- Regardless whether you've got a circuit car, a road car or a drift car, the alignment is
critical to getting the most out of your car's performance.
In particular it's that tyre contact patch between the tyre and the road that really
defines how much grip you're going to have and how the car's going to handle.
But when it comes to drifting in particular, it is a very unique form of motorsport and
the typical settings we may expect from our alignment are going to be vastly different
to what you'd see in the world of circuit racing.
So we're here with Mike from Squire Motorsport to get into a little bit more
detail about some drift specific wheel alignment settings.
So Mike, for a start you're no stranger to motorsport, circuit racing in particular
as well as drifting so you've had a lot of experience in both camps, can you sort of
start by giving us some idea of some of the key differences we would see between an
alignment setup for a purpose designed circuit car and something that's going to be
built for drifting?
- Yeah sure so I mean obviously the first biggest notice is going to be steering lock.
So that's going to be the one big thing and you'll see a lot of cars running quite
big camber up front.
That generally comes alongside with the lock.
But as a whole, the biggest thing is a circuit car's going to have a different, they're built
to go straight, keep their grip and the way the car feels in, out down straights the whole lot
of that where you know guys sort of get a little bit straight on grip or trying to find
grip and thinking it's going to come just from toes and stuff like that so I think the biggest
mistake that everybody makes is trying to follow a, like OK this works in a circuit
car but in a drift car it doesn't necessarily work to a point.
So the biggest focus with that is how, everybody thinks oh drifting is just smoking
up the tyres and not actually having drive but you put a pro drift car out on the track
and it can probably drift behind a circuit car doing a fast lap.
- I think that's something that is easy to lose sight of that in the early days of
drifting it was exactly like you're saying, basically let's make a lot of smoke and
go sideways but I mean this is an incredibly competitive sport these days and the cars
are making more and more power, many of them up around 1000 horsepower and beyond.
And now it's come down to getting that power to the ground so the drive is very important.
Now before we get a little too far into this, I want to just jump back to something you said
and unpack that a little bit.
You mentioned the steering lock and I mean that goes without saying these cars are
incredibly sideways so the steering lock's essential for the driver to be able to
control the drift without spinning.
So how do you get that out of a production car that's not designed with anything like
that sort of steering lock?
- Yeah so the biggest, first of all it generally ends up going with, well it started as what
they call a cut and shut knuckle.
So obviously just cutting your spindle down, moving your steering rack forward a little bit
just so that you don't get the lock out.
Obviously on full lock, if you don't have that.
And also just to avoid some really ugly bump steers and those sorts of things.
So I mean that's where it first started.
It sort of then went into down the road lengthening the lower control arms as
well as that.
And then as naturally progression went on, you get stuff like Wisefab out of the States.
- Purpose designed components to get the geometry correct and also allow that
additional lock?
- Yeah sure but once you start getting into those sorts of gear, you know they've got
a lot of adjustment where you can go from zero Ackermann and then you can go in any
direction you like.
In some of the setups you can adjust the caster in two different places so it starts
to really bring in an element where you actually need to know what you've got
to do and then your driver also has to know the feel, how he likes the feel of the car
because the dynamic of changing those front ends, even just as little things as
far as Ackermann, scrub radius, toe, camber, those things actually start bringing in
really big differences on a car and you can generally tell how a car's going to handle by
just looking at its front end static.
- Alright so you've just brought up about a million more terms that we now need to
go back and unpack which is great so let's dive in there a little bit.
So I want to start with one of the simple ones here, caster and the caster has a
sort of a self aligning effect on the steering so basically really important to drifting.
So with drifting, can you give us sort of a range of what sort of caster angle we
might expect to see in the front end?
- Yeah sure so when the guys were starting with their cut and shut and their radius arms,
if we talk about a Silvia, probably one of the most common right.
You've got your front adjustable caster arm.
So by the time the guys have done the adjustments they need to get the lock
and the camber, your caster sometimes kind of comes pre determined.
That window there is generally around the seven degrees.
