Agree with him, to an extent.
It comes down to determining why either end of the kart is struggling for grip. If the kart is breaking traction from overloading the tire, any additional force you try to put on that tire will make the problem WORSE because you’re already over that tire’s traction limit.
It’s so common to hear from drivers that “the front end doesn’t have enough grip”. So we keep dumping caster in and widening the front track and stiffening the bar. Still not enough, still not enough… Well then we can determine that the reason it doesn’t have enough front grip is because either
A. The driver is just over-driving the corner entry and asking too much of the tires.
B. There was already too much front weight/grip to begin with, and all we are doing is making the kart approach that limit quicker and quicker.
As a tuner or coach, you can see the driver’s hands, read the tire wear, check the tire pressures and make reactionary adjustments based on that. But only the driver can tell you WHY the kart is doing those things. You need to keep asking your driver “why” to get to the bottom of the problem.
As a junior I did was weight distribution testing. What we found is that if we were struggling with front grip for example, we could move the seat forward and get the front to bite a little better. But if we got out of the 43-40% front weight distribution, the kart started to respond poorly to changes. So while we might have been able to fix our temporary front grip issue for a session, we struggled to adjust the kart from that point on when the track changed, because our adjustments weren’t working or were very unpredictable.
As with anything tuning related, keeping the kart within the “tuning window” will yield the most predictable chassis response, however, sometimes you stumble onto something that’s way out of the box, that might work great for a session or two, but it’s a dead end in terms of continuing to refine the setup after that.
I kind of went on a tangent there, hopefully something useful is buried in that novel!