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SUSPENSION 101: Everything You Wanted To Know About Vehicle Handling



Making your car handle well is a really complicated task if you overthink it. Ride frequencies, roll centers, camber curves, scrub radii; it’s enough to make you build show cars instead. So, I have an easy solution for you: ignore all of that stuff. Odds are that you can make your car handle better than most by knowing the following five things.



So how do you pick the right tires? That’s a tough one. The tire industry seems determined to make tire choice as difficult as possible. Tire names are a meaningless alphanumeric soup. What’s the difference between a Nitto NT01, NT05, NT05R and NT555R? The reality is that they’re all very different tires distinguished by a few changes in numbers and letters.Closeup of Radial Tire
Sometimes you can judge a tire by its tread pattern. In general, performance tires will have bigger tread blocks, since they are physically stronger and less likely to be ripped apart by hard driving. Performance is fashionable, though, and despite all the hype about tread stability, water evacuation and the like, tread patterns are largely dictated by fashion.



Dampers are voodoo. Just like the black arts, they are both extremely powerful and virtually impossible to figure out without years of study. Good dampers can make a car ride and handle beautifully. Bad ones can render your every attempt at adjustment useless. Figuring out how to choose good dampers is even harder than figuring out tires, but it works on the same basic principle: Find some good dampers on someone else’s fast car and ask what they are and who tuned them. Then go buy your dampers from them.