes are applied minimally. A smaller skid pad will allow a lower speed at max grip, and thus slowing down is more easily accomplished without having to distort the cornering numbers with a braking segment.

There are some more complicated testing protocols you can perform than the above skid pad suggestion, because in an actual tire, the tire begins each corner at some temperature profile across the tread based on the braking level used before the corner was ever reached in addition to what the temperature of the tire was before braking. Thus, the nature of tire temperatures around a race track or even a skid pad is very much transient and it really is hard to very accurately measure the exact tire temperatures real time.
With infra-red measuring devices, a real time temperature of the surface can be measured but a correlation between the very important tire core temperature and surface temperature can also be a difficult if not impossible task as well.

 

Good Infomation Johnny...
What you say makes good sense. I never put those variables together when checking tire temps.

 

so my -1 is not much but i'm guessing it's a good start since i'm a newbie at the track. and with your guy's info i can work from there.

 

To the OP, you will require more then -1° camber in the front. With getting too specific about your setup, I would probably start around the -2° mark and go from there. I ran
-1.8° camber, attained from lowering the car only, and it was not nearly enough. Good Luck.

 

I'm running -2.5 in the front, -2 in the rear. I found my temps about 10-15 degrees hotter on the inside of the tire both front and back on my first track day. I was going to back down about 1-2 to 1 degree both front and back. Reading Johny Mac's comments though now I'm not so sure. The skid pad sound like a good idea.

I am seeing wear on the inside, not terrible, but noticeable after about 5 k miles. But I"m running $37 Fuzions on the street so I'm not too concerned.

 

Go get your toe set to 0*. This will end the uneven wear.

-4* front camber on my Integra. Its a bit too much for street tires to fully make use of.

 

i run -4 front -3 rear with 0 toe front and rear on my daily. tire wear isn't bad when you don't do a whole lot of freeway driving and take turns "spiritually". it helps to daily on hard compound or high treadwear rated tires, and to flip the tires when they wear down. save the stickier tires for the track.