Why corner balance

The weight of the driver over the left front of the vehicle needs to be accounted for, along with all of the fluids topped off or at whatever levels are optimum during competition driving along with proper tire pressures.

As you should already know one suspension adjustment affects everything and your corner balancing changes are no different. Document every change every time you adjust a spring perch while corner balancing and be sure to roll your car off of the scales every time you make changes. The more time and more often you corner balance your car the more notes you will have.

Also, take notes. The whole process involves a lot of trial and error along with developing a feel for the actual process in the beginning. Adjustments on spring rates softer than this have a smaller effect on your suspension than making the same adjustments on a stiffer corner.

The whole corner balancing process shows most of its benefits in racing use instead of just daily driving. This should process should be done in conjunction with suspension tuning to add the final touches to your suspension. With a basic understanding, some confidence and a good set of scales you can dial in your suspension on your own.

The Basics. What the Hell Is Corner Balancing? Corner balancing is commonly misunderstood, like many other things in the racing world, and we're here to help clear up exacltly what it is, what it's capable of and why you might want to balance your car. If you've ever installed a set of coilovers before, you know you can adjust the car's height, but have you ever wondered if there's more to it than just setting the fender gaps to be all the same? Of course there is! The most common analogy used with corner balancing is a chair, or stool, that teeter-totters.

When it doesn't have all of its legs planted firmly in the ground, it's not corner balanced. In fact, it most likely carries percent of your weight on just two of its legs. Needless to say, that's bad. Our goal is to split the weight carried evenly between the two diagonal sets of wheels to improve predictable handling. Imagine what the car would be like-it would be that teeter-tottering chair.

Because we're working with a car resting on springs, the issue can still exist, even if it looks like the car is evenly planted on all fours to the untrained eye. The next logical question is, So what? What if my corner balancing is off a little bit? I don't even fully understand what that means! Well, corner balancing is so important that most professional race teams in the world have a set of scales that they lug to every race.

Actually, this may be the definition of a professional race team. You're not pro until you have scales and a bunch of wood to level the scales, because racetracks never seem to pave a flat paddock. Why would race teams do this if it didn't matter? Just to be balling? But most likely it's because when the corner balance is off, the car will have entirely different handling characteristics when turning in one direction versus the other.

It doesn't take much to really feel it. Even 1 or 2 percent will be noticeable to an experienced driver, and a bit more for the novice.

Either way, it's no good, so let's talk about how to measure the issue and how to fix it. To measure the current weight and balance of the car requires scales.

It's absolutely critical that the scales are perfectly level. Corner balancing your car on an uneven surface is possibly worse than not corner balancing it at all. It's also critical that the tire pressure is correct set it to what your hot tire pressure would be out on track because the lower the pressure, the lower that corner will sit. Once our scales are set up and level, turned on and zero'd, we set our car on them. You'll notice from the photos we don't have roll-off ramps.

A typical corner balancing setup will include some sort of runway to roll the car forward and back to eliminate all the tire bind from coming down off a hoist or jack. Rolling the car back and fourth many times is required without long roll-off ramps to ensure there's no preload in the system. The front wheels must also be straight because the caster of the front wheels alters the corner balance as the wheels turn.

Lastly, you also need to make sure the sway bars don't have preload in them-that can also skew the results. If your sway bar endlinks are adjustable, it's an easy fix.

If not, as long as the car is at the same ride height left to right, you should be OK. You can always check by removing a sway bar endlink at ride height and making sure it's easy to remove and insert. So here we are. A fresh set of coilovers, slapped on with no real attention to ride height we actually made a few turns of coilover adjustment in random places to emphasize how off the corner balance can be , and we ended up with This means if we went out and ripped on the roadster in its current state, it would surely feel like it was "loose to the left, tight to the right.

With a Nominal Japanese Driver, I would guess that the car is almost perfectly balanced. Total: lbs!! I think stock 92 NSX weighs lbs. Specifically, the center of gravity is located 0. Now, it so happens that with me in the car, the LR and RR are pretty much the same. Can't say much for the fronts. If you decide to buy adjustable spring perches so you can corner-balance your car, the ideal distribution with your pound body in the car would be:.

Your car's already balanced to within 1 or 2 percent of this ideal. If I were you, I wouldn't bother spending the money for adjustable perches. In my 25 years of racing it usually took weeks of work to get a car so well balanced. Try that with a Turbo or a I did, and here are the data:. Total with no driver: Total with driver: I have a '97 T. I had the spare, jack, air pump, and CD changer in the car when weighed and my helmet in the passenger's seat. I have the Comptech muffler and restraint system and full belts on both sides installed.

I'll let someone else interpolate all this the restraint system and tires increased factory weight whereas the CTech muffler reduced it, I presume , but these figures look pretty good compared to the curb weight of shown in my '97 spec sheet for a 6-speed NSX-T.

It depicts a scenario of a car's four tires in a right hand turn and the slip angles of all four tires in three handling states. These are neutral, understeer, and oversteer. The fourth example was a car brought back into neutral from an oversteering situation.

Basically the slip angles of the tires for a neutral handling car are all the same. During understeer, the slip angle of the front tires is greater than the rear tires. On oversteer the slip angle is greater than the front. The track width didn't have to be changed nor was anything else done to the suspension to achieve a neutral handling car. Finally at the bottom of the handout they make the following statements.

This seems to bear a lot of correlation to what is done with the NSX and in some respects to my car. Because of the larger size of the rear tire as compared to the fronts, 'sx16" , my car tends to be much more neutral than in the past even with the newer Dali sway bars. Web NSXPrime. What Is Corner Balancing? By the same token, if the CG is positioned a little towards the rear, as in the case of the NSX, we would have: lbs Corner balance would still be ideal.

In this example, say the driver weighs 10 pounds 10 lbs Corner balance is still ideal.