What Camber and Toe setting are you guys running? My setup is a stock integra type R on koni's/stock springs lowered 25mm, hawk HP+ F/ HPS R on star specs. I mostly autocross and it's not my daily driver. thanks

 

It also depends what wheel size, any spacers, etc

 

No spacers, stock 15x6 ITR wheels on 195/55/15's. Lower perch settings on the koni's and all the way firm up front.

 

I run -3deg front camber toe out 1/16
rear -2 deg toe 0
205/50/15

 

There is no correct answer,but most can give you a baseline.
The spring rate and amount of roll the car has,are important in choosing settings.
If you have 2 degrees negative and your car rolls over alot to make that 1 degree positive,then you need more camber.You can also go too far and have too much camber per roll, and actually loose more than you think you would gain,by decreasing contact patch.
Same goes for toe,a rolling wheel will last longer then a sliding one,so if you run toe in or out you have a slip angle and the tire is sliding not rolling.Sliding creates heat and abuses the tire.
This is why most need to go to an alignment shop and get it done by someone who knows what to set the car to in a particular situation,be it racing or daily driving,or dual purpose..

 

thanks. can you explain toe out and why its needed?

A base line is exactly what I need right now. After installing my koni's I attended a test and tune autox event and I was surprised how well the car maneuvers, but I completely spaced it when it came to getting an alignment. Toe is where I'm unclear about. I don't know what toe to start out with. Star Specs are pretty cheap and I only drive it on the street about 2 days a week so tire ware isn't a problem.

 

Front toe out tends to make the car turn in more crisply up to a point. Too much front toe out can lead to reduced feel and push.

Rear toe out tends to help the car rotate, but too much rear toe can lead to mid-corner push. Rear toe in tends to make the car more stable, especially at higher speeds.

 

im going to roll around on my toe and c how much camber i get... hopefully the caster wont change..

 

Thanks everyone, I know what settings im going to use.

 

Go buy a $20 infrared temp gun thing from Home Depot and hit the track. Depending on the track, ambient temperature, and tire width, your hottest tire should see about a 15-20 degree difference from the inside to outside-- hotter inside-- from pit lane. In theory, this will mean that you are pretty close to using the entire width of the tire in the corners without wobbling around on the insides of the tires down the straights.

Toe is a difficult one to spot. There are calculations, but the biggest thing is a good baseline and feel it out from there. It is quite easy to let toe settings get out of hand. They are not as important as people make them seem and can quickly turn into a band aid for other handling issues. Too much toe will not only cause very eclectic handling characteristics, but also a massive amount of rolling resistance.

Too much camber will also drastically effect rolling resistance and will also degrade straight-line braking and power-down-- especially in a FWD car. It is very important to just get the camber right according to the tire temp spreads. There is a balance. If you want to focus more on mid-corner traction, then you'd likely want a ton of camber to make sure it is just barely using the outside of the tire. If you want to focus more on straight-line braking or power down, then you may want to sacrifice some of that mid-corner traction and put it to when the car is a bit more stable.

 

wow that is a great description !

I use a lot of camber and toe. I do have reduced braking effectiveness.

Also when a tire is cambered over it wants to turn in that direction and requires a little toe out to compensate.

 

Really good advice there. Buy a temperature gauge and use it. Only good way I know of to determine camber (unless you do camber sweeps on track and check laptimes or if can wait until your tires have worn enough to see if they are wearing more or less evenly, but season might be over by then!). So many people buy upgraded parts but won't spring for even the cheapest tire temperature gauge. If nothing else, it will save wear on the tires. You of course need adjustable camber.

 

Camber DOES stretch the tire on the bias, so it pulls the car in the direction of the tilt. Thus, you do need some toe correction. Mostly this is a feel thing. People should experiment with toe eventually to see what feels best without hurting one section of the track more than the other. Keep in mind, toe, relative to camber, is minuscule. Camber on our touring car a while back was upward of -5 degrees. With that, the front toe was about 0.5 degree out and the rear was about 1 degree in.

All true and good advice. My only concern is that tire wear, with proper camber, will almost always wear the inside more than the outside. Toe alone-- even just a degree or so-- could significantly wear the inside of the tire.

Another myth that should be noted which is something I hear a lot, is that camber is camber, whether by lowering the car or moving the strut towers. This is wrong. Suspension geometry is quite tricky. Modern cars do have camber gain with suspension stroke. Some geometries are better for lowering than others-- McPherson is bad. Your roll centers go WAY out of wack and the camber gain goes through the roof with a lowered car. If you have a lowered car, buy some Ackerman spacers and THEN adjust camber-- anything else is doing it wrong and will have similar effects as too much toe. You can adjust camber by moving the lower control arm mounting point outward toward the wheel, but this too has a bunch of problems associated with it.

Long story, short: Take care when modifying a street car to be phenomenal on the track. After racing in Koni / Conti Challenge for a few years now, you start to see the trade-offs in tuning a car's handling. You hear that a car must be low and must have a ton of negative camber and toe here and there, but you don't realize how much of an effect all this "tuning" has on the very eccentric geometry, and in turn, the very eccentric handling of a car on the race track.

 

Any other way to test for what camber should be besides the temp? We're going to get the CRX aligned soon for Autox and I'd like to get it right asap as alignments are expensive lol I know spring rate and strut stiffness settings affect what tire pressures you run does toe and camber also change what pressures are best?

 

nope.....there's only that 1 way....measure temp across tire at 3 places (out,center, in) on the contact patch

that s why camber settings can t be universalized (is that even a word?) and depend from track to track.............I know this one guy with a mustang that proved to me with fastidious data taking that his car turned quicker laps with -3deg L and -2.3deg R of camber up front at Mid Ohio and that those settings are completely different at BeaveRun Park and Nelson Ledges

 

I made a 3D string model of the front suspension on my EK using Pro/Engineer, then wrote a spreadsheet using calculations from various suspension books to determine the amount of roll and pitch I was getting for any given lateral/longitudinal accelerations, then inputted the various strut loads produced by the spreadsheet into the 3D model to give the instantaneous suspension geometry at corner exit where I wanted to improve front end traction.

I set the model up to have the wheel at -0.5° camber at that point which ended up being a static alignment of -2.5° camber and 2.25° castor.

Sadly I only got 3 test runs in before I ruined the bottom end and had to retire from the event, but the front end grip was amazing compared to the stock alignment. There's still some improvements to be made to the accuracy of both the model and the spreadsheet, but overall I think it's good to get things in the right ballpark.