Now that you know the basic terminology of alignments, its time to figure out what settings will work best for your car setup.

Prioritize Your Settings
Toe is more important than camber is more important than caster. In that order, always. The reason is that toe has the greatest impact on how well your car steers, tracks, and generally whether it will tend to behave or try to kill you. Camber simply affects ultimate cornering grip and tire wear. Both are important aspects, but not as important as keeping the car in control NOW. Caster only affects the feel of the steering (for all intents and purposes). Hence, you dial in the caster you want/can WITHOUT impacting your toe or camber settings.

SETTINGS

Toe
Setup for Normal Driving and Road Courses
Yes, odd as it may sound at first, I would recommend the same toe settings for a car that is daily driven normally and a car set up for a road course. The reason is simply stability. Toe in in the front keeps the front end from being too “skittish”, and toe in in the rear keeps the rear from having a mind of its own and getting out of control. Both items are just as important driving on the highway to work as they are pushing the limits around a high speed sweeper on the track.

Toe can be measured in degrees or inches. The computer at the alignment shop I go to uses inches, so that is what I’m familiar with. Anything between 1/32 and 1/8 inches in front and rear would be a good setting. The more toe in, the more stability you get, albeit at the expense of slightly more tire wear. I usually get 1/8 inch in at all four corners, as I’d rather be more stable, and I haven’t noticed any excessive wear from too much toe in.

Be aware that depending on suspension setup, toe can change dramatically as your car’s payload increases. Miatas are known for introducing toe out in the rear with heavier payloads. That means that if you get a perfect toe in of 1/32 inch in the rear with no one sitting in the car, that could easily turn into a LOT of toe out when you are actually sitting in the driver’s seat. Since you are always in the driver’s seat when you drive, that means you will always have toe out. Yet another reason to ALWAYS ballast when getting an alignment (see below).

Setup for Autocross
Rear toe setting should be the same as recommended for a daily driver or road course car. Again, you want the rear to be stable and not have a mind of its own.

For front toe, settings depend on the taste of the driver. Toe in gives stability, as mentioned before, but this isn’t really necessary with autocross. Speeds rarely get above 70 mph, and even then it is only for a brief stint if at all. Most speeds are much slower, typically in the 1st and 2nd gear range. As such, the extra response and “snappiness” of toe out can be quite helpful at an autocross. It just may keep you a bit busier on the drive there and back.

Camber
Unlike toe, optimum camber settings are directly related to how hard you drive your car. The harder you corner, the more camber you should run. In fact, you will actually wear your tires unevenly and prematurely if you DON’T run more camber yet still corner aggressively.

Daily Driver
This is the car you drive every day. And nearly all the time, you will be going straight or turning at a very mild to barely moderate pace. As such, your tires will squarely planted on the road most of the time. You therefore want minimal camber to ensure even tire wear. 0.5 degrees negative camber would be a good place to start. You don’t want much less, as you do corner occasionally and can benefit from a touch of camber. But, you don’t really want much more as then you will begin wearing the insides of the tires prematurely.

Track Warrior
This would be your dedicated track car. I.e., you ONLY drive it on the track because it isn’t even registered, or you literally only drive it on the roads when you are driving it to or from the track.

Such a car will spend almost all of its life cornering at the absolute limit of traction. That means you will get maximum grip and tire life if you run a lot of camber. 1.5 degrees negative camper would likely be the lower limit, with around 3 degrees negative camber being a realistic upper limit. But, those are just starting points; your setup may benefit from more or less camber, so experiment!

Track/Street Hybrid
This is the car that you drive both on the street and at the track. Or, if you only drive on the street but drive in a very, shall we say “spirited” manner, you would also fall into this category. This is actualy the hardest sort of car to pick camber settings for, as you need to find a compromise and balance between hard cornering and driving in a straight line on the highway forever. My Miata is an excellent example of the difficulties this category poses. On the track, I am at the very edge of traction (or pretty close thereto) in every corner, so I definitely want a lot of camber on the track. But, when I’m on public roads I don’t do anything of any note, and cornering forces are decidedly low. How does one find a happy balance of the two?

As a very general, blanket statement that one can apply to any given car in this category, a good starting point is 1.0 degrees of camber at all four corners. Again, this is a STARTING POINT - try it and see what your tire wear tells you. With my Miata, I’ve gravitated towards 1.2 degrees front and 1.7 degrees wear as the optimal balance for me and my driving style.

Fine Tuning for Different Types of Cars
To a degree, camber settings can correct slight to moderate oversteer or understeer tendencies in a car. The theory is pretty simple: by adding more camber to the end of the car that loses grip first, you give that end more grip and cancel out the deficiency. With 3000GTs, for example, their tendency to understeer can be offset somewhat by running ~2 degrees of camber in the front and 1 degree of camber in the rear when on a road course.

Of course, there are definitely limitations to this approach. My old Camry will always be an understeer machine even if the tires were parallel to the ground. A much better approach would be to get stiffer sway bars, or adjustable sway bars. But, camber is definitely a tool that can be used too, as needed.

Caster
Most cars do not have adjustable caster; it is set at the factory and that is that. For those of you with cars that do have adjustable caster, there really is no right or wrong setting. Less caster makes steering feel lighter, and more caster makes steering feel heavier. A mid-range caster settings is 5 or 6 degrees. A low setting (makes steering feel light) is 3 or 4 degrees. And a high setting (makes steering feel heavy) is anything above 7.

So which setting to pick? First, how is your steering feel right now? If it is annoyingly light, go for more caster, and vice versa. If you have power steering, more caster generally gives a heavier and (for me at least) more “responsive” feel to the steering. If you no power steering or have removed your power steering, less caster will makes low-speed maneuvers far more enjoyable.

