This past weekend replaced my front brake pads, changed oil and flush brake fluid and this morning I called InterSport and scheduled for all 4 wheel allignment on Wed. First time going there for an allignment, I hope I'll have good experience with Omar and his team.
I think I'll be all ready for next month at VIR

 

^^^ Redi you will be young Jedi!

 

Sunir, I wanna be just like you when I grow up

 

^^^ Strong with you the force is Simtiaz

 

You getting corner balanced or just standard alignment?

 

I got Corner balanced allignment

 

Nice. What specs did they set everything too ?

 

Corner balancing a street car is not really useful. When I used to race we used to set the car up for each track and for any weight bias we had to put in the car according to points and rules. Corner balancing was a part of that setup checklist.

For a street car save your money, a regular alighment will be fine. I tell students this all the time...and regardless... students just love spending money on useless stuff...

 

Why do you figure it's useless?

 

Adam, Craig at IS told me the specs which I can't remember off top of my head, he did set it up aggresivley for mostly track and some street driving as far as cambers go.
Sunir, I can see your point where i's importat for dedicated track car where everything is stripped out and weight is balance with driver in it as oppose to street car.

 

for what sid just said, basically...in a nutshell corner balancing is for stripped out race cars to place weight bias where needed best in the chassis in with respect to a given track or set of circumstances, such as conditions, weight penalties from proir races or accorning to number of pounds under the race class catagory minimum etc.

corner balancing a street car is useless.

 

If you are running stiff springs / stiff set-up corner balancing can be very helpful if trying to achieve optimum handling, regardless of whether it is a car intended for street or track use. It is all about weight carried by each corner, which has more to do with respective corner ride-heights than moving weight around the car, be it racing rewards weight or groceries or chubby passengers or whatever placed whereabouts in the car. A car's weight, even divided by four corners, will dwarf any of those introduced weight imbalances and with stiff springs the slightest change in ride height on corners can drastically affect weight carried by a corner.

Charlie has only been doing this stuff for about 30 yr.s.... and he isn't the type to tell you to do some useless crap to collect some money (actually he is most of the time to the extreme opposite of that.... maybe even to a point of his own business detriment sometimes IMO). If you want a shop like that let me know.... I have a perfect candidate LOL.

 

In every car, the weight moves around every time you turn the steering wheel. Street cars carry even more weight and it shift around even more dramatically. Some street(track oriented) cars such as GT3 on R comps goes around VIR even faster than race car such as spec-miatas or spec-e30s. That means more weight transfers around to all corners (more weight = more inertia, simple physics) so does that mean only miatas needs corner balancing?

That being said, my 996 GT3 didn't need any corner balancing. I checked everytime it went in for alignment. If the shop has right equipments, I think you can see if it is within the range or not while doing an alignment. I remember seeing cross weight and distribution % on some kind of tool. One of my M3s needed one because of crazy complicated Ohlins setup. So, corner balancing for a street car is not really useless but not definite requirement. It's just rather recommended type of thing.

 

Corner balancing is something done on race cars...to account for weight being placed in the chassis from circumstances, rewards weight, under class regulation weight, etc. If you want to cross corner set the car you can do that with weight jacking using the adjustable perches on each of the 4 corners, this is part of a fine tune. One example is accounting for driver's weight or driver + fuel load (desired start load to weight after a period of time, or number of laps). But again I don't think it is neccesary, you are at a HPDE to learn not to qualify on pole. In my estimate get a good alignment, good set of pads, good brake fluid etc... and you should be fine...no need to do extra crap that is meant for race cars.

I've driven a GT3 and GT3 RS on track...on the full interior bone stock GT3 the car is plenty good out of the box, the setup is spot on from Porsche, no need to do anything outside the normal pre-track checks...certainly no need to cornerbalance...

I'll stick with my point, corner balancing a street car is useless.

 

Lol I'm mute