[s-cars] Understeer vs. oversteer?

[Theodore Chen]

--- Robert Pastore <rpastore at animalfeeds.com> wrote:
> Teddy:
>
> The ECS plates do nothing more than the "Igor/Peter Blaser method" of
> redrilling the upper plate and offsetting the holes to reduce negative
> camber.   ECS just machines their own upper plate which takes even more
> camber out of the suspension than is possible by redrilling the stock unit.
> there is no change or adjustment for caster

you must have put in aftermarket lowering springs if you were taking
negative camber out.

so what did audi do differently between the '92 and successive years,
which had higher ride heights?  are the upper strut mounts different?
mine are adjusted to maximum negative camber (as much as allowed by
the tiny slots).

> Raising the strut mount isn't easy/neat.

it all depends on your perspective.  if you have a welder and various
tools for working with metal, it's not that bad.  looking at it, it
doesn't seem like it should be too difficult.  you'd have to use longer
bolts in the lower plate and make spacers.

one potential problem is the hood.  i don't know how much the plate
would need to rise, and whether there's enough room to move it up without
hitting the hood.

>  Neither is raising the lower
> suspension mounting points (lowering the car takes away from dynamic camber
> gain)

coincidentally, when i was in the garage just now, i was thinking that
it wouldn't be too hard to change the front suspension setup and get rid
of that funky triangulated antiroll bar.  you would have to add another
lower control arm to triangulate the spindle mount and deal with
braking/acceleration forces.  the subframe conveniently runs right where
you'd need to mount the new arm.  i was thinking it wouldn't be too
hard to weld a bracket to the frame with mounting tabs.  the new
control arm would just be a threaded rod with heim joints at both ends.
you can do the same thing to replace the factory control arm.

or instead of using two lower control arms each consisting of a threaded
rod with rod ends, you could use an A-frame control arm.  circle track
shops sell these, and they're cheap because circle track racers consume
them like popcorn.

you'd need to replace the antiroll bar, and figure out how to mount
the endlinks to the control arms or maybe the struts.

of course, while you're at it, you might take the opportunity to move
the mounting points about an inch upwards to correct the camber curve,
tilt them forward to increase anti-dive, and move the balljoint forward
a little to increase caster.  it'd be hard to move the balljoint outboard
to increase negative camber, because of the halfshafts.  however, if
you moved the pickup points further inboard, you could use longer
control arms, which would reduce front roll center movement from
suspension compression.  you can probably make most of these changes
and still preserve the ability to go back to stock if you don't like
the way it turns out.

i'd be tempted to do this to my S4, but i told myself that it was going
to be my daily driver.  it'd be nice to make it handle like a BMW, but
that giant lump of metal sitting in front of the front axle is a major
problem.

wanna make a silk purse out of a sow's ear?

-teddy


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