GEEZ, MATHEW,

you haven’t given me a lot to go on here. It sounds like a bit of a weird one, to be honest, and it had my Chryslertorsion-bar-suspension expert scratching his melon, I can tell you. Unlike a lot of cars that use shim-packs to adjust the front end geometry, the castor on a VG Valiant is adjusted via eccentrics that act on the upper suspension arm. Which is to say, it’s not usually a problem to adjust the castor as it simply involves turning a spanner a quarter of a turn or so.

Now, if that doesn’t produce the desired result, my suspicions are that you’re looking at a bent chassis rail, a bent upper arm or maybe even a bent stub axle. The advice at that point – depending on how fussy you want to be – is to get the left-hand castor as close as possible to your desired setting and then adjust the right-hand side to match. A bit dodgy, but it will get you out of trouble if the distortion isn’t too bad. Me? I’d find out what’s bent and fix/replace it.

But here’s the curve-ball: My expert tells me that while many double A-arm cars of this era run positive castor, the VG Val actually runs between three-quarters and one degree of negative castor. That’s in the case of a nonpower-assisted-steering car, purely because any positive castor makes them too heavy to steer. On cars with power-steer, the conventional wisdom seems to be to set the front end up with between three-quarters and one degree of positive castor.

The point being that if your wheel alignment dude isn’t up to speed on old Valiants, he or she might be wondering why the heck they can’t get enough positive castor on to the thing when, in fact, they don’t want positive castor at all. A bit of a long shot, but worth checking.