Greeting fellow tuners:
I have been reading a lot about tuning in the forums and on other online resources, and trying to apply those principles to my own tunes. One confusing area for me is camber - I’ll tell you how I’ve been tuning my cars with respect to camber:
First I’ll set the camber on front and rear tires with a high negative number (-2.0 to -2.5), then I run a few laps to get the tires warmed up. Once things are nice and warm I’ll look at the heat telemetry and will generally see cooler temperatures on the outside edge. Next I start tweaking the camber until my tires have an even heat distribution from inside to outside. My rationale is that under cornering the full surface of the tread should be in contact with the road, so if I have even heat distribution, that means the tire is flat on the road. I generally end up with slightly more negative camber on the rear after doing this.
My understanding is that you should have roughly -0.5 camber during a turn to account for tire deformation. However when I look at the wheel telemetry after adjust camber as detailed above, I usually have considerably more negative camber than that (-1.0 to -1.5 on the rear). If I adjust the camber so I have around -0.5 during a turn, I seem to have considerably less grip than if I adjust camber using my heat technique. I generally just make sure my tires are between 33 - 34 psi when warm.
Is it more important to look at heat, or camber telemetry? Is there something else that I’m not taking into account? I don’t have a good understanding of how caster effects all of this.
I would appreciate any feedback or advice you can give me.
Thanks!