Slip angle is one of the most important measurements in vehicle dynamics, and it tells a different story depending on what you measure and where. This explainer breaks it down.

It covers the two types of slip angle: body slip (how the vehicle's direction of travel differs from where it's pointing) and tyre slip (the angle between each wheel's heading and its actual path), and why each matters in vehicle development. It looks at how slip angle varies across different positions on the vehicle, uses the bicycle model to explain understeer, oversteer and balance, and walks through how both angle types are calculated.

A real oversteer example shows the point clearly: rear tyre slip angles exceeded 30 degrees while the front tyres recorded barely 3 degrees.

Throughout, it shows how the VBOX 4 Dynamics GNSS data logger and the IMU05 inertial sensor, together as the Dynamics Duo, capture slip angle accurately during testing.