Drift Car Dynamics w/ Chris Forsberg and Jason Fenske (Engineering Explained) Pt. 1 | Donut Media

The Gold 280Z: A Street Car Turned Drift Machine

My name is Chris Forsberg and I'm a Formula Drift champion. Well, the gold 280Z is one of my favorite cars I have. It's actually my street car, but it's not the easiest car to drive. And we wanted to do a couple of upgrades to make it that much more fun on the streets.

We've got a huge list of parts going into this car, not only suspension-related but also drivetrain and better brakes. Beyond installing all these parts, we brought in Jason from Engineering Explained to help break down exactly what it takes to set up a proper drift car.

Now see where this car would work just fine going in a straight line when you're cutting through the corners, you really want to have specific alignments to get all the grip in the front that you can. And this chassis actually has zero adjustments in there rear and very limited adjustments in the front, so now we're going to be able to set up our camber, caster, and toe so that we can dial this car in for the perfect feel.

First part of the front end is this control arm from Techno Toy Tuning, this has adjustable track width which allows you to extend this lower control arm to reduce your scrub radius. Jason: "So Forsberg has increased the length of his control arms and in doing so he's increased the track width. Proportionately, we're doing the same thing as lowering the center of gravity, so the load transfer is going to be less to that outside tire and you'll have more grip."

Now by pushing out the wheels you also allow for the wheel to turn more, so you can have more steering angle, and this allows for greater slip angles. This is important because it's what allows us to get the car turning in the right direction.

Next up is the caster arm, also known as a tension rod. This is what keeps your wheel from moving back and forth and allows you to dial in your caster. Caster is the angle of the steering axis when you're looking at the car from the side, so if we have our caster angle like that, that's going to be referred to as positive caster.

If you're looking down on this, it's going to look like your steering axis is up here and your contact patch of the tires down here. So as you rotate that wheel, the contact patch is going to come out here, so as the tire is out in this direction its going to want to force it back to straight ahead. This gives you good steering feedback, good steering feel, and it's gonna build progressively as you turn into it and then as you let go of the wheel its gonna return it back to straight ahead.

Our next piece is a new outer tie rod end with this adjustable height pick up point. This allows us to correct the bump steer with a lowered vehicle. Bump steer is the effect when you go over a bump in the road with the wheels turned and the wheel actually continues to adjust because the tire rod pick up and the lower control arm are not on the same plane.

Toe is the angle of the tires looking down on the car from above, so if you look down on the front axle and the tires are pointed like this, that's referred to as toe out. If those tires point that's referred to as toe in. In drifting, you're gonna want to have a slight amount of toe out, and this helps with turn in so as you turn the wheel the car reacts very quickly.

The front suspension of a drift car is typically pretty soft, because you want the spring to be able to adjust those bumps, but you need a really good shock to handle a soft spring so that when you do go over those bumps don't get a really porposie-y effect and have the car go bouncing down the road.

Our next new shiny part for the frontend is this billet hub from Techno Toy Tuning. To match up with a Wilwood vented rotor, these old cars obviously have very outdated brakes, and when you're adding this much power and grip, you wanna make sure you can stop too!

To finish off the front end, we've got a new set of Hankook RS3 tires, matched up with our SSR MS1 wheels. We went with a sixteen by nine wheel in the front to give us a little more clearance for this extra steering angle.

Alright well that was fun, thanks for watching and thank you to Jason for coming out and helping out. Yea, this has been awesome, thanks for having me and I hope you guys learned something. If you want to see more videos make sure to click around and don't forget to subscribe!