would changing my camber angle so that the top of the wheels is 2.5 degrees inward increase the handling without wearing down my tires too badly? my buddy with an STI said thats waht i should do.
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Nope! A good alignment will keep as much rubber as possible on the road. A slight angle like you mention may help a bit, but not significantly enough to justify the uneven wearing. But doing this, on a hard turn, the outter wheel will increase its contact area while the inner wheel will have very little contact. With the setup that you have, you'd be better off putting some sway bars and performance dampers on to achieve the handling characteristics that you want. The sway bars should be done first since they keep your car level around hard corners, which is what I think that you are looking for. The dampers will improve the overall ride. With my setup, I am holding 0.9 g's, measured with a G-Timer.

 

2.5 degree's is fairly extreme and will result in very uneven tire wear, it will help your handling although I think it'd help more with less of an angle. The sway bar is going to do more than camber alone but according to a few tire shops you can run up to 1 degree of negative camber without any very ill effect (just rotate the tires a little more and you're fine) and that will help your cornering as well

But as falkore24 stated, just camber isn't going to give you the same performance that springs or sway bars would. Not to mention you'd probably need a camber kit to do it and that would cost you more than a sway bar.

 

ive got a camber kit, and its got like +/- 3 degrees pos or neg of adjustment capability.
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If you really want to improve your handling, you need to upgrade the parts that you are missing. Anti-sway bars were my first suspension upgrade and they make a huge difference by themselves. Tweaking the settings is fine once everything is in place, but will have very little effect compared to actual performance parts.

BTW - Why would you have performance springs and the camber kit, but not dampers???

 

Also, for the front camber kit, I'd highly recommend the Ingals Engineering upper control arm adjustment as opposed to the offset ball joint. I killed the offset ball joint in less than a year.