Originally Posted by
billdelong
I really like this approach but I will go a step farther with an initial car setup where I prefer to never touch trim and keep sub-trim to zero.
I use a setup station to set the ride height, camber and front toe first...then I adjust the link between the servo arm and the bell cranks to get the car to track straight. It can be time consuming but it's worth the hassle to know my car is perfectly centered. Not all radios will balance steering properly even with sub-trim where a few points is no big deal, but I've seen some guys have close to 50 points on their sub-trim where I test drove their car and could clearly feel unbalanced throw from left to right making the car harder to drive than necessary. Once we centered everything out the car drove like a dream.
I do this too but I don't do it on a setup station. In fact I do it before the steering links are connected while building the car. I make sure the steering rack itself is centred, the setup station won't necessarily do that even if the wheels are pointing straight. I've seen a lot of cars at the track where the steering rack is out by 10 degrees or so because they keep adjusting the steering links to get the wheels straight instead of the servo link.