Monday 1 September 2014

Self centering steering - an IVA requirement

The IVA manual states:

"When the vehicle is driven at speeds of over 10mph, there must be a degree of steering self centring evident"

This is a difficult one to get right without driving the car so I used a local private road to drive up and down to see if I could best gauge what was going on with the steering. The consensus on various forums seems to be a small amount of toe out and much increased front tyre pressure.

I tried this, and to be honest the car felt close on undrivable with the front end feeling like it made no contact with the road!. Back to the drawing board, tyres back to 18psi, and a tad of toe out seemed to do the trick. What was really interesting was the amount of difference just one turn of the track rod made on the feel of the car. In such a light car the geo set up can really change the entire feel of how it drives. I remember getting my old westfield set up by track developments just before a track day, and it was probably the single biggest improvement in performance terms that I made.

Plan is to get through IVA, then take car to the specialists for a suspension set up. Currently, the front end seems to stiff, possibly because the car is built as light as possible, but will do for now.



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