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Corner weighting now avalible at wim


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All cars can be corner weighted although default suspension would mean the we would have to physically move/ remove or add weight.

 

Or put the driver on a diet :lol:. What's the method for corner weighting a road car? Surely it would depend to some extent on how many passengers the car would normally carry, or do you just adjust the balance for only a driver?

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What's the method for corner weighting a road car? Surely it would depend to some extent on how many passengers the car would normally carry, or do you just adjust the balance for only a driver?

 

Unless you are going to use the road car for serious competition then you wouldn't normally bother with corner weighting as you wouldn't notice any difference. Which answers your question - if you are driving hard then you won't have any passengers!

 

Simple answer is that you should only corner weight with the car in its "active-mode" ie if its a rally car then it should have both co-driver & driver aboard (or their weights in the seats), half a tank of fuel, tyres at equal pressures and all other gear carried on board and in the normal place.

 

Off the top of my head about the only benefit corner weighting a road car might give would be improved braking in a straight line - ie less lock up of one side.

Of course there's also the pub bragging aspect, but that doesn't interest me.

 

However when it comes to a track or proper single seat racing car the benefits are dramatic.

It's a quite frustrating process though because as the link rightly says, adjust one weight and all the rest change. Which also means that a number alignment factors can change too.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I'm sure we can work something out for you price wise...... In truth i haven't finalized the price because it depends how and where the balance is going to be staged, meaning if it's done on the geo ramp i have to take into account lost revenue for the geo's, or we have a "setting bed" that uses a two poster or i might have to get another geo ramp purely for weighting.

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  • 4 weeks later...

hi tony newbe here, hoping you may be able to help explain something too me, i've been advised to corner weight properly the arb's should have the tension removed from them by using adjustable droplinks, what confuses me is that surely if you then put the tension back in by tightening them up the corner weight setup would alter? or is it a case of adjusting the tension as part of the corner weighing???? :blink:

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Further to the above, Corner Weighting will not improve the handling of the car per se. It is a bit like saying more power will make you go faster!

 

The grip that a car can generate depends on the vertical loading of it's tyres - an axle will have it's greatest grip when the tyres on that axle are evenly loaded. (Milliken & Milliken wheel pair theory)

 

Load transfers in a vehicle normally occur diagonally accross the vehicle - hence corner weighting is usually carried out to give a 50% cross weight.

 

The reason for this is so that the car will react the same in both right and left turns so the chassis engineer can then apply understeer/oversteer corrections to dial this out.

 

A typical example of incorrect corner weights is when a car will be fine in right hand turns and understeer/oversteer on left hand turns - this is very difficult to dial out.

 

The chassis tuner can also 'add wedge' (alter the cross weight percentage) for certain tracks so the car will turn better in right or left hand turns (most UK circuits run clockwise - Mallory is a good example of when you would not run a 50% cross weight) and also add 'stagger' (different tyre pressures to change rolling diameters of wheels) to improve drive out of the corners.

 

Due to the fact that corner weighting is done to equalise load transfers so that each tyre 'sees' the same vertical loadings it is vital that the part of the suspension responsible for the load transfers is tested first - i.e. springs/dampers.

 

Unless you know that the spring ratings are identical and the dampers are well matched by a damper dyno (even top grade dampers require dyno matching) then the corner weighting will be an approximation at best.

 

The car should be weighted for it's running conditions - we weight ours for the last 25% of a race - fuel is measured accurately to the nearest litre as is driver weight/helmet etc - it is vital these weights are placed in the correct position during the excercise.

 

As previously stated the vehicle should also have adjustable ARB droplinks to corner weight - the ARB's are disconnected for corner weighting to stop inaccurate readings then re-connected with no pre-load.

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I think we can agree corner weighting for the domestic vehicle is very different from a competition car. A competition car will have a predictable amount of fuel, be balanced to optimise vertical loading and geometrically calibrated to optimise the tyre coefficient/ saturation points. For the modified domestic car corner weighting is there to compliment the modifications. In an ideal world the owner would need to throw away the one gallon washer bottle for a start, but it's not an ideal world.

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