Hi all:
Saw the recent post about widening the rear track to even things out.
Having done this myself (twice now--once on the Alpine, again on the
Tiger), I thought I'd offer the following excerpt from page 56 of
Carrol Smith's book Tune to Win along with a question (well, two, actually):
(He's talking about racing cars here) "I believe that the front track
should be considerably wider than the rear track. More heresy! My
reasons have to do with turning the car into corners and jumping on the
power coming out. The wider the front track, the more resistance there
is going to be to diagonal load transfer and the lesser will be the
tendency for the car to 'trip over itself' on corner entry and/or push
into the wall from the effect of the drive on the inside rear wheel when
the power is applied. I believe that most of our present road racing
cars, with roughly equal front and rear tracks, would benefit from an
increase in front track width. The slower the corners to be negotiated,
the more important this relative track width becomes."
Okay, he's talking about racing cars, *BUT* I'm interpreting the last
sentence as also applying to road car situations, such as my own, which
generally is dealing with a back country road, a 20 or 30 mph corner,
with me trying to go roughly 15 or so mph faster. He also doesn't
(drat) make mention of how much wider a front track he's recommending on
these racing cars. That said, my questions (since you understand this
stuff in a way I never will)is/are:
1. Does the stock front/rear track setup of our Tigers offer any
*benefits* for street use in cornering and would we be better off trying
to keep things as the factory created them (even if it does look funny)?
2. Is there any point in trying to encourage an even wider front/rear
track disparity in our cars, or would the front/rear track difference
have to be so great that it wouldn't be worthwhile except on a race car,
which mine isn't?
As always, I'm grateful for the brainpower available on this list, and
my thanks in advance for any answers to the above questions.
Best Regards
David (can't let well alone) Sosna
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