Height Adjustment & Travel, Why parallel? Options

[Joseph Mills]

My 914 goes to the shop next week for alignment: 1.5 to 2 degrees neg camber front, 2 to 2.5 neg rear with 1/16" toe-out front, 1/16" toe-in rear. Tires are Hoosier A3S03's.

I have found a few posts that seem to indicate that when the A-arms and trailing arms are parallel to the ground, you have maximized your cars height. Is this in fact, correct?

If so, why is this level preferred? If you go below this height is suspension geometry adversely effected? How much wheel travel is left at this point?

Joseph
'75 914 2.0L AX bound

[Brad Roberts]

Drew,

I hope you didnt think the "Ricky Racer" was aimed at you. It was a general term that I used. A lot of the SoCal shops are well known for sending their customers out on what I consider unsafe alignments. What works good for the fastest guy at the track doesnt work for the guy just starting out. I have seen cars with a ton of negative camber go faster with less because they where not using all of the tire. They where basing their alignments on "what everybody else is running" instead of doing their own data gathering on the owner/driver of given car. This happened last year with some friends of mine at the PCA club race at Fontana. They took a driver there in a GT3 Carrera cup car with 4deg of negative camber. I walked up and the driver felt uncomfortable in the car. It pushed.. it was loose. He wast happy. I walked up to say hello to them and after saying hello... I looked at the car they had there and said "too much negative camber". They said "that is what so and so is running" I said your driver isnt PRO, pull 2 degrees out of the left front and pull 1 degree out of the right front (all left hand track) and pull 1.5 out of each rear wheel. Very next session after 2 laps he was 4 seconds quicker and screaming into his headset about how well the car felt. The car didnt go faster... he felt more comfortable in the car going fast.

My 02

B