A thought - LoLTD vs. LaLTD

Been quiet here for a couple days. Got a call from my friend on Saturday morning telling me to drive the 460 mi / 740 km out east since he had scored Giants tickets from some random dude at Starbucks.

Unbelievably embarrassing loss to watch in the last seconds of the game, but hey, what can ya do. Play the next game, keep marching toward playoff contention. Thankfully we had Sorrento's (probably some of the best cold subs you can find in the entire goddamn universe, 100x better than anything in Ohio), so that dulled the pain. Personally I recommend the #1 with onions, lettuce, tomatoes, roasted peppers, oil and vinegar, salt and oregano. As for drinking at 930am? Don't judge.

Back to the point at hand, I wanted to get a couple notes down for my own reference here. In vehicle dynamics parlance, 'LLTD' commonly refers to lateral load transfer distribution - a key number for cornering balance. An extreme example of front LLTD bias is shown below. Boogity boogity boogity.

One would think that there's an analog to this in the longitudinal direction (hence Longitudinal Load Transfer Distribution versus Lateral Load Transfer Distribution). It might be nice, on-throttle when the car pitches back, to be able to transfer more load to the inside rear tire for extra forward bite (exit speed is king) at the expense of front axle lateral capacity. Yes, you can have power-on understeer even on RWD cars.

On a road course car I can't imagine having much difference in wheel rate left-to-right on the chassis. Can we do it with some tire rate and kinematic trickery like we talked about before? I suppose if you start with negative camber all around... as you go into roll in a corner and the tires all gain inclination in one direction the insides will have a softer rate than the outsides, and your LoLTD then biases itself to dump load on the outside rear. Pretty much stuck with that with a SLA suspension. Shit. Well, at least it's something to take into consideration and highlights the importance of having good tire rate data over a range of conditions.