[changzuki]

- Centurion's Camber -
In the post above, a passing car took pics and made references to Centurion's mismatched wheel camber. Looking from the front, the wheels resemble a cowboy who's just got off a very round and overweight horse - major bow legs! The opposite can be said when looking at the rear wheels from behind the car. The pic attached with this posting shows it fairly well even from a side view:
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There is however, a very good reason for this, but to the casual observer, it looks, well, "different". Early Triumph spitfires (and other cars with early independent rear suspensions) "could" get themselves into a situation where the rear wheels can "tuck" under the car. This Centurion uses a 1966 Spitfire as it's base so this concern has merit in certain (but rare) situations:
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The simple fix is to lower the rear of the car a tad and that in turn will allow the tops of the rear wheels to lean inward toward the car - thus lessening the chance of the dreaded wheel tuck ever happening. On the other end of the car, the tops of the front wheels do lean slightly away from the car. When the Brits were getting stoned in a garage engineering the early Spitfires (hey it was 1966), they deemed this odd looking arrangement to be the standard for these cars, and as crude as it was, it worked.
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So, in short - it looks odd but handles like a rocket on rails. We could run through hairpin/descending turn #1 at speeds other cars could not and we never chirped a tire or drifted out.
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- The above is taken from "Chapter 5: Interesting info that most are too disinterested to ask about" -
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~CrazyJerry