Hey guys, having bought a set of hardrace toe arms recently, I've been reading as much as possible about the best way of setting them up, but haven't really found a thread focusing solely on the cars toe characteristics, rather discussion about suspension geometry in general.

Before I bought the arms I'd always assumed that their sole function was to restore the toe curve to stock, or at least close to stock using the spacers provided. What I have been thinking is this...do I really want the stock toe curve, or are there performance advantages of using a different setup?

Please share any of your own experiences with the spacer setups. What were you aiming for and did it work out as you expected? Were there any specific handling traits you were trying to dial out? etc etc I know toe adjustment is a powerful tool for tweaking the handling on this car, so maybe we can start a good discussion on the pros and cons of our experimentation. Cheers.

 

On an AP1, the more aggressive your toe curve, the more reactive your car will be to small fore-aft weight transfers. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

 

I must add that I'm not necessarily looking to improve the handling of my own car, but rather trying to build a thread with useful information and discussion about peoples experiences with different products, setups etc, all relating to toe. Having searched quite a bit on this site and others, there are no real threads or webpages with this information all in one place, so maybe we can create a useful reference thread for anyone interested in toe and it's handling effects on the S2000.

With that in mind, I will be mapping the stock toe curve in a fair amount of detail, and hope to have graphs and numbers sometime in the next week or so. Thanks for your input, lets keep things going...

 

What year of car are you measuring? I have actually seen a graph of an ap1 toe curve on either here or s2000.com doubt i could find again to save my life though haha.

 

https://www.s2ki.com/s2000/topic/716...#entry20881747

 

Thats the one. What I take from that is that basically, unlike what I thought to begin with, the ap1 toes in under compression and rebound so long as the ride height is over about an 1inch drop. So the bumpsteer issue is more about size of the toe deflection (very large and quick toe in) vs toe in/toe out. Anyway, if I am wrong about that someone set me straight. I spent the last couple of week driving out of town on the weekend on my new setup and the roads in south louisiana (i10) suck major balls. I didn't ever feel like the rear end was ill composed on bump even in sweepers going over 50mph, or going 80 over huge dips at overpasses.

 

Yeah you're right, after about 1.5 inches drop the toe arm becomes basically horizontal, and will only toe in through both bump and rebound. This seems to me to be a more stable geometry but I'm not sure in practical terms if it makes the car easier to drive on the limit or not. I would imagine that it makes the rear end more stable but a little less willing to turn in.

But in any case, like you said, the magnitude of the toe change is probably more important than the direction ie, positive or negative. I had a look at that STR thread in my searches, and while the post you refer to does a very good job of describing the behaviour of toe in bump and rebound, there just aren't any hard numbers of compression/rebound vs toe. Hopefully I can map out the stock toe curve (MY00) and provide a picture of the toe change at various positions of suspension travel.

Of course I still have to install my aftermarket toe arms and I'll have to measure toe change on those too. Should be interesting to compare before and after.

Anyone else please jump in here, the more info we can get together the better...

 

Im definitely looking forward to your data.

 

lol started reading this thinking I struck gold.

andy_intel, did this ever happen?

 

I’ve played with this some.

What I wanted to do is to get the toe arms close to level again after the suspension drop so that there is only toe IN under Compression and rebound, and the closer you can maintain that level arc from full wheel droop to compression the less influence bump steer will have. To me that’s the goal if you want the car to be as predictable as possible. From there you set the static toe alignment where you want for handling/traction bias. It’s the same thing for the front. Get spacers under the rack to level out the tie rods again. Unfortunately 20mm is all you can fit under it due to the cross member clearance. Any correction is better then none however. The less severe the arms sweep up from parallel, the less they will want to pull the wheels IN on compression. Stock ride height and toe arm arc sucks in my book as I’m sure its shared, because the toe arms are not parallel at full droop, they are drooping, which means a In/Out arc through the travel which just adds more vehicle control dynamics then is needed or appreciated when your running the car at the limit. Any of those desired characteristics can be tuned in through more conventional static methods which aren’t as "corky".