
Over the years I have had lots of feedback that most these concepts and ideas work great on dirt, on front wheel drive mini stocks, on almost any street stock, production type race car.Given all the things you can change on your race car (camber, caster, toe, ride height, dampers etc) how can you be sure you are running the optimal race car setup? When this book was originally published in 2001 it was specifically for GM Metric chassis (78 or newer Malibu, Monte Carlo, Regal and Cutlass cars) racing on asphalt. They aren’t usually as good at spotting little modifications to every single part of the suspension. Officials are trained to find sneaky parts.

The surest way to get disqualified is to bolt an illegal part onto your car. Yes, outright violations are penalized, but creative interpretations or improvements in area that have no specific rule usually get the “Don't bring that back next week” penalty. Even when clear rules exist, the track officials are often reluctant to enforce them.

Unfortunately, most rule books that I have dealt with are very vague. I would rather race 100% legal with a rule book that is written 100% clear and specific, that is enforced as it is written. Many of the ideas fit into the “gray areas” and some of them are outright cheating. Most of the ideas in this book are perfectly legal for any rule book. It costs just as much money, if not more, to run poorly, so you might as well learn to run well. That extra effort is what separates the front runners from the rest of the field.

As you will gather from this book, setting up your car right and properly maintaining it is a lot of work. There is no one big trick to make your care handle better, rather it’s all the little things done right that will make you consistently fast. Other competitors will offer you tips, but what works on their car may not work on yours and often they can’t explain why something works for them, it just does. I always knew that chassis set up had to be based on some proven theory, but I could never find a book that could tell me what that theory was. Through trial and error, I spent a lot of time, money and energy learning how to get a race car to go around the corner and end up in victory lane. Over the years, most of the things that I have learned about racing, I've learned the hard way.
