off centre top mounts

@ Pooky: obviously technical discussions are not something you like a lot. You prefer to tell THE TRUTH in one short contradictory or ironical phrase.
Well, 99% of "profesionals" who are working with cars all their life long do not have an idea what a car is, so very good reference indeed.

@215DMX: in fact not any of the 2 possibilities, it is just a question of mass repartition, don't even need to drive any of these cars to know...The six cylinder is a heavy engine and is mounted more to the front of the car, so if you do as I mentioned, you have a positive effect on the repartition of the masses of the car, so the same positive effect on its dynamics.

Come on Uwe. Trigonometry?

I don't know how long the strut is, but you probably do.

Sin 2 x strut length = distance moved backwards

CoolCat wrote: @ Pooky: obviously technical discussions are not something you like a lot. You prefer to tell THE TRUTH in one short contradictory or ironical phrase. Well, 99% of "professionals" who are working with cars all their life long do not have an idea what a car is, so very good reference indeed.

Interesting comment. As you are not aware I have a masters in Automotive Engineering, spent a year doing a sort of vehicle dynamics apprenticeship, have now done vehicle dynamics development for 10 years since, my title is now 'subject matter expert - vehicle handling and steering development' for the company I work for, I am involved in detailed technical analysis on a daily basis using ADAMS and VEHDYNA, I must spend most of time driving and assessing cars with various development changes, I drive most competitors....etc etc. And a car is??????????????

Your suggestion that increasing castor as an alternative to camber and it having similar effects is wrong. Yes it has effects but they are different. The things you change on the car are different. You change many many things when you move the strut top back that you wont when you move it sideways. For a track if you want more camber then put more camber on. Simple. Changing the castor from 6 to 8 will make 1/10 of f all difference to the camber characteristic when you take an average corner. I was looking at this characteristic for the new M6 only two days ago. It has a change in camber of 0.13 deg per deg road wheel angle when you do a steering test. So, with a steering ratio of 16.9:1 and with a hand wheel angle of 100 deg the road wheel would have moved 5.9 deg so you would have an extra 0.76 deg of camber. Now lets increase that by 25% (going from 6 to 8 deg) and you will get an extra whopping 0.19 deg of camber. Thats a hell of a lot less than increasing the static camber by 1.5 deg by my measurements.

When you increase the castor the main thing you are doing is altering all the suspension geometry around the tyre's contact patch. You will put the tyre's contact patch further behind the point at which the kingpin axis crosses the ground. This is the trail. More trail means heavier steering plus LESS apparent steering feedback at the limit of grip. This is because as the tyre loses pneumatic trail during harder cornering the differences in torque around the kingpin axis will vary less as a percentage of the total trail, so it will be less apparent when the tyre is approaching and passing its limit of grip. This is one reason that the E30 has better steering feedback than the E36, but ultimately less of a feeling of high speed stability. Doing that to the E36 was BMW's choice at the time and they got it wrong.

Mine has 1 degree of negative camber on the front and I must say uneven tyre wear isn't that much of a problem, turn in has  really improved.

John