You can start looking at the Wisefab and the GT86s, and you start struggling to get around
about the 4.5, five, you've got to start doing some work.
So I mean anywhere within that window is good but I've seen, I've worked with some
drivers that would go as little as three and then as far as eight to nine.
I think a really good base setting and a good window is anywhere, learning
and just to give yourself a base set to know where you go, I think sort of six,
around six degrees plus but not much further, within that window.
- So that self aligning, just for those who aren't really aware of what we mean there,
so basically what that means, you'll see quite often the drifters, once they've initiated
the drift, they'll actually let go of the steering wheel and that caster,
that self aligning torque effect, counter steers automatically so it's much quicker than the
driver can dial in the opposite lock?
- Yeah sure so if we want to try and simplify it a little bit yeah and whenever you see a car,
you see them turning and it starts to load up its inside wheel, so in a drift, inside wheel's
kind of your driven wheel and your loaded wheel so yeah you're 100% right so if you see
any in car footage, they're always on and off the throttle and they're actually
driving the car off the throttle.
Some drivers will like that and other drivers don't so it's obviously as soon as
you reduce the caster, the car kind of gets less self steer if we want to call it
so the driver will actually have to feed it which allows the driver to have a lot more
input but you can actually adjust the way the vehicle will snap and the aggressiveness
of that...
- Of the caster.
- Correct so that's a part of it.
So the easiest way to explain caster if you, the most visual way to explain it,
if you ever watch West Coast Choppers, they're riding on a Harley that's got a wheel
three feet out the front.
That guy's never going to go around a corner super fast but it's going to go in a straight
line really well so that's kind of caster, just wants to keep pulling the car and the
steering wheel out.
- Alright so the next one that you mentioned, and this starts to get a little bit more
technical, probably a little bit more difficult for us to explain in simple terms here but
Ackermann steering, so basically in a nutshell here you've got the fact that when we're
turning the car, and let's talk about just driving around a supermarket carpark at
low speed, so as we turn, each wheel is actually turning through a different radius
and the idea with Ackermann steering is that it turns the two front wheels at different
angles so it matches the radius.
So there's a lot more to it than that, I'm trying to really dull it down but the
fact that that might work really well for driving around a supermarket carpark
at low speed, that doesn't really take into account what's going on on track at speed
with particularly the slip of the tyres so how do you decide on Ackermann
steering, what amount of Ackermann to include and how that works?
- Yeah so with the Ackermann it's actually, Ackermann and obviously whenever you
look at drifters, they all want to run the big dish.
You can generally, slightly off track but we'll come back to the Ackermann is
you can always see a car running say Wisefab, they generally run like a zero
Ackermann, the car almost has no dish on the front, its offset's right out.
So its pivoting over its own centres if you want to say.
But the thing yeah like you talk about, the Ackermann is, that's quite a big one
which I feel is kind of overlooked a lot in the pit lane.
Because Ackermann and scrub radius I kind of generally put together.
Just because you mentioned slip angle on the car.
So you talk about all these sorts of things which can go quite, as you'd know it's a
very deep sort of conversation but if we keep it simple, say Wisefab on a zero
Ackermann, there's plenty of videos around where the car actually looks like it's just
crab walking almost, they've got it on lock and there's absolutely no friction between
the front, the two front wheels which allows the rear to just push it in the direction of
the front wheels, if that's the easiest way to explain it.
As you start to change its Ackermann, you'll create a drag and a potential braking
affect almost if we can say it like that, to try and keep it simple.
And so that also just comes down to driver's feel but obviously too much of
it and you start to lock that inside wheel up too much and it actually makes the car
want to rotate on its own axis so you start to get into those sorts of things
and it is, generally if we talk about someone wanting to start out and you've got sort of
cut and shut knuckle style, you know.
- Let's be honest, your Ackermann at that point is set, it is what it is, we've got no
adjustment so I think it's important to state there, I've dug into this term because
you mention it so I want to get it out there but it is an adjustment in the suspension
geometry that most people aren't going to have any access to make adjustments
unless you're right up at that upper echelon where you've got all the adjustability in
the components, correct?
