Summary

00:00 - On a lightweight rear front wheel drive 90s Honda Civic, what would be the best starting setup for a car that can have more hop in the rear? OK so what I'm saying, how I'm interpreting that question is you've got a front wheel drive car that hasn't got much weight on the rear axle, which is pretty typical, certainly in something like what you're describing like a 90s Honda Civic.
00:19 So if you are having, I assume what you mean by your question is that you're having hop at the rear end but want to get rid of that.
00:26 So one of the times you can end up with hop in the rear is if you don't have enough compliance in that end of the suspension so in this context what I mean by compliance is you are running something too stiff.
00:35 So one of the things you often see on the rear of a front wheel drive car is people fitting really large anti roll bars or really stiff anti roll bars or stiff springs at the rear of the car to try and help the car rotate.
00:47 Now usually one of the reasons that's happening is because people are usually lowering their car and because, and this is a little bit idosyncratic of particular early Honda Civics, sorry front wheel drive Hondas in general, that 90s sort of period, but it can happen across any brand, is that you end up with a different amount of roll centre migration in the rear relative to the front.
01:07 Now I'm not going to get into the details of roll centre here, it's something that is a pretty big topic and it's covered in quite a lot of detail inside the course itself but essentially it controls the amount of load transfer you have front to rear when we have the rear roll centre migrating a lot more than the front.
01:23 So there are better ways to fix that as far as actually doing roll centre correction which is a really important part of getting the most out of the handling of many cars that have been lowered for the track.
01:34 But in the case of this, a lightly loaded rear in a front wheel drive car, one of the, what you often end up with is people putting stiff rear springs and stiff anti roll bars to help them turn because often it can give you a lot of understeer happening there, rear roll centre really low.
01:56 So the downside of that is running the rear end really stiff to try and get the car to turn which is, has some validity to it, it means that you end up reducing the amount of grip at that end of the car because suddenly the rear wheels aren't able to follow irregularities in the road as well as the front.
02:11 So that's, from a pure mechanical grip perspective, running the car as soft as you can, particularly on a rough surface, is usually the best way to increase the grip on the tyre.
02:21 So I suspect that's what's going on.
02:22 What I would say Chris, if you haven't got a roll centre correction kit and you have got your car lowered, I would look into that first.
02:28 That should allow you to reduce the amount of anti roll stiffness you've got in the back both in terms of spring or anti roll bar and that should help increase your rear grip.
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