If you’ve ever watched professional racing, you may have noticed some key differences between the race cars on the track and the sedan parked in your driveway. The entrants in F1 have skinny, low-built bodies, with a tiny cabin for the driver and an alarmingly sparse overall aspect. Your family car looks like a balloon animal by comparison.

Sharp-eyed observers may also notice one particular detail that sets apart the Lewis Hamiltons from the regular Joes: the angle of a racer’s

tires

. This is called camber, and here’s why it’s important to a car’s

performance

The timbre of your camber

Camber, as defined by

Dunn Tire

, is the tilt of the tires inward or outward when you look at them from the front of the car. A tilt inward gives the vehicle a knock-kneed look; a tilt outward appears a bit bowlegged. The inward tilt is called negative camber, the outward is positive, and when the tires are perpendicular to the ground that is neutral, or zero, camber.

A regular car on the street will likely have a very slight negative camber, while a tractor may have positive camber. Race car tires usually have an aggressively negative camber. But why pick one over the other?

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Not so neutral

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It’s all about the contact of the tires with the road, explains

Road and Track

. A car with neutral camber has its feet planted firmly on the ground, the whole bottom of the tire flush with the road. You’ll be extra stable when you drive in a straight line, but there’s a catch: the car won’t handle as well on a turn.

You already know this intuitively. Picture steering your car around a sharp corner. You will slow down a lot, because if you don’t, you risk transferring too much weight to the outside edge and possibly flipping the car in the process, à la Bronco II. Tilting your tires ever so slightly inward to achieve negative camber alleviates this concern. A helpful video linked by Road and Track explains why.

Negative is a positive

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This is where contact between road and tire becomes crucial, and where neutral camber fails us.

The more surface area that is shared by road and the tire (called the contact patch,) the better the handling, and the more even the division of wear and tear across tires. As you’re rounding that corner, the weight transfer causes the outside tire to take on the majority of the weight and stress as the body rolls towards the outside.

But as the body rolls outward, so, too, does that outside tire. The inside part of a neutrally cambered outside tire lifts up in response to the turn, thus reducing the contact patch to only the very outside part of the tire that remains connected to the road. Your car is now hanging on by a thread.

The solution? Negative camber. Tilting tires slightly inward means that the roll that occurs on a turn is much safer, and handles much better.

As weight is pushed to the outside tire, the outside of that angled tire makes its first contact with the ground, and the inner portion simply shifts down so it’s flush with the ground. If you took a photo of a negatively cambered tire on a turn, it would, ironically, look like it was neutrally cambered. The contact patch of this outside tire is then wonderfully wide, and your car makes the turn with ease.

You can see why race cars are almost always negatively cambered. On tracks with tons of turns, racers want to feel safe gunning it around a corner, and want to prioritize handling.

Negative has some negatives

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Of course, there’s a catch. Driving in a straight line with negative camber means taking an even distribution of weight and placing it on tires that are perched on tiptoe. Imagine an ice skater trying to carve a straight line by shifting her weight inward toward her ankles. She’ll be slower, and her inner thighs will feel the burn a lot faster.

Cars have the advantage of having four ankles to work with. Plus, back tires are often neutrally cambered, so the benefits tend to outweigh the costs in having a negatively cambered set of front tires. You’ll be safer on turns, and since acceleration shifts energy to the back of the car anyway, the neutral back tires will be able to knock out straightaways with no issues.

Unless you have a farm vehicle that won’t be interested in making aggressive turns, negative camber is probably the way to go. So much for saying no to negativity in 2022.

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