Camber Theory

PsuPepperoni

Muscle Car Drifter
Premium
2,187
United States
Kansas City
PsuPepperoni
NOTE: As of 1.09, Camber effects have changed, but I'll wait for more people to test it out before posting any results.

When a wheel has negative camber, the outside of the tire leans slightly off the ground.

In a straight line, this creates a smaller contact patch and lowers the tires' potential to accelerate and decelerate the vehicle.

During hard cornering, sidewall flex will cause the contact patch to roll flat onto the road and, ideally, create the largest possible contact patch and improve grip.

suspension_9.jpg


Note that this only works for the outside wheel, but since the car will lean onto the outside wheels while cornering, that's where you want to maximize grip.







The sweet spot for camber depends on the strength of the sidewalls.

There is a limit of course. Extreme camber means that the sidewall will never flex enough to level out the tread with the road surface, and you end up with a tiny contact patch on the inside corner of the tire. Some drifters do this to their wheels to make them slippery. They also stretch tires onto wider wheels, which angles the sidewalls and makes them more resistant to lateral flex, negating any extra grip that the camber would have added
post-27237-12639395223447_thumb.jpg


On a perfectly balanced car, increased camber on the front wheels should allow the front of the car to take tighter turns than the rear. When taken to the limit, the rear end will lose traction first and centrifugal momentum will cause it to slide towards the outside of the curve and rotate the vehicle too quickly.

Increased camber on the rear wheels causes the front wheels to reach the limit first, which means loss of steering and inability to rotate the car through the corner. Centrifugal momentum carries the car on a tangent line until the front wheels regain traction.

Interesting note from Wikipedia about interaction between toe and camber:
"When a wheel is set up to have some camber angle, the interaction between the tire and road surface causes the wheel to tend to want to roll in a curve, as if it were part of a conical surface (camber thrust). This tendency to turn increases the rolling resistance as well as increasing tire wear. A small degree of toe (toe-out for negative camber, toe-in for positive camber) will cancel this turning tendency, reducing wear and rolling resistance. On some competition vehicles such as go-karts, especially where power is extremely limited and is highly regulated by the rules of the sport, these effects can become very significant in terms of competitiveness and performance."

 
Last edited:
👍. One more thing that affects camber is suspension geometry. Depending on what suspension you have (double wishbone, McPherson strut etc) and the precise geometry, you'll get changes in camber as the suspension compresses/droops with body pitch and roll (dynamic camber). As you say, in a turn, you want the tyre offering its best contact patch, the dynamic camber behaviour, body roll and sidewall deformation all come into this.

Lovely thermal imaging video... I'm dreaming, but this would be awesome in GT! At the least we should have an inside/mid/outside temp indicator.

Cheers,

Bread
 
So how do you find GT6 application of camber compared to real world? I've only played around a little and hardly at all since the 1.02 update but it doesn't seem to work the same as GT5.

It may be that too much camber results in loss of grip when it wasn't the case in GT5 but I've been leaving the settings at 0 until I have time to drive some more cars and get my head around what's happening in GT6.
 
I've not had much time on GT6 either, the only thing I do sometimes do is check the replays and zoom in on the tyres to see if they look flat to the road. Since GT doesn't show sidewall flex visually (and we don't know if it models it either), in GT5 I'd usually get them so they displayed a bit of -ve camber with respect to the road when I was cornering. Granted it's very hard to be sure the camera is aligned correctly, especially with a banked track, and small camber values are hard to spot. I guess you could take a photo and export it to PC, draw some lines in MS paint and measure angles.

I think some threads have reported that even a little negative camber (like 1-1.5 degrees) can show a performance decrease in GT6!

It's very hard to be certain of anything like this without telemetry, which is a major shortcoming of GT IMHO. The only thing you could try to test would be on the willow springs skidpan to see if you notice anything by feel or by max speed whilst holding the desired line. Someone did this on the FITT physics thread.

Here's to hoping the promised 7-poster rig in GT6 brings good telemetry!

Cheers,

Bread
 
So how do you find GT6 application of camber compared to real world? I've only played around a little and hardly at all since the 1.02 update but it doesn't seem to work the same as GT5.

It may be that too much camber results in loss of grip when it wasn't the case in GT5 but I've been leaving the settings at 0 until I have time to drive some more cars and get my head around what's happening in GT6.
I made this thread because I don't think it's correct in GT6. As you said it's not the same as GT5, and it's not even the same as the descriptions in GT6. Every car I've tuned in GT6 understeers more with any amount of front camber, when it should improve steering response. Attempts to cure oversteer with rear camber only make the problem much worse.

I'll just have to tune all my cars the wrong way in the game and not think about it too much. :rolleyes:
 
So how do you find GT6 application of camber compared to real world?


It is completely off. Take for example the Ford v8 supercar. Tuners here give it 0 camber however in real life it ran around 4.5 degrees.
 
I have a nicely set-up Eunos Roadster (can't remember values if the top of my head) that should tear around Tsukuba, but my DC2 kills it on standard suspension! Camber actually worked on GT5
 
I made this thread because I don't think it's correct in GT6. As you said it's not the same as GT5, and it's not even the same as the descriptions in GT6. Every car I've tuned in GT6 understeers more with any amount of front camber, when it should improve steering response. Attempts to cure oversteer with rear camber only make the problem much worse.

I'll just have to tune all my cars the wrong way in the game and not think about it too much. :rolleyes:

From my limited experience, I would agree. But not to worry; someday PD will come along with an update and suddenly everything will be different - and then we may have something worse to complain about. :rolleyes:
 
Adding front or rear camber in GT6 seems to lower road adhesion in both acceleration and braking (expected) and cornering (unexpected). I have made some successful GT6 tunes by using 0 camber front and rear. Adding camber just slows them down.
 
