The Importance of Proper Toe Alignment

horrible for road racing good for drifting we do not want the rear to be Towing out why might I increase my tow out at FDF we spent years mastering our craft from precise welding and machining to competing at the highest level of drifting every week we'll be giving you our tips tricks and all The Insider knowledge you need straight from our shop to your screen welcome to just a tip Tuesday I am coming to you live from just a tip Tuesday here at FDF Ray shop I'm Josiah I own the place and I'm going to

talk to you guys about toe and tips on toe that have to do with your drift car first I'm going to tell you what I run in the front then I'm going to talk a bunch and then I'm going to tell you what I run in the rear so you're going to have to watch the whole video in order to get both tips on toe what do we do when we set up a drift car for our alignment specs what are the three main things that you focus on your camber your caster and your toe

yes there are far more kinematics involved with setting up the front end of your car but whenever somebody's asking what you're running those are the three main things we're not talking to a Caster or camber we are going to talk about toe so what do most people run on a drift car toe out generally between 18 of an inch all the way up to a half an inch of TOA which I have seen people run in FD they may compensating for something or they may be trying to add some positive acren but we'll get into

that later what do I personally run I run between 1/8 and 3/16 of an inch toe out which is about. 2° on a alignment machine that uses degrees the way that we measure this generally speaking at the track is with toe plates so after our initial alignment we then use toe plates at the track uh the initial alignment has confirmed that all four wheels are straight and in line with the chassis nicely centered and then from there we make equal adjustments left to right whenever we adjust our toe why might I increase my toe out

I will increase my toe out if I want slightly better Turnin response it's complicated to describe why your Turnin response is better but let me explain something to you as quickly as I can because this is just a tip this is not a fully in-depth we're not giving it all to you okay basically your static toe what you have set up when the steering wheel is straight your static toe is only relevant before the drift is initiated and kind of right at the beginning of your initiation because once you've already initiated and you're actually in

drift your toe is no longer affected by what you set up statically now it is all to do with your acren also on your lead wheel the majority of the weight of the vehicle is on your lead wheel sometimes the trail wheel isn't even touching the ground so your toe really doesn't affect the handling of your car while in drift that much only when you're initiating and transitioning and basically driving straight that is when your static toe is going to be the most relevant now what would say let's throw the opposite at it and what's

going to happen if I have too much toe in so tow in is for highspeed straight line stability and very slight amounts of it you really don't want both Wheels allowed to be freely guided without having a slight Force against each other so whenever you're setting up any form of racing or driving you need to have a small amount of toe kind of no matter what to allow for that very slight scrub left tire versus right this helps with alignment torque this helps with guiding the car now when we talk about slight we can have

even the the minimalist amount it's basically 0.1 of a degree um or even less but basically we always have some form of toe in or toe out depending on the type of racing that's it for drifting in the front take what you will from that I told you what I run and I told you what most people run the reason why someone might compensate with a lot of toe out is because positive acman induces scrub while in drift okay this can do two things slow the chassis a little bit and also increase your self-alignment torque

because those two wheels are trying to fight each other other back to straight because of the scrub difference between the two so the more toe out you have the more those Wheels want to be pointed back straight again okay so they want to even out the load between your left and right wheel so the more toe out you have it does induce a form of self-alignment torque and some people do prefer that feeling it will scrub your tires quite quickly on the inside and it will do some excessive wear and slow the car a little

bit in corners but like I said while you're in drift sometimes that trailing wheel is not even touching the ground um on a bank it does almost nothing you can see them usually locked up with a little bit of left foot brake pressure and yeah so while you're in drift it doesn't really do anything for the rear so let's talk about tow in the rear a tip for you guys Towing in will increase your forward drive on the car why is this basically whenever we're drifting we're in a constant slip being in a constant slip

tires are often measured and the compound is determined by the slip angle of the tire and what these tires are able to withstand before they slit before they lose traction now in drifting we're purposely putting these tires into a permanent slip also engaging those two tires basically two applied forces against each other just allows for a harder driving force in a certain direction now if we were to tow the rear out for example which a lot of factory multi-link cars do when you lower them and under compression a lot of them will tow out this

is going to kind of do the opposite effect when your car leans if I'm drifting to the right and I have toe out in the rear when I initiate the drift and I compress my suspension the tire is going to tow out even further and it's actually going to encourage the car to over rotate and to steer almost like it has rear steering because when I shift my weight I go from having 50% weight on each tire to having probably 70 80% of the weight on the outside Tire compressing the suspension and towing it out

basically giving me rear wheel steering either it's going to over rotate it's going to lose traction and it's going to not drive the car forward because basically the car is a driving force and our front end is our boat Rudder and we are steering a dragster around the corner that's essentially what drifting is and we do not want the rear to be Towing out we want it to be Towing in as well as having the car set up with static tow right off the bat so let's get into what I run I personally run right

around a/ an inch of toe in on my Corvette on my 240 I have gone as far as putting it at 1 in of toe in with minimal bump bump steer or toe gain or dynamic toe whatever you want to call it I will only ever use that if I feel like I'm not able to recover well enough on a certain track back or if I'm using a certain Tire mostly just based on using a spec Tire um usually I'm using a tire that has a ton of grip and I don't need to do much

with the dynamic toe side of things but if I'm using a spec Tire I will induce some Dynamic toe Dynamic toe is under compression my wheels are Towing in which is also called bump steer this is horrible for road racing this is good for drifting it feels a little weird when you're running up and your toe in the rear is messing up a bunch but once you're in drift you really don't notice it and you have a very strong wrong on throttle response when you have Dynamic toe especially when you're modulating or if you're doing

a lot of transitions you'll feel like as soon as you step on the gas you're going you'll feel that toe change and you'll feel that uh additional grip and then as the toe releases and you go off throttle you're going to lose grip which could be H good for floating in certain areas of the track and so on and so forth it's pretty in-depth when you get that involved with setting up and playing around with toe but basically in essence that is just a Tuesday for toe maybe more than a tip nonetheless I hope you

guys learned something and uh this is basically my opinion on my experience with playing with tow quite a bit there's lots of data on this especially with road racing there's a lot of um tips and tricks on setting up and messing around with toe when it comes to road racing drifting is definitely a big this works for me but it might not work for you thing that's what's worked for me we'll see you guys next week on Tuesday uh where we're going to talk about something else that's cool know what it is that's it guys

thanks for watching I'll see you guys in the next [Music] [Music] video