Right Bear, talking of understeer and oversteer and what makes it happen, lets talk chairs and see if were on the same page.
It seemed to me that most young blokes at school never got there heads into physics, more likely sport or girls
. BUT handling is all about physics, especially that bloke called Newton re mass X momentum etc.
It doesn't matter whether its a motorcycle, sidecar or formula 1, the physics are all the same for cornering.
The biggy is polar inertia, imagine the bike as a long skinny weight and as it turns the heaviest end will want to maintain the existing inertia and direction while the lighter end will want to change direction quicker !
This really dictates the riding style trying to deal with this, setting up the bike or car or chair you can't have a neutral balance ie both ends the same as it becomes unpredictable so the norm is for the rider to select what they want under or over based on tyres, track etc
So my example from old days I built two identical cb 750 engines for two speedway chairs (sidecars) Bear they were in Whyalla named Peter Clark and Paul Hewitt . they had identical frames , Clarkies chair handled perfectly but Paul complains the motor was a dog. So I went to Whyalla for a meeting and spent some time with Paul at practice and his bike was sounding nice but understeering so bad it was driving hard into the wall on the exit and very very scary to watch, however the motor sounded good so putting Newtons hat I found a set of leathers that fitted me and decided to get on the chair for a session. The deal was instead of driving a straightish line into the corner at the end of the straight he had to back off the throttle flick the bike sideways and instantly hold full throttle, he didn't get it right the first time and I aint lying when all I could see was the wall coming at me, so anyway second lap he got it right. After the session he said it was the first time the bike didn't understeer badly, I explained that steering slowly into the turn and his passenger jumping forward for the turn made for a very front heavy bike and that was what was making it understeer, not the engine.
The heavy front end resists a change of direction where the light end will.
So the bottom line for my point is even though they had and tried adjustable suspension on the chair it was all about the balance of the bike and the riding style that turned the bike from a pig to fun fast.
NOT MANY PEOPLE MESS WITH BIKE WEIGHT BALANCE, spend too much time on the norm adjustments like shocks etc I feel unless you do, your likely only going to be as fast as the next guy doing the same thing.