The most important thing to remember is that caster is a distant third in importance behind toe and camber. ALWAYS prioritize your toe and camber settings FIRST, and then dial in whatever caster you can.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Manufacturer Specs v A Precision Alignment
99% of people who buy cars buy them to get from Point A to Point B on public roads at normal speeds. As such, alignments need not be precise, they just need to be in an acceptable range. Consequently, most manufacturers specify a very judicious range of acceptable toe and camber settings. Camber, for example, can have a range of say 0 degrees to over .5 degrees or more. And yes, 1/2 a degree is a VERY large range.

Remember, the best alignment settings for YOU in YOUR CAR are dictated by how YOU drive. If you drive on the track or more aggressively, you will actually get more even wear if you step outside of the manufacturer specifications, in most instances.

Make sure you ballast!
A precision alignment is only precise if the car is ballasted. What does that mean? If your performance driving is done with 2 people in the car, you want 2 people sitting in the car when the alignment is done. If you are the only one in the car when you drive sportively, then you should be sitting in the car when the alignment is done. The reason is that adding weight to the car compresses the suspension, which affects the alignment. In Miatas, for example, the rear gets more toe out as more weight is added. That means that your perfect toe settings in the rear with you NOT in the car can turn to catastrophic toe out simply by virtue of you sitting in the driver’s seat. And since you have to sit in the driver’s seat to drive, you really just paid for an alignment with lots of toe out.

While the car doesn’t care whether you or 150 lbs of sand are in the drivers seat, make sure that the ballast weight is in the driver’s seat when you get an alignment. That 150 lbs will affect the suspension much differently if it is placed in the driver’s seat, the trunk, or on the engine.

You will probably notice a bad alignment more than a good alignment
Some may scream “sacrilege!” at this notion, but I still assert that you will notice a bad alignment more than a good alignment. A bad alignment - or, more likely, the alignment of your wheels after not getting an alignment for a looong time - will make the car feel like it has a mind of its own. The steering will be unpredictable, and the car will generally tend to do what it wants, rather than what you want. And the steering wheel will probably be at an angle when you are going straight, which I’d hope you’d be aware of.

A good alignment, by contrast, simply makes the car more behaved. The nuances between 1 degree of camber and 2.5 degrees of camber are just that - nuances. You have to be REALLY in tune with your car to notice a difference. And preferably, you will do a session on your favorite track, have your mechanic do an alignment, then do another session right afterwards. Without this, there are a whole host of factors that are introduced that could be the reason for a different feel. Different temperature? weather? track conditions? and then there is YOU. Do you really remember what it felt like 2 months ago? You probably think you do, but you probably don’t in actuality.

Although I haven’t played around with alignments too drastically, I haven’t noticed any major difference in the alignments that I have gotten. Toe I just tend to leave as toe in, as I don’t autocross and thus prefer the stability of toe in. Camber I have played with, ranging from 1.5 to 2.2 degrees of negative camber. All I noticed with the 2.2 degrees is that the inside of my tires wore faster.

So what does all that mean? If you are going to pay for an alignment, you might as well pay for a precision alignment and get things to the specs you want. But don’t fret about it when your mechanic is off by a tenth of a degree.

It pays to go to a good alignment shop
It is always a good idea to go to a good mechanic, and this likewise holds true with an alignment. More particularly, it is best to go to a shop that specializes specifically in alignments. The reason is that precision alignments require specialized, expensive machinery and of course, the knowledge of how to actually set the alignment for your specific car.

That second piece - knowing how to adjust the alignment settings - is not as straightforward as you might imagine. More often than not, when you adjust one setting, you are also adjusting other settings. That is, the bolt that affects camber may also change toe when adjusted, and vice versa. This is the case with Miatas, and without someone who knows what they are doing, they may not be able to get the specs that you have asked for. Plus, most shops are used to having a very wide range of acceptable settings, and might not be inclined to take the extra time to actually get your specs as precise as you want.

Can I do my own alignments?
Absolutely! There is nothing magical about doing alignments once you know how to adjust the settings. The real key is in the specific tools involved. A modern, laser alignment machine typically costs many tens of thousands of dollars. But, frankly, it is really worth each of those dollars. To do a proper alignment, you need to have a way of precisely measuring the angles of the wheels in very small increments (think tenths of an inch). A modern alignment machine, once set up, does this on the fly for you so you can immediately see the effect of each adjustment you make. The only other alternatives generally involve pieces of string and careful measuring with rulers and tape measures. It can certainly be done, but it is a tedious endeavor.

You also must make sure that the tires are both on the ground AND on a slippery surface. The reason for this is that if you jack up the car in the air, the wheels are now dangling in the air. This is decidedly not what the angle of the wheels will be when you are driving around, and thus you cannot align the wheels in this position. So, the car must be on the ground, with no jack stands or anything else supporting the frame. And what if you have a low car? Well, you need some way of getting under it to make the adjustments. Unless you are particularly lanky, this means you need a way of raising the wheels while leaving a hole in the middle in which you can work. Think an elevated rail system and you get the idea. And then when you actually do start making adjustments, you need the tires to be able to slip and move with the adjustments. Alignment machines generally combine a raisable rail with movable metal plates on which the wheels are placed (and that is in addition to the laser measuring equipment).

What setting is best? Experiment!
As you hopefully understand by now, there is no such thing as a “correct” alignment. Rather, a good alignment is one that maximizes the objectives of the driver. If you want a car that is very darty and handles high lateral acceleration better, your “correct” settings will be drastically different from someone who does 99% of their driving on the highway.

Set your own goals for what you want out of your car in terms of handling, stability, and tire wear. Then do a realistic assessment of how you actually drive. If you fool yourself into thinking you need 3 degrees of negative camber when you never corner hard, you will simply be wearing out your tires prematurely with no material benefit.