Miata Mailing List: June 1993, Message #109
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   From: Ken Warren 
Subject: Re: alignment question
   Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1993 20:38:24 -0400


On Mon, 28 Jun 1993, Thomas Tkacik wrote:

[quoted alignment specs deleted]

> This is typical of what many say their alignment is.
> Is there any reason not to be even more agressive.
> Say, maybe -2 degrees negative camber in the back, and -1.5 degrees in
> the front?  Is a wider tire (205 vs. 185) more or less sensitive to
> lots of negative camber?
>
> It seems to me that if a little camber is good, then more should be better.
>
> Thrown out to start some discussion.  I will probably get mine done
> soon, and am curious how it came about that most of you have very
> similar alignment setups.

It depends on the use you put your car to. The quoted specs are about the
maximum (for camber) that I would want to run on the street. The camber
quoted for the rears was probably a bit more than desirable for the
highway, as a matter of fact.

If you have more than about a degree of negative static camber, then going
straight down the road, the tires will wear more on the inside than the
outside.

However, more camber *is* better when cornering at the limit; it holds the
tire closer to vertical with the ground, and improves the adhesion of the
contact patch.

So it depends on the use you put your car to. If you use it for *nothing*
but highway driving, less than half a degree of negative camber, front and
rear, is probably fine. If you use it for racing exclusively, you're going
to want all the camber you can get. And the specs quoted are a compromise
between the extremes of Miata usage, with a definite lean toward the
performance/handling side of things (after all, it *is* a sports car,
right? :-{)

--
Ken

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Ken Warren             |"Nothing good has ever been reported about the
| full rotation of a race car about either its
E-Mail: kenw@netaxs.com| pitch or roll axis."            Carroll Smith
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