I am proud to report 2 major achievements that were attained just today. The first was that I took tuna sandwiches to a whole new level. For lunch today I mixed cucumbers, onions, and feta cheese into my tuna with some mayo and plastered it on an onion bun with some muenster cheese...Brilliant...The other achievement of the day is probably more profound, but less tasty. I am pleased to announce that TheHotPass.com has taken $100 from THP store sales and donated it to the Jamie McMurray foundation that does work with Autism. So, again, I thank all of the current and former THP customers for making it such a success, and I hope to continue the spirit of giving in the future. I would have given to a Robby Gordon Foundation if one existed since it was mostly his shirts that allowed us to do this, but alas there is none. When he does, I will be one of the first to sign up. The only reason that I picked McMurrays is that he seemed like a nice guy when I met him at a test a couple of years ago, and since Robby punted him in one of the last couple of races, I thought he deserved it. I've heard Kyle Petty is a dick, and the Victory Junction Gang gets more money than god anyway, so I went a different route.

In today's techinical discussion, I want to talk about camber and its significance. Camber is the angle of the tires that you see when you look at a car from the front. If the tires are angled with the tires toward the middle of the car, this is negative camber and is referred to as "top in" in Cup lingo. If the tires are angled with the tops of the tires away from the car, the camber is positive or "top out". Here is a figure to help out with the definition.

Camber is a double edged sword. Dialling camber into the car gets the tires to generate lateral force which helps the car to turn better. However, when you run camber, the tire runs on a thinner contact patch and this can generate too much heat and cause the tires to wear out quicker or to fail. In general, for any random oval track, cup cars will run close to 8 degrees of positive camber on the LF (top towards the infield) and about 2-3 degrees of negative camber on the RF. In the rear, positive 2 on the LR and negative 2 on the RR is pretty normal. NASCAR rules say you can't run more than 8 degrees of camber on either of the front tires and no more than 2 on the rears. So, you can see that on all but the RF, the cars are maxed out. Also note that the tops of all the tires are pointed towards the infield to get the car to pull to the left. Now, it is less important where the camber starts and more important where it ends when the car is traveling in the corners. In cornering the RF will gain negative camber, so now instead of -2 degrees we might have -6 in the corner. On the LF the tire will lose camber in the corner and instead of 8 we might have 3 in the middle of the corner. The exact numbers depend on the geometry of the suspension. Even at full car travel all of the tires are still pointed toward the infield. Engineers on the teams spend alot of time looking at tire data to figure out the optimum camber to run for a given race, and they use this data to chose a suspension setup that will achieve the desired camber in the middle of the corner. Alot of times the RF tire will only want about 5-6 degrees in the middle of the corner before the contact patch becomes so small that it starts to lose grip.

Up until 1991 no one really paid attention to camber. Then Harry Gant started running a ton of rear camber and won 4 races in a row and almost a 5th when his brakes failed. Then the rest of the garage cought on and started bending camber into their rear axles too. Eventuallt the teams were taking it too far and there were axle failures every week due to the stress of too much camber in the drive train. NASCAR then came down with the 2 degree rule for the rear axle. The front is not so sensitive to camber induced failure so they still let them start with 8 degrees now.