Quote:
Originally Posted by spiller
Whether the car understeers or not depends on what sort of tires you go for. If you over tire the rear of the car too much it will not only make you slower in a straight line but the extra grip at the rear will tend to cause the car to understeer if the front is not balanced out with equal amounts of grip. The best way to do this is with your wheel alingment - more negative camber at the front basically. Some people like to run toe out on the front to induce turn in but ive never been a fan of that. It messes with the feel of the steering.
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Bit of an oversimplification there. The OP's question was whether a staggered setup would induce additional understeer. The clear answer would be yes, due to the higher amount of grip at the rear of the car.
Could you tune the chassis to re-balance the car after adding wider rear tires? Using a combination of springs/dampers, sway bars and aggressive alignment settings you probably could, but that would involve a whole lot of work just to fix something that was intentionally 'broken' in the name of aesthetics.
If you have an abundance of power to break the rears loose and need wide rubber to contain them that's one thing but there's a reason that the hardcore track S2K and Miata guys tend to favour square setups.
Having said that, nobody's proven things one way or another through actual testing on these cars yet.
Just my 2c.