The man wants MORE caster. How about this idea?
I'm curious at what point you think there is too much caster ?
There has to be a "too much caster", how much is that, and what is the symptom ?
When stuff never meant to take the stresses bend/flex and break, tire wear ?
Adding caster means you get additional camber when you turn the wheels, which does a few things. It makes it harder to turn, because you're basically lifting the car by putting the tires more on edge.
So from an effort standpoint, it gets harder and hard to change direction quickly. So there's definitely a point where you're going to be making it too difficult to turn, especially if you're not running power steering.
From a handling perspective though, the point is to keep the inside tire flat on the ground. If you add too much caster, you're going to be adding too much camber on the wheel when turning. So you could actually lose contact patch by putting the tire too much on edge. The other thing is, you are trying to lift the car when you put that much angle on the tire and that can have an unsettling effect when you're turning in, you can actually upset the balance of the car if you get too extreme.
Factory settings were "0" to minus "1", ( think front wheel of shopping buggy flopping around) - so any pos caster is going to give better directional stability
I just don't get this wheel "slamming" back to center .
Yeah but the factory settings were for bias ply tires, which have a built in recentering effect because of their construction. The moment you put radials on the car the factory settings are wrong.
On a long race/drive, no power, that's fatiguing
Coast road without power steering, caster +6. lol.
I understand and
use big caster for autocross, road course, ya know, racing, - but for street, absurd .
jmo
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Actually you're backward on this. For racing you'd want the caster to set up the right amount of camber on turn in. You don't necessarily need a ton of positive caster for autocross at all, because the speeds are slow and you're always turning one way or another. So high speed stability isn't a concern. Especially for slower speed tracks you'd probably want less caster than you'd want on the street if you were running manual steering and wide tires, as long as your camber gain was decent and you didn't have a ton of body roll angle.
On a road course you'd want a good amount of positive caster. The high speeds would require stability, and with wide sticky tires in the front you'd want to have the handle on them. It would still be a balance, because the higher speeds also make upsetting the balance of the car on turn in more likely.
On the street, or most streets anyway, you're actually doing a lot less turning than anything else. And lousy road quality increases the "tracking" and rut following kind of tendency you get with a wider front tire. And for freeway driving the high speed stability is definitely a thing, if you're running too little caster and tracking all over the road that's fatiguing too.
I'm always driving mountain roads now, pretty much anywhere I go. I run 275's with +6.5° of caster and 16:1 manual steering. My commute to work is over an hour of driving, and at least 45 minutes of it is fairly curvy mountain roads before I hit the freeway. The mountain roads aren't an issue at all for fatigue, and the steering on even my car doesn't start to get heavy until I drop under 20 mph. It may actually be a little high on the steering effort for a tight/slow autoX course, but on the street it's great for everything but parallel parking.
