Camber is an intrieguing issue, most people understand that a liffle camber help road holding and few understand why. The following figure was scanned from Carroll Smith's "Tune to win".
Although this figure shows that the absolute grip of a tire is maximized at some small negative camber, it is (strictly) only valid for that particular racing tire. I am going to use this camber grip in a numerical analysis a little later on.
Each tire/wheel combination will have its own grip with respect ot the cambers employed. Wider tires enjoy LESS camber (static and dynamic), and even the height of the tire sidewall strongly interacts with the traction envelope, shorter tire (lower numerical aspect ratios) like LESS camber (static and dynamic).
Another variable is the tire contact patch to the wheel rim measurements. Consider a very wide tire on a narrow rim. Here the sidewally are buldging outwards in a static situation. Now when the car enters a corner, latteral forces build, distorting the contact patch. The inside edge of the outside tire will lift the inside contact patch off the road surface as the car builds cornering forces. The converse happens with a narrow contact patch on a wide wheel.
Camber gain is the amount of negative camber a tire/wheel combination attains as a car more heavily loads said tire while cornering. Some suspension designes have a lot of camber gain (front end suspension of 1960 American V8 big luxury cars), and some suspension designs have little camber gain (strut suspensions with parallel lower control arms.) While the former is well suited with wide tires onnarrow rims, the latter is well wuited with wide tires on narrow rims.
Suspension design and optimization has to deal with all of these variables to achieve a well balanced suspension.
