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.

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.