Corner balancing

its a way of ensuring the car distributes its wheight through the wheels evenly to both sides of the car.

basically the car is put on 4 scales, then each corners suspension is adjusted to insure that the wheight on the front scales is the same for both sides and the rears match both sides, you'd be suprised how far out they can be. the adjustment can be done in a variety of ways eg. by adjusting the height/length of one of the suspension springs

 

Yes and no.

The analogy is sitting on a four legged bar stool. If all legs are the same length, there's equal weight (load) on all four. If one leg is shorter/longer that the other three, you know that you will rock on a diagonal pair, gently raising and lowering one leg of the opposite diagonal pair. Of course, this changes the weight on any given leg compared with a bar stool with four equal length legs.

With corner weighting a production/ road car, your goal is equal weight diagonally across the chassis; that is add left front and right rear weight on the scales and compare with right front plus left rear.

Being within about 2% of the vehicles total weight is typically within the tolerance of load cell corner weight scales.

Example:
LF 745
RF 698
LR 987
RR 955

Here the cross weight percentages are 49.8% and 50.2%. The fact that the weight difference across the front axle is nearly 50lbs is not relevant for this production based race car.

When adjusting a Ferrari (or other) with threaded spring collars be aware to keep the chassis level side-to-side and that the anti-roll bars do not influence the load on any wheel (disconnected and connected load comparison).

Best regards,

Rob

 

Important points to note here:

1. You're only concerned with lateral (side to side) balance. Fore/aft is not relevant as fore/aft balance depends upon vehicle design assumptions.
2. The correct lateral balance is not necessarily exactly equal as unequal placement of weight within the car does impact this and trying to correct out down to the last lb is likely to produce some minor, but strange, outcomes.
3. It's equally important to consider the relative position of wishbones (or equivalent suspension pieces) on either side along with ride height and other suspension measurement points as it is ensuring the corner weighting is dead on. This is because it's necessary to maintain proper suspension geometry while at the same time balancing the car. Usually, the best outcome is a compromise between these two competing priorities.

 

Regardless of what some will try and tell you you cannot physically move weight around by adjusting a spring. This article is a longer version of rexrcr's answer:

http://grmotorsports.com/news/012005/understanding-corner-weights.php