Originally Posted by
JohnL
That's an awful lot of camber. IMO the only time it's going to be productive is when cornering very hard with a lot of weight transfer to the outside front tyre, but only if you have enough body roll to cause that 5° of camber to be negated and for the contact patch to be presented to the road 'squarely' under full roll (and of course the inside front camber will be utterly terrible rendering the inside front tyre almost useless for much of the corner, nearly all front grip will have to be generated by the outside front only).
If you have a fair degree of roll stiffness you might never even get that outside front contact patch presented squarely to the road, meaning the full potential grip from either of the front tyres may never be realised, even at mid corner with max body roll (?).
Keep in mind too that with body roll the camber of the inside front tyre becomes even more disadvantageous, and the more so the more the static neg camber is. With FWD we rely more upon inside front grip then RWD cars do, so we should be careful not to compromise inside front grip too much with excessive neg camber angles.
Having the inside front runing on it's inner edge of tread won't be very good for either lateral front grip (read understeer), nor for longitudinal traction exiting corners (read inside front wheelspin). High levels of neg camber will compromise front tyre braking performance, and this becomes even worse with nose dive under hard braking. This is more problematic for double wishbone designs than for Mac struts because double wishbone suspensions gain more neg camber with bump motion (as you get with nose dive). Under brakes, you have the static neg camber + any neg camber gain from the bump motion, which isn't all that much with Mac struts but substantially more with double wishbone (typically), so with substantial static neg camber to start with you may end up braking on effectively quite small front contact patches...
One of the main benefits of a well designed double wishbone suspension is that less static neg camber is required to maximise dynamic performance than with Mac struts (and performance will be greater than Mac strut, all else being equal), but with so much camber I suspect you're suspension might be being held back nearer Mac strut type performance...
