Tried Unequal Camber setups?
 

Has anyone tried asymmetrical camber setups; that is running more camber on one side of the car than the other? Since all road race tracks have 360 degrees more worth of turns in one direction than the other, wouldn't it be a little bit of an advantage to run a little less negative camber on the inside wheels? I know the round trackers do this to the extreme with great success. Have any of you tried this on a road race track? How successful were you?

The only problem is if you get too far from symetrical under braking the car will do strange things. You can get away with a little, like .1-.2 but not too much. You will get more from different temp ranges on the tires. We run R35's on both front and the right rear and a R45 on the left rear because of all the right turns at Sebring.

Lime Rock is widly considered a oval with one left turn in it to make it a road coarse. We always run more camber on the left side to compensate. Bottom line is it depends on the track. Ever check out the NASCAR guys on the short traks? the run pos camber on the left side!

I'm no expert but I think the general idea is to set up each corner on a per-track basis by running some laps then pitting in to measure your tire temps on the inside, center, outside of the contact surface -- the idea being for the particular track you want the best utilization of the entire tire, so you could make camber adjustments till you see a more even temperature distribution, which will yield better grip and even tire wear... I guess. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

yeah it depends on the track, or if you have a stiuation where you need the car to be faster in 1 or 2 corners. we never really tried it, but thunderhill wears the right tyres first, buttonwillow clockwise wears the left. so theres some room there

I do it all the time. I can't remember the last time I had both front wheels within 1 degree of each other.

RussTypeS, are you on slicks or radial street tires?

the Hoosier DOT R comps

I have not run any of the latest "street" tires but I think they will take a little more camber then our cantilevered slicks. What I found was a strange wandering under heavy braking on the slicks if camber got to asymetrical.

My thoughts on the need to go really asym with camber settings:

If we know the car leans X amount in, lets say, a 1G turn. If the car is balanced it will lean the same either way. Are we giving up turning grip or braking grip on one of the wheels by having more or less camber on one side? If we only have one or two turns in a given direction is the tire we are reading cooling off on the outside edge and staying hot on the inside edge before we get to it? So, we want the tires hot equally all the way across but is the tire overheating while it is in the turn, on the outside, because we are running it with less camber?

I was always more concerned with braking feel than one or two turns so I've gone with symetrical settings. This next season I'll have all my data aq stuff running and I'll be able to get split times through these turns and I'll either start a new thread or dig this one up and add some numbers to the discussion. I only have about another $1500 in sensors to install to feed my MXL Pro 05. Then I can spend all kinds of time trying to figure out what makes the car fast between sessions. It may take replacing the nut that holds the steering wheel. :D

I can agree that running asymmetrical camber will make the car a little darty under braking. Make sure you're running the same caster on each side, even if your camber is different, that will help braking stability a little.

The temp measurements I have made over the last 10 years have not been as useful as I have hoped. Some road race tracks are better than others for providing good temp data. Road Atlanta is awful for temp data - the long back straight run before the pits lets the outside edges of the tires cool off, and makes the inside edges hotter than normal. I tried tuning camber based on temps, and reduced my camber from -2 deg to -1 deg; and the car plowed (understeer) awful in the tight turns. Jim Susko at G-Force told me he ran into the same problem, he said to go by what produces a fast lap time, not what produces even tire temps on pit road.
I am not planning on a radical camber difference side to side; I was thinking about running 1 deg neg on left rear and 1/2 deg neg on right rear.

I run a straight side wall 11" wide bias ply slick on a 10" wide rim.

we did data aquisition this year, and with 2 drivers running 2 setups, we're kinda thinking that the setup is for 2 reasons.

1. making the tyres happy. doi!

2. making the driver happy. if the car feels good to the driver, they put in a better laptime. our 2 setups and 2 drivers are .3 seconds apart from turn 1 to turn 9 at thunderhill.