I apologize for derailing the thread, but I'm trying to learn stuff here.
Donnie Barnes wrote:
I'm not Aaron, but I'll answer anyway.
Generally speaking, dampers should be used to dampen and springs should be used to fight roll. We like to get tricky and soften the springs to help with bumps and install anti-roll bars as complex springs to continue to fight the roll. In a stock class car you can only play with dampers and front sway bar, obviously, so sometimes we have to make do with playing with both.
The fortunate thing is in your typical front engine RWD car, most of the weight that's going to cause the roll is up front, the same end we have a bar we can change. Okay, great. You find a bar and damper settings that work for a given surface...check. They may even work over a range of given surfaces pretty well, but at some point you're likely to need setup changes for a larger surface change.
If the concrete is very grippy, you now have a pretty large change over, say, HPT. With that added grip you're likely to see more body roll which might take away camber and cause loss of overall grip. You can likely stiffen the shocks if you aren't as stiff as allowed, and that MAY be the right answer. But a stiffer bar may also be the right answer. Likely, you really need BOTH stiffer.
And I'll throw this bone out there. I think Lincoln is probably closer to Forbes in grip than the current general opinion out there. People are used to only running Forbes when there's been a lot of rubber down (and even though most of us have run there first or second heat early the first day, we tend to block that out), but not many people have been able to run Lincoln with a LOT of R-compound cars going through it in a day YET. But that's just my opinion.
--Donnie
Alright, this is a start.
Now. On a car with double wishbone front suspension - which has a fair amount of camber gain on compression, as well as a solid amount of caster put in it - is the "body roll as an instrument for reducing camber, and therefore grip" notion still in effect?
I guess what I'm trying to understand, at the core of it, is why body roll is A Bad Thing, if the car drives well, is well balanced, and fast? I mean I guess it looks a little funny in photos, but really, what difference does it make?
Again - I'm not being obstinate, I promise. This all reveals how little I actually know about this stuff. For years now, I've mostly taken the following approach to setting up a car: "find out what other people are doing that works, and do that."
It's one of the reasons I like having a hired gun codriver in the car. Aaron drove with me at one event, and I respect his opinion very much. He made a run, and immediately and without hesitation, asked that we crank the shocks all the way up, and change the pressures a little bit. Presto - the car was a LOT better.
So mostly, this is me trying to learn something.
Thanks Donnie.
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