Tuners wanted! Share your setups.

I currently do not mess around with setups too much, although I tried it enough to realize that AC does a wonderful job of changing the car's behavior according to chnaged settings. However, I only care for tyre pressure, to make sure the tyres reach and stay within the range of temperatures one would want them at.

 

The first bit of reading I have done is the LAP FASTER- DATA LOGGER SECRETS REVEALED (you can find it in my "Useful Documents folder" on my Google DRIVE )This has been a great starting point to understanding Lapping faster and a lot of what you guys have been talking about is becoming clearer.
I will continue reading this and the books you have suggested.
Thanks

 

Funny you say that, its the first thing I have fiddled with

 

Its ok aris saying that the default setup is the one the factory uses but not every track will use the same setup..

Take imola in the 12c gt3... Bumpy as hell so you have to alter the standard setup to cope, but im sure the standard set if used at monza or mugello would be much better.

I find it quite hard to explain in a short space how i setup my car because when i drive it i might feel 3/4 different things and i know what i can change without it having too much of an effect.. Or i can change 1 thing knowing it has an effect on multiple things..

Its knowing which value to change for what instance your experiencing.. Ideally braking down the track to straights and corners then corners into in/mid/out and then analysing (i do tgis in my head) how the car feels through each of the stages..

You can take any setup value and it can have 2/3 different applications and its being able to know what you need to change and when.. Also, being able to read setups helps you drive the car as you can understand pretty much straight away how its going to handle..

Eg, lots of neg camber and the car will be skittish along the bumpy straights, etc..

 

That make sense, different tracks different set-ups.

 

Absolutely agree with Chris.

There's a thing than can help doing a good setup.... experience.
Drive, drive, drive trying to understand and feel how a setting change influences the car behaviour.

 

Heh, I think it would be a fun thing to have an actual race car use of the AC Aliens' car setups and see how much better times they could get. The engineers would probably look at the setup and say NO WAY!

 

What Fabio Borghini said was spot on.

Rule 1 for me in setting up a car is never change more than one variable at a time. If it gets worse you know what to blame. and it can never be the driver lol


The two things i have found are a must for me to change from stock to lap faster is more camber and toe out.

I like to get temps of the inner slightly higher than the middle and the middle slightly higher than the outside. If you watched formula 1 last year they had flir cam and you see running down the straights the inner part is very warm while the outside is cool and around the corner the whole tire heats up. More camber will aid in better turning speed or more speed through the corner because all of the tire is being used as the side wall leans in allowing most of the tire to make contact with the surface. But you need to avoid going to far which will lead to lack of straight line stability, braking effectiveness, and loss of corner speed because you will just be running on the inside edge and not utilizing the whole tire when you really need it.

Toe angles basically is where the tires point, toe in is where the tires point towards each other or toe out pointing away. Ive found that stock is usually either neutral or actually toe in. I usually will put in -.10 to -.3 depending on track tightness. This greatly helps just after entry into a corner all the way to the exit. While usually in the stock setups its always toe in which should give a sharp turn in but the outside tire will begin to slide before the inside tire which will still be actually turning away from apex. In the back i leave a .10 to a .05 toe in (if you toe out the rear it will cause the rear to wander). If you take your hands and act like they are your tires and add your toe angles and act like your driving around a corner you will see that the inside tire will start to slide earlier but the outside tire will have more time to work and that's the tire your really leaning into. You dont want to go to aggressive on this either as if you go to far you will start having to fight the outside tire through the corner and begin to loose effectiveness of your inside tire to where it becomes useless around the corner.

Gearing is just keep it tight and in the power band and get tighter the higher in the gears you go as you will be battling drag at that point. Suspension- a funny way ive kinda just experimented with learning what things do is go to extremes like none or minimal dampers and max springs or no springs and all rebound etc and it gives a very visible way of seeing what the suspension elements can do for you. The tool tips explain it very well when you hover over the individual settings explaining how they work and in general how they effect the car.

 

I found the tool tips quite badly worded tbh.. It does tell you what it does but its not clear to just look.

 

A number of factors affect tyre temperature. On a car with no AERO, when the car travels around a corner it does so due to what is known as MECHANICAL GRIP. This is to say, traction that is not aided by down-force from AERO (front and rear wings etc).

GRIP could be referenced to by using the words FRICTION or HEAT as both represent the same thing and what generates grip is the force pushing the tyre into the tarmac. Even at stand-still a car is pushing down on the tyres with a certain force. Drive fast around a right hand corner and the weight of the car is distributed onto the left tyres, in a straight line the wieght is distributed evenly accross all four, brake healvily and the weight is shifted heavily onto the front tyres.

This dynamic dance and exchange of downward force between all the four tyres is a direct result of what is know as WEIGHT DISTRIBUTION.

If you have uneven overall tyre temperatures then this is because, be it for setup or driving style, on an average lap of any one particular track (assuming you have consistent temperatures appearing) the workload for each tyre is different.

My point here is not to offer the magic settings changes but more to highlight a simple and fundamental principle upon which a car behaves with regards to weight and grip levels. When you drive around the track start to feel the movement of the car, try and work out where the weight is being distributed in any one situation and refresh this awareness constantly. As you practice this technique you will begin to FEEL the car and understand intuitively where the grip is being generated and why.

I wanted to share this insight becuase I feel that on top of understanding the clinical appoach to setting a race car up it is as important when setting up a car to be able to understand and feel how the car is moving and swinging and swaying around the race track. Go and do a few laps in the Abarth 500 (a car with soft suspension settings) and if you don't know how to already, learn to feel the car transferring it's weight around the course.

To setup the car one has to connect with it!

 

There are better (free) resources than Speed Secrets. They are really just collections of pro-tips. If you're serious about driving, Going Faster is the entry-level book. I have posted the video version a couple of times. In fact, I'm going to add it to my signature.
If you're serious about engineering, there are a couple of books that people have told me are good: Race Car Vehicle Dynamics by the Milikens and Competition Car Suspension by Allan Staniforth.

There are a number of setup guides online. I think that it'd be more useful to post links to those than collect these disparate tips like "When such and such, I like a little bit more somesetting"

I don't know about you guys, but I've logged something like 68 hours on AC. My hotlaps are 101-105% WR, and I still feel like I have a lot more to wring out of the cars before I start optimizing for each track.

 

Hey, thought this might be the best thread to get some help; I've been looking at some simple things to tweak to get started setting up a car and I've landed on the differential.

So my question is this, is there any reason not to max out the diff power? It looks like you just have to be able to manage your power oversteer more, but you'll be faster overall.