Summary

00:00 - Top tips for front wheel drive alignment please? Yeah well again it probably depends a little bit on your exact application but I'll make the assumption here that we're talking about running on sealed surfaces, running on a racetrack or something like that.
00:13 So one of the things I probably see a bit of a trend you'll see in front wheel drives is people tend to be in the headspace, and also experiencing in some cases a fundamentally understeering car.
00:26 Part of the reason for that is the front tyres are doing more work than the rears as far as being overloaded, they're driving, they're turning and that does tend to be one of the fundamental complaints of people racing front wheel drive cars.
00:39 Now that's absolutely not I would say, that's a trait that can be tuned out of them, not something that you just have to deal with.
00:46 One of the things you do tend to see in some front wheel drive cars when people are really trying to get them to turn properly and it's probably not a great approach, is running really heavy rear springs, really heavy rear roll bars and maybe even some toe out on the rear axle just to try and get it to rotate.
01:00 Now all of that stuff's going to depend on the exact type of racing you're doing, the type of class you're racing in, certainly what things you're allowed to do, you may have no other opeion but to do that.
01:09 But in many cases, one of the things I would start with if your car is lowered and you are racing it, is you should be looking at a roll centre correction kit.
01:17 What I mean by that is, I haven't talked about roll centre in any detail today but essentially it's the instantaneous point that the chassis rolls about when you head into a corner, there's one for the front and there's one for the rear axle and particularly in a lot of front wheel drive cars, things like Hondas and stuff, when you lower them you are lowering the centre of gravity and that's a great thing.
01:33 The downside of that if you aren't doing a roll centre correction, this is to do with how your suspension geometry changes as you lower it, is you actually end up with more roll moment as a result because you've lowered the point that the chassis is rolling about, you've, that means you've increased the moment arm between that centre of gravity and that point you're rolling about so even though you've lowered the centre of gravity overall which is a positive, the downside is if you don't correct the roll centre back to its original position, you'll actually end up inducing more body roll as a result.
02:00 Now we do, I have seen certainly in the past, people making the mistake of not correcting their roll centres.
02:06 And I would say really from a wheel alignment and set up perspective, that is probably the most fundamental thing you need to keep an eye on and particularly if your car is lowered.
02:15 After that there's really nothing too specific as far front wheel drives, after that it depends a lot on the tyres, it depends a lot on the application, whether you end up with toe in, toe out, how much camber you're running, all of that stuff.
02:25 The other thing I'd mention on front wheel drives is to not get too sucked into running a square setup.
02:31 What I mean by square setup is running the same size tyres front and rear.
02:34 Obviously the rear tyres usually running on the back of a really light car, they're not doing a whole lot of work, really they're just being dragged along for the ride, maybe there's a little bit of braking force going into them but you know they've certainly got nowhere near as much energy as the front tyres going into them so if you are getting serious about racing, you should be thinking about running something like a wider or lighter tyre on the front axle relative to the rear.
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