Toe-in or toe-out?
 

What's the difference in feel and performance between toe in and toe out? I'm looking for nice turn in and keeping nice road manners. Is there a difference in feel between the two?

Use toe-in on a street car for straight-line stability and reasonable turn in.

Toe-out is meant to compensate for the different slip angles of the inside and outside tires at race speed. Toe-out creates a bad tendency to hunt from side to side as weight is transferred, even when you're driving in a straight line. Basically unstable.

Depends what you want.

You want little tire wear as possible - 0 toe.

You want more turn, especially in the turn entry - toe out.

You want more stability - toe in.

With that said, it comes down to one point: It is important how the car feels to you not how other cars feel and handle.

You will read here all kinds of recommendations, choose the one which make sense and is explained why. But this is a start point until you find your setup.

The hours spent on the right setup are rewarded by days, month and years to come to have a pleasure ride - fit like tailor made.

I spent 30 years designing and refining suspensions on Indy car chassis and driver training schools and on the subject of "toe out", in my opinion, it is useful only on race cars, on controlled surfaces and only on specific type turn ins on very important turns. Otherwise the side effects are just not helpful anywhere else.

All in all, it is only used for those first few moments, before any significant weight transfer starts (other than rear to front under braking) and gives the inside tire a bit more of a chance to help initiate the turn in before it loses most of its gripping ability as it lightens or lifts.

Think about it this way, the only reason the car will go "straight" with toe out on both fronts is the outside tire is offsetting the "turn in" or toe out of the inside tire, they are balanced. Once you enter a turn and steer the outside tire to dead straight, the inside tire has now moved to even more toe out (turned toward the corner more) while it still has significant weight on it and can start the front of the car to turn in before the outside tire has even started to steer toward the corner. A head start so to speak. But when weight starts to transfer to the outside front tire (or rears under power), you lose all the effects of toe out on the inside front because it is losing weight to cause grip. It will have already done all it can do pretty quickly. In the extreme, if it lifts off the surface, its grip is zero (not really a good thing if it can be prevented).

On a street race course with lots of slower, tight corners it can be a blessing to over come some understeer without upsetting the bar balance of the car needed for the high speed stuff (or poor driver technique some cases).

The caution is, on the street it can cause a lot more harm than good. Under hard braking on street surfaces with varying grip side to side, the situation can get ugly in a hurry. Get it really wrong and the front can dart hard enough to cause a pretty good loss of control (think change lanes on you or worse).

On the street, with the power our cars have and the very short wheelbase, setting them up with a little toe in on both ends and soft bars for stability is not a bad idea. Seems like just about every time you want to jump on one of our cars, nothing is warmed up really, including the tires, brakes, oil in the shocks or especially the driver......so stability would have a better chance of letting you continue to play another day.

Wayne, is this you?

Wayne Rogers Bio

Yep, that's me. Was a long time ago. That was a fun little project. We ended up stretching the body to fit a 92 inch wheelbase and putting a LS/6speed in it. Sold the whole thing off to some strange guys in Russia that had been building small aircraft. I'm not sure if they ever really got it going. I still have the body buck stored in Ca, and it turned out to be a really cool looking little roadster and a blast to drive. Similar to an open wheel Cobra I suppose.

Now to really stir up some trouble. In about 1992, Carroll Shelby, Don Landy then president of Shelby's companies, and I took one of his Shelby CanAm SCCA cars and put a Cosworth Ford V8 in it, very quietly. Because the timing was right, we built the car for a TV show called Race Day owned by Pat Patterson. We put the Dodge V6 in it as was the regulation for that race series. But after that, Carroll asked me if I could get my hands on the Cosworth and I had two in crates from some Indy car development stuff I had just done. So with a blind eye from Cosworth, not wanting to get in a Dodge fight, in it went in front of a special designed Pete Wiseman transaxle (terrible piece to shift). I did the testing at Laguna Seca over several weeks and it was a monster. Kind of like the old CanAm days, no driver assisted anything, about 800 HP I would guess with a low test boost and 1400 pounds. Patterson filmed the testing and broadcast it on his TV show. That turned out to be a mistake as the political winds blew and the car was quietly shelved as Dodge got bent out of shape with that Ford motor in it and the SCCA needed that relationship. The car was still being stored in a warehouse in Salinas last time I talked to Carroll before his death and I'm not sure anyone else knows that, until now I guess. Don Landy and Carroll parted company and Landy disappeared and all the guys that had a hand in the development are scattered to the winds or gone now....or probably don't remember. There was always a question of "who" owned the car or engine for that matter, so it was just made to disappear for a while. Been a long while now. I wonder if this is another unknown little chapter in the life of Carroll......among many more I'm sure. Someone will come across the car at some point and maybe this will help build its history.

I thought you were the guy that played Trapper John on MASH, and who is now quite the stock guru. But you've probably heard that once or twice....:LOL:

Same name, different bank account.:D