Having been through the mill somewhat recently it has become increasingly apparent to me how important it is to have all four wheels pointing in the right direction.
As it came to me, the GTM had an alarming tendency to be extremely tail happy when turning left. Turning right was fine, but turning left was scary on the limit.
I didn't realise this to start with. The car was an unfamiliar layout to me and I wanted to slowly creep up on it's limits, not just jump right off the edge of the cliff.
In the last week I have learnt that as well as positive camber on the OSR it also had toe out on the same wheel. So every time I wanted to turn left at any sort of speed at all, that wheel wanted to go straight on.
I have now rectified both problems and it is difficult to put into words how much of a difference this has had on the car. It is now equally benign whether going left or right.

This all sort of got me thinking. All these MK Indys with fully adjustable rear alignment and camber. How do you all go about this ?
Are there any other evil handling cars out there that would benefit from a look at with a string line, a home made camber gauge and a flat surface ?

I reckon that todays adjustments will have easily bought me a couple of seconds at Kames sprint track.
All for free.
I could have chucked a couple of grand at a new engine and not gone any quicker.

Any thoughts, anyone ?

[Edited on 7/5/05 by zilspeed]

Spend the money you've saved on the engine now .

I used to run X19's, a similar layout, and used shed loads of toe in at the rear to keep things nice and tidy, although you could still force the back out if the need overcame you

What money - the hypothetical money that I would spend in an ideal world ?

the best compromise we found on track darrians , was about 1 degree negative camber with about 3mm toe in.

we did have big slicks tho and it was semi trailing we were using , so you might want to discover what actually happens during , bump, rebound etc with varying amounts of toe and camber .

you may find the wheels will toe out further the more bump and roll you have , or vice versa .

get a copy of mitchell software , or the 'string' computer to give you an idea of whats going on .

I've done a 'wee' bit of that so far.

The camber goes negative in rebound and obviously positive in bump.
I've been thinking in relation to that : The advice I was given by a.n. Other to lower ride height to get rid of the positive was in fact completely wrong.
I do want to keep the car supple, don't want to have to limit travel just to try to control camber change

really ?

so this is with the metro front suspension at the rear ?

should be the same as the front in geometry terms ?

if not a wishbone relocation may be needed!!!!!!!

Exactly the same as the front, yes.

That's why I think I need to start off with a fair degree of static -ve camber at normal ride height. So that it goes into neutral at worst when loaded at the outside. This was how metro cup racers did it.

I'm learning

First thing is to try and get some measurements of the wishbones and heights of the pivots and ball joints.

Re your earlier mismatched ball joint it seems that the balljoint used on the late Metro/Rover100 suspension varies with tyre size --- I presume because of ride height and camber angle issues.



155 tyres
Track rod end QR2381
bottom ball joint QSJ1147

185 tyres
Track rod en QR2382
bottom balljoint left QSJ1146S
bottom ball joint right QSJ1148S