If Nurburgring the north course is your favorite track, then I would probably not try to get max camber for max lateral force. I would trade in a bit of lateral force for stability on that course. The constantly changing gradient, banking/road camber even at mid-corner makes it not quite possible to obtatin max cornering force throughout an entire corner anyways. What I'd like instead is stability to help driver confidence to push close to the limit.

Besides trading braking for cornering speed with more -ve camber, it's not as well- known that you could be trading in intuitive cornering characteristics as well. If you run enough -ve camber that the outermost tread heats up just as much as innermost tread, you'll probably need to run so much camber that the handling characteristics of the car becomes non-intuitive. In particular, when you understeer mid-corner, lifting throttle will only understeer more. That means you cannot do fine-tuning on your line by fine-tuning throttle input mid-corner. You have to have the corner-entry speed and line dead-on. If this is on a 1-2 minute road course where pavement condition is more consistent and there are more runoffs and I can memorize the lines and corner entry speeds more dead-on and I get a big prize for winning the race, then I might take this risk in return for ultimate cornering performance. But if I'm track lapping on Nurburgring the north course for fun, I would take a more stable car any day.

 

The first time I had my car aligned the alignment guy could not even get two degrees in the back, and since it is rude to tell people they don't know how to do their job I just took the car to someone else. The second guy does race car alignment and had a much better grip on how to properly align the car, and he had no problem getting -2.5 degrees with a little to spare (and my car is lowered!).

The adjustments interact, and sometimes it takes a lot of time and patients to get the car aligned properly (but once it's done it is usually easier the next time around). If your alignment guy can't get -2-1/2 degrees, even after a 1" drop, you probably need to try a different shop. Over that may be too much to ask without additional suspension mods, but on the street I really don't think more would be practical. Maybe if you're running R compound tires on the street and have other suspension mods, but on an otherwise stock car I can't see going beyond that. The cost in tire wear alone would be unacceptable (IMHO).

 

thanks for all the replies, very informative.


I think an S2000 was more effort for the shop to align than a regular car they get..(s2000's are not common at all in belgium) so probably they were short of time on the quote they had made for me..

the suspension is approx 25mm lower.. KW3's and GFL control arms at the rear.

front camber -2 and rear camber -2 57

215/245 sized tyres


from a brief test on a short course (3rd gear corners).. at about 80% pace - the car felt very stable and balanced..there was no strange or weird movements to give me concern at the moment..

will have to see what happens on the ring next week