A crooked steering wheel is less a defect than a confession. It tells you the column was centered for someone’s idea of straight, while the real decision makers sit lower down in steel and rubber. Wheel alignment, tire wear and suspension geometry form the actual voting bloc that decides whether a car drifts, not the plastic circle in your hands.
The blunt truth is that straight-line stability is a geometry problem. Toe angle and camber angle, set at each hub, govern how the contact patches fight or cooperate as the car rolls, and a vehicle with symmetric toe and camber can track arrow-straight even if the steering wheel sits at an odd clock position after a rack adjustment. Turn the rim a few degrees, the tie rods stay put, the thrust line does not care.
More awkward is how people misread wear as wander. Uneven tire wear, especially feathering from incorrect toe or cupping from weak dampers, can bias the way the carcass flexes and generate a mild lateral force that feels like a pull, even with the wheel visually level. Conversely, fresh matched tires on a chassis with correct caster and a square thrust angle will run straight while the wheel glares at you, because the steering shaft was never recentered after the last alignment.
