Camber and wear, with mostly DD, advice on what's "too much?"
 

So now I finally have my wheels & tires both track/messing about & street decided on. However to make sure that both will work with what I will set for camber I wanted to do one last leg of research here. And of course to be better educated on this platform in this regards.

My driving consists of lots of highway at current time, primarily since I live a few hours away from car club, tracks, auto x and so fourth. Now that said I am on coilovers as well, KWs currently. I am approx 1.250 to 1.5" lower. I have my camber a -2 right now (ZERO TOE) all way around and only drove it for last 1000 miles that way before parking it. I am making this thread cause it may directly impact my choice of wheels mainly and I may need to change my mind to something more conservative.

I am currently looking at a set that is 17x9 with a 245/40/17 tire for track play stuff, and a 18x9.5 with a 255/35/18 tire set for street stuff. Both sets SQUARED.

The car drove certainly fine no issues or complaints with -2 all around however in forward thinking next season I will be running squared setups vs current staggered setup of front 18x8.5 and rear 18x9.5". I will also be looking into doing a FI project in 2014.


I fully realize that if tracking a car a fair bit this is what would help to even out wear, but unless I move closer to these events I must be realistic to other things in life.

My concern and other reason here is wanting to ensure that at my height, with wheels and tires I have in mind is I want ZERO rub, ZERO issues and want to stay on the lower side (IF CAN) of - camber and make my tires last as long as they can I suppose.

My questions are:

1.) If as said mostly highway and at a camber F&R of -2 & ZERO TOE what can I expect to see from a set of tires miles wise before there is a concern of changing them out? Assuming I am running a MPSS or quality higher rated tire 300AA. And I suppose same question could be applied to say Rivals or something in a 200AA wear rating.

2.) Is there truly a big difference "this situation in mind" in running say -1.4 degrees camber all around instead of -2

3.) Has anyone discovered where the breaking point max neg camber is where you will see real fast wear regardless of car duty and tire?


I know for fact from going to stock to an adjusted good alignment I can NOT go back to stock alignment and camber, having some camber all way around is SO MUCH better to say the least. Just want to get a solid grip on what the limits are and what expectations I need to have in my mind.

Thanks to anyone who can offer what they've experienced throughout the miles and duties they have put their car through!!

:w00t:

Camber doesn't wear tires to a certain degree. I'd say this is at around -3.0 or -3.5 (thought I'm not sure you'd need this much on a daily driven car). However this is a dynamic system, your car isn't really sitting at a certain camber/caster in a given situation only when parked.

Camber plus toe is what wears out tires. More camber has sort of a multiplicative effect on this wear given what happens with angles at a given dynamic situation.

are you running camber bolts OP?

edit…..didn't read the question correctly.

I always had my M3 wear pretty quickly on the inside with camber. I got a year out of my V12's, but it's a TOTALLY different car and I imagine the FRS would get more life out of them.

Running -2 degrees of camber will be fine although I would recommend more camber up front for better wear on track. We run -3.3 on the BRZ up front and -2.4 in the rear. So far even wear on track use. Remember McPherson struts in front lose camber upon compression. Toe is what kills the tires the most. Our commutes to the track are 100mi (160km) to 240mi (384km) each way and we did not see any extra wear. Car is also driven in heavy LA traffic multiple 100 mile (160km) commutes to meets.

-2° camber is nothing. That's not going to kill your tires if your toe is in spec. On my Accord, I was running around -3.2° front and -3.9° rear for years, and as long as my toe was in spec, I was able to run the tires for a pretty long time. When you get more negative, you have to pay attention to wear more closely though. I had to flip my tires many times to preserve them. When I bumped up my negative camber to -4.2°, my tires couldn't handle the OEM toe specs, and my tires got destroyed in about six weeks. So there is a point I'd say where you'll start noticing more aggressive wear, but you should be good with -2°.