Build A Faster Car - helping drivers engineer

Some cars just never seem to have enough camber to get even tire wear across the tire's tread when driven at its limit. Why is it that a car with only 3 degrees of body roll can sometimes need 4 degrees of negative camber just to keep the tire perpendicular to the ground while cornering? This is counter-intuitive, as 3 degrees of body roll only should need 3 degrees of correction- or less, if the car's suspension geometry is good. This article explores that "if" and shows how to improve your dynamic camber curve on a car with a strut-based front suspension.

The camber angle is the angle at which your tires lay relative to the vertical axis of your car. Assuming your chassis is level, it is also the angle at which your tires lay relative to perpendicular to the ground. A tire that is perfectly parallel to the chassis' vertical axis (and thus perpendicular to the ground) is said to have zero camber, whereas tires angled inwards towards the chassis are said to have negative camber. Camber is one of the most important aspects of an alignment because it greatly affects tire grip.

This calculator shows you the spring rate of a sway bar. It is accurate for mild, spring, and chromoly steels since they all have a very similar stiffness. Nearly all sway bars are made from these materials.

The measurements needed for this calculation are quite easy to take, especially if the sway bar is off the car.

Put as simply as possible, the roll center is the point around which the chassis rolls. We all know what body roll is, right? Well, it's actually a pretty complicated subject. The dynamics of roll centers- where they are, and how they migrate around the chassis while driving- is one of the fundamental concepts of chassis design. This article isn't written just for chassis designers, though.

Brakes seem like simple enough devices: they stop the car. Whether this happens with traditional brake rotors and pads, a hybrid's battery-charging generator, or the drag from an air brake, the underlying physics are the same: kinetic energy is being sapped from the car and converted into an alternate type of energy. With a hybrid, that energy gets stored in a battery for later use, but with traditional brake pads, that energy gets converted to heat. The study of brakes is really the study of transfer of energy.

This is a grouping of articles and threads detailing the effects of increasing/decreasing a vehicles performance by selecting different wheels then stock.

This article is to address the concerns regarding the use of cross-drilled in street vehicles on the track or road course.

This article is to address the lack of and confusion of information on this forum about intercoolers. Since I've also made this mistake myself (I once posted a silly thread about the speed6/speed3's intercooler being "tiny") I feel I'd like to share what I've learned with the community. This is merely a combination of information retrieved from the internet, personal conversations with shop/shop owners, road course guys, and a few books.

Higher spring frequency are frequently used in the rear of a car to produce what is known as a flat ride. With a rear spring frequency slightly than the front, the rear of the car will oscillate in a sightly shorter amount of time. Done correctly, the front and rear of the chassis will complete one oscillation at exactly the same time, reducing pitching in the chassis. This article will elaborate a bit on the subject, and show how damper tuning can make this feel even better.

Spring rates seem to get a lot of emphasis from car owners. This article shows how optimal spring rates can be chosen and even compared between two different cars, and why your dampers should be taken into consideration while choosing spring rates.

You may know the basics of how a tire works, but there's more to it than just rubber rolling along the ground. Tires are elastic and deform, and that's part of how they grip. However, the nature of how this happens is very important. In this article we'll explore the basics of how tires deform.

Let's focus for a moment on the peak grip a tire is capable of. This happens when the tire is at its ideal temperature, perpendicular to the ground, at it's ideal slip angle, and many other ideals. Not all of those ideals are going to happen at once, but there are a few important concepts that will help make the most of your tires. This particular article discusses tires, friction, and weight transfer, which is perhaps the most important subject in all of suspension tuning.

Here are some concepts to keep in mind while selecting a tire. These are guidelines, not rules- just things consider.

Suspension tuning is all about optimizing the grip of the tires. The best upgrade you can get for your car is nearly always the tires! Being the only part that actually connects the chassis to the ground, tires are the most important part of ANY car and are critical to the suspension. Race teams often dedicate entire engineers just to the tires, and those teams have valuable engineering data direct from the manufacturer to help them with their tire decisions.

The modern bump stop is more properly called a jounce bumper. Made from urethane and cut to varying sizes, today's bump stops are an integral part of most factory suspensions. Knowing their effects on the suspension is as important- if not more so- than that of your main springs. This page explores their effects when installing springs that lower a production car.