Why A Proper Front End Alignment Is Important For Drag Racing

Drag racing requires a high level of vehicle optimization to be successful. There are numerous areas that can be tweaked and adjusted to extract the most performance possible. A proper front-end alignment is a must-have item in drag racing, but if you don’t have the right parts, it can be difficult to get the front end where it needs to be.

Project Number Cruncher’s front end consists of an interesting mix of OEM and aftermarket parts. Some of the parts the original builder used are less-than-ideal and made it difficult to give the Pontiac a proper alignment. We talked with the team at BMR Suspension about the issues we were having with the car. BMR sent the parts we needed to make sure we could get the best alignment possible.

Why Front-End Alignment Is Important

The three pillars of a front-end alignment are the caster, camber, and toe. These three measurements are important and we need to cover them before we dig into drag racing front-end alignment concepts. Proper front-end geometry is based on getting these measurements right.

Let’s kick things off by talking about caster. It can be described as how much of a forward or backward tilt a spindle has if you’re looking at it from the side of the wheel. When the wheel is tilted backward, that’s positive caster, and titled forward is negative caster. You measure caster in degrees, with the centerline of the spindle being perfectly vertical referenced as zero degrees.

Camber can best be described as how much a wheel is tilting in or out at its top. You express how much camber a wheel has in degrees, and it is measured off the wheel’s true vertical. When a wheel is tilting outward at its top, that’s positive camber; negative camber is if it has an inward tilt.

You’re going to see some pretty significant performance gains from an optimized and correct front-end alignment in drag racing, – Kyle Briese with BMR Suspension

Toe is the easiest front-end measurement to visualize. Toe is commonly defined as the difference in distance that can be measured from the face of a front tire and that of the trailing side of the exact same tire. When a vehicle has toe-in the front wheels will appear to be pointing in towards each other, while toe-out shows the tires pointing outward, away from each other.