A question for the slalom racers, Why is front-end so stiff you lift a wheel Options

[stewteral]

Hey Slalom Guys,

I've been bothered by the pics of your cars lifting the inside front wheel under cornering. Years ago, this was the set up for 911's to adjust away from the car's oversteering nature.

However, from my past experience I've found that a car that would be too oversteery for the track would be about right for slaloms. As I saw it, it was most important to get the front end to turn-in crisply to carve the very tight turns.

So what don't I understand about running 914's? Are your courses so fast now the a loose car will get away from you? The fastest course I ever ran just barely
got Dad's old Cobra into 2nd gear (80 MPH).

Best,
Terry

[J P Stein]

Static camber was set at -.5 front & rear....bias ply tires. I fooled around with toe quite a bit and ended up with 0 toe f & R. Toe out made the car too squirrely under heavy braking & corner entry....AX is a game of inches. 21mm T bars & 275 lb springs. Since one doesn't get many chances at a course (3 passes at SCCA), IMO making the car easy to drive all over the range of crap course designers throw at you......everything to long sweepers to 180 deg single cone pivot turns, tight spaced slaloms, wide spaced slaloms, variable length cone slaloms. Basic oversteer to help rotate the car...but not too much. Tire pressures were all we fooled with at an event. Got a bit carried away with lowering the rear in that second picture.....bout rolled the tire off the rim, oops. It scared the crap outta me when I saw that pic. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/w00t.gif) never went below 20 psi after that....19 in front.
22mm AR bar set half hard is enough to lift the inside front. On a butt smooth surface a lot stiffer/lower setup would be the cat's ass and all that flopping around would be gone. I drove a track set up 914 on our venue once. It was at least twice as stiff as mine & it was undriveable there.

My car carried only about 350 lbs on each front wheel. As you can see the total front weight often was transferred to the outer front (some went aft, of course)
The shocks were very soft in rebound & just stiff enough in jounce.....even then it would rattle your eyeballs....(literally) double vision on the rough patches.

Did I say our home venue is rough? A bad patch.This could be avoided...once ya knew it was there. The natural line took you there tho.