Road Camber.

Green Hornet

This might be a stupid question but I was wondering if there is any way to set a car up to negate the effects of road camber? I find it can be tiring on a long journey with the gentle drift to the left. I drive a Honda and my last 4 cars have all been Honda's. Is the effect as pronounced in all cars or is it worse in some cars than others. The wheel alignment is fine incidentally so its not the tracking.

-Chris-

Green Hornet wrote: »

This might be a stupid question but I was wondering if there is any way to set a car up to negate the effects of road camber? I find it can be tiring on a long journey with the gentle drift to the left. I drive a Honda and my last 4 cars have all been Honda's. Is the effect as pronounced in all cars or is it worse in some cars than others. The wheel alignment is fine incidentally so its not the tracking.

It's not really something you can do a lot about. You could theoretically set up the steering geometry to always want to pull right, it's done in Indycars when they're on the oval tracks - they naturally drive to the left. It reduces driver fatigue and car wear.

I would expect it would impact the handling and tyre wear on a normal car though.

As for whether it's as obvious in all cars, I'd say it depends on a lot of factors. There's a measurement called Castor - it's causes the car to want to go in a straight line (if you're cornering and let go of the steering wheel, the desire of the car to want to straighten up is mainly due to castor). If a car is designed with more castor, it should in theory deviate less.

Tenzor07

Don't know if there is anywhere in Ireland that will do the setup for you, maybe trackdayperformance in Wicklow... But that sort of camber adjustment is normally only done for trackcars, or if you have a performance car(e.g Type-R) then it can be setup for "fast road"
Hardly worth it at all for your daily driver car...

Captain Slow IRL

First of all, check your tyre pressure and tyre sizes!

You can have the steering "tracked" to the right (shorten the r/h tie-rod and lengthen the l/h tie-rod) to point the front wheels to the right. If it's done right,(small adjustments at a time) it can counter the slope on the road surface.

It's perfectly normal for the car to veer slightly to the left, you'll find it in nearly every car on the road.

JHMEG

If you have cruise control you can use your right knee to hold the steering wheel and do some handsfree driving!

I find road camber varies left/right/none an awful lot, so wouldn't go with anything other than perfect tracking/alignment or tyres would start to wear unevenly.

Esel

Crazy idea, imo.