This week in Baja, it was crunch time. With competition next week, everyone has been working hard to put the finishing touches on the car. On Thursday, we got a few final parts in, and Friday night was spent on the final assembly of the car. Today, we got our last day of testing in, and we feel confident in the abilities of our car. Below is a picture of our competition ready car. The only task that remains is putting on sponsorship stickers.
Source: Author
Rather than expounding on the difficulties of final assembly, I will go into a brief discussion of steering systems. Most cars have fairly similar steering systems: the front wheels angle in the direction which you want to turn. Steering is a bit more complicated, however, as there are several factors which can make the steering system better. Ackerman steering is the practice of avoiding slip as can be seen below.
Source: http://www.beam-wiki.org/wiki/Steering_Techniques
In order for both front wheels to turn freely, without having to skid a bit sideways, is to have both tires travel in a circle about the center of the turning circle. As you can see in the left picture, this means that the two front tires will no longer be parallel during turning for this to be the case.
An additional concern is called bump steer. When you are driving along and you hit a bump, if the steering wheel tries to rip out of your hands, then you just experienced bump steer. In the gif below, the suspension is articulating through its motion. You can imagine that if bump steer is an issue, then the wheel would be turning slightly throughout the full range of motion of the suspension.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-link_suspension
An additional example of bump steer can be seen in this video.
Source: YouTube, Peter Basica
This week in Baja 
May 13, 2013 at 1:29 am
New information on how steering is implemented, very interesting. As far as bump steering in the Baja vehicle, is the steering incorporated to the front and rear or simply the front?
May 21, 2013 at 8:27 am
Sorry for the delay in response. We only use front wheel steering on our vehicle. That said, bump steer can affect both the front and rear, even without a rear steering vehicle. Bump steer is the change in angle of the tire as it goes through the range of the suspension. In the rear, this is more commonly called “toe change” where toe is the name of that angle – think ‘pigeon-toed’ or ‘duck-footed’ where your feet represent the top view of the wheels.
Hopefully that answered your question. Some teams in the Baja competition go with a four wheel steering vehicle, but with a 6 foot turning radius already, we see no need to complicate our steering system. Having just returned from this years competition, I can tell you this: no teams this year ran a four wheel steering vehicle.