Rack and pinion steering.

gregsdart said
Many years ago i had a pinto rack narrowed by seven inch (!) to try and put it in with drum brakes on a 65 dart. Fast forward to 1996 and a new chassis build, and i put that same rack in with modified lower ball joints. Ackerman angle was zero, meaning the front end stays parallel from straight to a max turn angle. This supposed wrong setup had serious impact on car handling at speed . If you get sideways, the front end does not "push", trying to flip you around, because the front tires are always parallel . Three times i have gotten seriously sideways at speeds of 125, 135, and 153 mph! A quick snap of the steering wheel and my dart comes back to straight like it is on rails .
Tire scrub wear has been minimal, but pushing the car around a corner is tough. But after those three wild rides, I will live with the inconvieniance! Picture of my front suspension, using upper and lower stock control arms, etc. stable at 160 mph!

View attachment 1716348991

Different racing genres use different levels of Ackerman. With drift cars, for example, it’s not uncommon at all to run zero Ackerman and technically negative or reverse Ackerman would be better/faster because of the slip angles involved. But even with drift cars most drivers don’t run negative Ackerman because of how different it makes the car feel compared to normal.

High speed performance is its own thing entirely because the steeing angles are reduced. Ackerman gets more important as the steering angles get more severe, so high speed maneuvers reduce the impact of Ackerman to begin with. F1 cars for example have TERRIBLE steering angles. Yeah at 200 mph they perform amazing, but navigating a parking lot would look like a scene from Austin Powers.

But those are race cars, not street cars. It’s a different bar if you’re still street driving.

gregsdart said
I shortened the lower balljoint arms and welded them back on. I did some serious strength testing to make sure they would never fail!

So you had them x-rayed? Or did destructive testing to determine the yield strength on a set of test arms?