- I mean you can still do it with a cut and shut style knuckle but you've got
to put some thought into it because you can really make your life hard,
if you're starting out to drift and you start, you think oh I can cut and shut and weld
my own knuckles up, you can potentially make, you can really ruin some track days
struggling so definitely something like that you know there's some guys out there that
have built some pretty cool setups that are really simple which allows you to
focus, I'd say getting out, learning drifting, you probably want to work more on the
rear end than the front end to start with, get your lock, but yeah like you say,
it's a hard conversation to sort of try and touch on.
- It's very difficult when we've got no visual cues here so I think what we'll do is
we'll park that and we'll move on.
Another aspect there, we've basically dealt with the key items, another aspect there
is toe so I just want to talk about some of the differences there we see between
the likes of a circuit car and a drift car.
It's be common on a circuit car, obviously all dependent on the chassis, the driver,
the track et cetera but we might run may a couple of mm toe out each side on the
front to aid turn in and corner entry.
We might run a couple of mm toe in per side on the rear to help with stability
and how does that differ with what you would see as a range for drifting?
- Yeah so again there's so many variations, so if we talk about a standard say Silvia,
obviously under squat they'll toe in, we've actually got setups out there now
that you can actually adjust if you wanted to toe in, zero toe.
- So you're sort of talking about essentially bump steer in the rear of the car so as the
suspension moves through bump travel, the suspension moves up, you're actually
seeing the toe change?
- Correct yeah but effectively bump steer, dynamic toe, there's so many terminologies
again depends which country you're in.
So if we talk about the rear for example, again knowing what that's done,
but it's also about, it is a very hard one to touch on because every setting has an
action and a reaction and if you change one obviously something else changes and it's
about knowing which one to change to compensate for the other.
But if we talk about a general toe, a sort of standard general thereabouts racecar
style setup, generally is a good base.
- It will get you in the ballpark.
- 100% because at the end of the day, you still are chasing grip.
It starts to get complicated when you start to really have the power and you really
want to start to drive the car differently.
You really want to drive the car differently or you want to start getting it reactive,
on and off power so that toe sort of can go very far.
Generally a rule of thumb, a lot of the guys will run a little bit of out on the rear or
zero to a little bit of in to get some drive off the rear.
Some of the guys run some really big numbers on the rear and really big numbers on the
front.
- Can you give us, like what is a big number, are we talking five, are we talking 10, 15?
- I mean I've heard it go as far as 15 but I think in my opinion, some might not
agree with but in my opinion, anywhere after, if you're touching double numbers,
you're pushing a tyre past its actual slip if we want to call it.
- Now a couple of things I just want to touch on there, again it's really important
to mention that this is very specific to the chassis and also specific to the track and
of course those numbers you're talking about there, with a pro drift car you only really
need the tyres to hold together for two laps, whereas if you ran those sorts of
numbers on a circuit car, the amount of scrub being caused by that toe would just
destroy the tyres very quickly.
- Yeah correct but you've still got to be able to manage, because the wheels are
spinning so fast, sometimes you'll see the wheels spinning in excess of
200 km/h, you've still got to be able to manage you tyre surface.
So if you're just spinning your tyre the whole time and it's got a toe drag on it,
you're going to potentially put excess heat into it which will also then actually effectively
reduce your grip.
So it's about managing those two things where some guys believe that if you just throw toe,
toe doesn't necessarily create grip.
And so it's that balance because you can cook a surface of your tyre by throwing toe in
and wheel spin and so that's the other aspect of where it can, things start to get very
challenging and deep and you mentioned, it's track specific, chassis specific but it's
also driver specific.
So it's a very big...
- I think it is really important to understand and anyone who's sort of experienced in
motorsport will know that there really are very few absolutes here but it's important
to understand the implications of these changes and of course we also need to test and find
out what a particular change does and decide if that's going in the right direction.
Look Mike it's been great to get some insight there, we thank you for your time and all the
best for the rest of the weekend here at World Time Attack.
- No worries, thank you.
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