I experience the same. increasing camber makes that end of the car slip more and the tyres turn red quicker. I've tried from 0 to 6.5 and the problem just gets worse the more camber is added onto the car I tested with.
 
Things missing from the OP:

Turning the steering wheel angles the front tires off the ground, (tilting them towards positive camber, which is bad) negative front camber helps relieve this.

Suspension compressing/decompressing changes camber angles. (meaning your optimal camber angle is dependent on the springs and shocks travel)
 
Things missing from the OP:

Turning the steering wheel angles the front tires off the ground, (tilting them towards positive camber, which is bad) negative front camber helps relieve this.

Suspension compressing/decompressing changes camber angles. (meaning your optimal camber angle is dependent on the springs and shocks travel)
To clarify, turning the steering wheel will only tilt the inside wheel towards positive camber, because of the caster angle.

And I don't have a strong enough understanding of the relation of steering factors (caster/toe/spring compression/steering axis inclination/shock stiffness) to try to explain it in my OP, but I would encourage you or anyone to talk more in depth about it here.
 
To clarify, turning the steering wheel will only tilt the inside wheel towards positive camber, because of the caster angle.

And I don't have a strong enough understanding of the relation of steering factors (caster/toe/spring compression/steering axis inclination/shock stiffness) to try to explain it in my OP, but I would encourage you or anyone to talk more in depth about it here.

An excellent laboratory for testing and making observations in GT6 on camber effects would be the Suzuka 10 Lap Challenge Race. It's a decent race because the AI don't act stupid and pit twice. Every car we are likely to run will have to pit at least once, and the tire wear is clearly seen corner by corner. In a recent race, I pitted lap 5 with indicators all 7's. End of race they were 8's and 6's (and my rear end was sliding), but the rears had extra wear because I had a spin which instantly took them down one number.

I plan to run numerous races at different camber settings and judge the effect on lap times and tire wear, if any. I invite others to do the same!
 
Last edited:
My first round of camber testing - with a nearly default 600 PP Rocket at the Suzuka 10 lapper - was inconclusive.

I raced at the default 0.0/0.0 camber a number of times, pitting lap 7. Tire wear averaged 6's over 7's at 1st stop, 9's over 9's at end of race.

I then tested with 1.0 camber front and rear, and achieved essentially the same result with no difference in lap times.
 
From my slightly less scientific testing as I've been tuning my cars:

Changing nothing but camber, going from 0 to 1deg does next to nothing (other than slightly decrease the straight line grip on the rear wheels under hard acceleration). I saw no noticable difference in grip or tire wear.

Going above 1deg, it felt like grip was decreased, even when firmly and smoothly planted into a banked turn, where the camber should be the biggest help. All the car's I've tuned for grip end up (negative)0-.4 in rear, and (negative).2-1.0 in front, anything more seems like it's hurting performance.

That said, for drift purposes, due to the caster of the wheels, negative camber up front did make it feel more planted when sliding around on opposite lock. Even 2-3 degrees was fine, helpful even. Certainly doesn't help straight line stability or full grip cornering, but it helps when you're sliding. Rears I've been leaving near 0, anything drastic there makes the car want to let loose.

Anyone try positive camber and see what happens? Another case of physics being backwards like GT5 was notorious for?
 
My results mirror the last two posters. I find it interesting because I look at some other tuner's tunes and see some big camber numbers sometimes. Maybe the difference is that I tend to focus on MR cars but I probably need to try their tunes and then play with the camber to see how the car reacts.
 
The inside wheel tilts towards negative camber, the outside wheel positive camber.
Optimally, you'd want positive camber on the inside wheel and negative on the outside.
By "inside" I mean the inside of the turn. So, if you're turning right, the inside (right) wheel will tilt away from the car, achieving more positive camber.

This car is technically turning left but the wheels are turning right and that's what I'm referring to.
4151313210_a1ce5e42ea_o.jpg
 
Yeah, you're right, I get this stuff backwards almost every time I try to type it. :lol:

You're not right, but you're not wrong. It depends on the design. It's not uncommon for manufactures to intentionally design the suspension so positive camber is gained instead of negative, and this is to induce under steer.
 
Last edited:
Yeah, you're right, I get this stuff backwards almost every time I try to type it. :lol:

You're not right, but you're not wrong. It depends on the design. It's not uncommon for manufactures to intentionally design the suspension so positive camber is gained instead of negative, and this is to induce under steer.
Hmmm. By my understanding, you would have to run negative caster for that to happen. If you can link me to a road car made after 1980 that runs negative caster I'll bake you some cookies.

Edit: You're talking about the outside wheel now right? Because I just said the inside wheel gains positive camber when turning...
 
Last edited:
bqu9.jpg

hsfs.jpg


I wanted to post this and say, "like that"? But it turns out the effect on my car is so minimal you can barely tell. (very slightly positive inside, very slightly negative outside)
 
if you're turning right, the inside (right) wheel will tilt away from the car, achieving more positive camber.

You're not right, but you're not wrong. It depends on the design. It's not uncommon for manufactures to intentionally design the suspension so positive camber is gained instead of negative, and this is to induce under steer.


I wanted to post this and say, "like that"? But it turns out the effect on my car is so minimal you can barely tell. (very slightly positive inside, very slightly negative outside)

:confused:
 
I said the inside wheel gains positive camber. You said I was not right, and that the inside wheels gains camber.

You are agreeing with me while trying to correct me, and I'm trying to clear up my confusion.
 
Last edited:
Back