Build A Faster Car - helping drivers engineer

Some drivers create very neutral-handling cars despite running huge front sway bars (or very stiff front springs) which should be completely saturating the front tires. It just goes to show that a suspension must be designed for the tires, and that a setup designed for wide, sticky rubber might feel horrible on street tires. Some tires can take very heavy loads while others cannot.

The "big front sway bar" crowd has the goal of wanting the rear tires as evenly loaded as possible so that the inside rear tire doesn't lose traction on corner exit. This too is important, but means lots of load transfer at the front tires (which decreases grip). Every measure should be taken to compensate for this, including tires that can handle the inevitably huge amounts of load on the front tires.

So, this illustrates a final point: tuning for maximum peak grip for one situation often means a trade-off in peak grip for another situation. Optimizing for peak cornering might mean not being able to apply as much power on corner exit, and so-on. For this reason a stopwatch must be used to validate your suspension changes, although full data logging will do a better job of showing if the driver could adjust his or her style to better utilize the modified suspension.

More reading (and the source for some of these images):

http://insideracingtechnology.com/tirebkexerpt2.htm
http://www.carbibles.com/tyre_bible_pg2.html
http://www.miata.net/sport/Physics/
http://www.creativecarcontrol.co.uk/modelgrip.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=cr4IyD5l1NQC&pg=PA10&sig=X_FjuTvvFJsqgg...