My 89 hatch always seems to end up toe out every alignment. Started time trialing the car last year, and had an alignment done before each race. Every time the front end goes from where we set it at (a little toe in) to tow out after only driving it for maybe 500 miles (only a fraction of this is at the track). Any ideas on what could be causing this?

All the bushings and ball joints are in good shape. I don't think there's anything wrong with the rack, took it completely off cleaned and re-greased.

 

how are you aligning the car? strings or one of those voodoo machines? For a car that sees the track, its best to use strings in my opinion. you drop it back down, jounce it, roll it to and fro, and see where the alignment leaves you. plus if you get fast at stringing it you can start tuning your ride based on driving style at the track.

try to set the toe on an alignment rack, then go drive it around the parking lot, then put it back on the rack- its probably a little out already due to the deflections in the bushings from when you were aligning it in the first place.

 

We do it on a laser guided alignment machine.

 

Have you replaced ALL the bushing in the frontend if not they would throw it off everytime you move the car

 

Mine did the samething. But I didn't race lol. I just replaced the tierods and used loctite on the bolts

 

are your tires wearing to indicate the alignment problem? or do you just align it all the time? if your tires aren't scrubbing, you should probably look into getting the machine calibrated, and give your car some time in between to see if your tires are wearing

 

Yes, my tires wear heavily on the inside. Bought Nitto neo gens recently in hopes to compensate(the tires are advertised to wear evenly on lowered cars).

The boots on the tie rod ends are still good. I thought the only indicator of worn out tie rods was torn boots....could the ball joint be worn out before the boot? I suppose it wouldn't hurt to replace them. It will be my next step in attempting to fixing this.