Wheel alignment is crucial to any car, not just modified cars with aftermarket wheels. However, it doesn’t always receive the care and attention it deserves. You could have the best car suspension on the market, but, with bad alignment comes bad handling.
Let’s look at it in simple terms: your tyres are the only contact point between the car and the road. The grip they have with the road is the only thing that allows the car to turn, accelerate or brake. That’s why you should never skimp on fitting decent tyres to any car, let alone a performance or tuned one.
As such, optimising the way those tyres interact with the road is, unsurprisingly, a key area to getting the best possible performance from your car.
CAMBER, TOE AND CASTER
There are three main areas you can adjust to tune the tyre alignment: camber, toe and caster. Most of these parameters are adjustable even on a standard car, but start adding some upgraded hardware such as fancy coilovers with adjustable top-mounts, camber bolts and adjustable control arms, and you can really tweak things to find the optimum settings for you and your car.
To accurately measure any of these, though, you’ll need either a laser alignment rig or
