I see a fair number of customized Hondas/Accuras with the rear wheels canted in (if that’s the correct term) at the top so that it looks like the rear suspension is broken. In some cases its extremely exaggerated and looks downright stupid/dangerous. Someone told me its because the wheels are to big to fit in the wheel well without canting them. So, whats the point? Something to do with drifting?
Along the same lines - what’s the thingy where a trailer hitch would normally be installed. It looks sort of like this: ]o if you were looking at the rear bumper from the side.
To a certain point, this negative camber is an asset to hard handling. At the point where it’s noticeable to anyone not looking closely, it’s probably exaggerated nonsense… auto-woo.
while a degree or two of negative camber is usually seen on the rear wheels of cars with independent rear suspension, the phenomenon you’re seeing is called “hellaflush” or “stanced.”
these people think it looks good for some reason, and don’t give a shit about the poor handling or the safety concerns.
Small amounts of this are accomplished simply by taking the built-in adjustment mechanism for camber and cranking them all the way to the stop. It lowers the body by angling the wheels up & in. FWD cars with independent rear suspensions will have these adjustments on all 4 corners. Old-fashioned RWD cars typically won’t have adjustments like that on the rear but will on the front.
The goal is simply to get that ground-hugging look. And for somebody just starting to mess with their FWD car, it’s a zero cost mod.
More extreme examples like post #5 take custom hardware.
I think that just comes from the extreme lowering. If you lower a car with independent front and rear suspension, the suspension arms are at the extreme upper end of their travel. The wheels move in an arc so when the wheel moves up that high, the top of the wheel leans in.
Are you talking about the square hole at the back of some vehicles? That would be a receiver. The hitch has a square shaft that fits into the hole and is locked in with a pin.
Civics: the $5,000 car people give their son so he can put $30k in largely useless mods on it, $500 at a time, then sell it for scrap or for less than it cost new.
When it’s only on the rear wheels, it’s usually a sign of suspension design compromise, as on my (long gone) 1982 Ford Escort. It’s generally more noticeable when the car is loaded down. Nothing to be proud of.
I’m operating on the assumption the stanced look is what the OP is talking about. All modern cars will typically have some negative camber in the rear, because it helps reduce oversteer, and oversteer causes lawsuits.
This is correct. Here’s a picture of a Civic that’s been lowered with no camber modifications. The normal [slight] negative camber is exaggerated because the wheels are further along the arc of their travel, even at rest. Notice how the wheels look sunken in; there’s a huge gap between the wheel and the fender. That’s viewed as a cosmetically bad thing in certain circles. More on that later.
Negative camber in the rear is almost always going to be a detriment to handling. Negative in the front, neutral in the rear. Any time you see a lot of negative rear camber, it’s either style, or cluelessness, or both.
Nitpick – Civics lost factory camber adjustments in the mid-80s. Most modern economy cars (last 30 years) don’t have factory adjustment for camber because engineering tolerances are so much better. Toe, yes; caster, maybe; camber, probably not. Adjusting camber by itself won’t lower a car, you need lowering springs (applicable for most modern suspensions).
So, why do people do this stanced thing? Because of lip and gap. Gap is bad, and you can get rid of it by getting wider wheels, wheels with lower offsets, or with spacers. Lip is good – ugly factory wheels (modder mindset) have no lips, sexy aftermarket wheels (again, modder mindset) have lips so big you can stack up Benjamins on them. The problem is that Civics can’t take wheels with a lot of lip. They’ll stick out way too far, and then you look like a, uhh, Mexican lowrider and not a slammed sports car.
Solution? Stretch the tires (tires too small for the wheels), roll the fenders (increase clearance in the wheel well), and then add a bunch of negative camber so that it actually slides up into the body work.
So that’s all it is, it’s strictly a cosmetic mod to get rid of gap and get as much lip as possible on a car that shouldn’t have it.
For most popular cars there are kits. The last 2 Civics I posted pictures of probably have cheap ebay camber kits. Something like this required some custom work, and IIRC, janky custom work.
The reason why it was originally mostly a Honda phenomenon is that during the 80’s and 90’s Honda used front and rear double wishbone suspensions on most of their cars. Lowering these resulted in much more pronounced negative camber than lowering a similar FWD car with the more conventional McPhearson strut/torsion bar layout. The conventional wisdom was if you lowered a double wishbone suspension car, you had to install a camber kit to get the stock camber angles back. It turns out though that so long as the toe angles (i.e. the horizontal alignment) are good, that negative camber isn’t really hurting anything.
My take on the whole phenomenon is that since Hondas were the only common cheap car with this suspension setup, people souping them up on the cheap would tend to just lower them and not spend the money to correct the camber. Then, inexplicably, this became fashionable to the point that people started buying camber kits specifically to create more negative camber, not less. Then people with other kinds of cars with more conventional suspension layouts started doing the same thing. No accounting for taste.
Tow hook. See, race cars get stuck in gravel traps, and if someone call pull you out quickly you can get back to racing. Most race cars will have some easily accessibly tow hook in the front and rear, because the factory hooks will be too hard to get to if you’re stuck in gravel.
So someone decided to make a buck and sell blingy tow hooks to people who don’t need them. It’s even sillier because actual racecars tend to have fabric tow hooks (think seat belts) so you can bump draft. Those big penis looking things would poke holes in radiators, and would generally be frowned upon by actual racers. But there you go. Penis tow hooks.
You saw some negative camber in very successful autocross cars of the 1970s- predominantly VW Beetles and Datsun 510s. But it was only a little and was due to the peculiarity of their suspension and weight distributions.
In general, you’re correct. Rears should have nearly zero camber under nearly all conditions, hard track racing included.
I guess it’s kinda like gangsta pants - “I look like a big stupid toddler with my pants falling down” translated to “look, my rear suspension is completely trashed.”
Or bias ply tires, for that matter.
