My name is Chris Forsberg and I'm a Formula Drift champion. Well the gold 280Z is one of
my favorite cars I have. It's actually my streetcar, but it is not the easiest car to drive.
And we wanted to do a couple upgrades to make it that much more fun on the streets. We have a huge
mess of parts going into this car, not only suspension related but also drivetrain
and better brakes. Beyond installing all these parts we brought in Jason from
Engineering Explained to help break down exactly what it takes to set up a proper
drift car. Now see where this car would work just fine going in a straight line
when you're cutting through the corners you really want to have specific alignments to get all the
grip in the front that you can, and this chassis actually has zero adjustments in the
rear and very limited adjustments in the front so now we're going to be able to
set up our camber, caster, and toe so that we can dial this car in for the perfect feel.
First part of the front end is this control arm from Techno Toy Tuning, this has
adjustable track width which allows you to extend this lower control arm to
reduce your scrub radius. (Jason) So Forsberg has increased the length of his control arms
and in doing so he's
increase the track width. Proportionately we're doing the same thing as lowering
the center of gravity, so the load transfer is going to be less to that outside tire
and you'll have more grip. Now by pushing out the wheels you also allow for the wheels
to turn more so you can have more steering angle, and this allows for greater slip angles.
Next up is the caster arm, also known as a tension rod this is what keeps your wheel
from moving back and forth and allows you to dial in your caster.
Caster is the angle of the steering axis when you're looking at the car from the side, so if we have our
caster angle it like that, that's going to be referred to as positive caster.
If you're looking down on this, it's gonna look like your steering axis is up here and your
contact patch of the tires down here, so as you rotate that wheel, the contact patch is going to come.
out here so as the tire is out this direction its going to want to force it
back to straight ahead so its gonna give you good steering feedback, good steering
feel and its gonna build progressively as you turn into it and then as you let
go of the wheel its gonna return it back to straight ahead.
Our next piece is a new outer tie rod end with this adjustable height pick up point
this allows us to correct the bump steer with a lowered vehicle. Bump steer is the
effect when you go over a bump in the road with the wheels turned and the wheel
actually continues to adjust because the tire rod pick up and the lower control arm are not
on the same plane, so your toe is physically changing as you go through compression.
Toe is the angle of the tires looking down on the car from above
so if you look down on the front axle and the tires are pointed like this, this
is referred to as toe out. If those tires points that's referred to as toe in.
In drifting you're gonna want to have a slight amount of toe out, and this helps
with turn in so as you turn the wheel the car reacts very quickly
Now the front suspension of a drift car is typically pretty soft, because you want the spring to
be able to adjust those bumps, but you need a really good shock to handle
a soft spring so that when you do go over those bumps don't get a really porposie-y effect
and have the car go bouncing down the road.
Our next new shiny part for the front end is this billet hub from Techno Toy
to match up with a Wilwood vented rotor, these old cars obviously have very
outdated breaks, and when you're adding this much power and grip, you wanna make sure you
can stop too!
To finish off the front end, we have our t3 camber plates installed up top.
These will allow us to fine-tune the camber of the front end by adding negative camber, which will
keep that tire planted flat as we increase our steering angle.
Camber is the angle of the tires when looking at the car from behind. So if the bottom of the tire is
further out than the top of the tire this is referred to as negative camber.
Now in drifting you want pretty aggressive negative camber and this is because as
you're cornering you're going to have that force and it's going to cause the
tire to rotate onto its contact patch so as you're in a pretty heavy corner that
contact patch is gonna be maximized and roll onto itself so you can maximize
grip going through corner.
And to finish it off we have a new set of Hankook RS3 tires,
matched up with out SSR MS1 wheels. We went with a sixteen by
nine wheel in the front to give us a little more clearance for this extra steering angle.
Alright well that was fun, thanks for watching and thank you to Jason for coming out and helping out
Yea this has been awesome, thanks for having me and I hope you guys learned something.
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