Setup guides by real race engineers

I think it would be great if it could be organised for the real engineers from the teams that take part in blancpain to do setup videos for ACC based on what they actually did last year.

If a team running the BMW for example could go over what setup they used at Misano in 2018, why they set the car up as they did, what the track demands, what slight adjustments can be made. A fairly detailed exploration of setting up a race car for specific conditions.

Ideally there would be a video for each car at each track under each of the conditions, but that may be a bit much.

I don't know what kind of promotional deals are in place with Blancpain, so maybe this kind of stuff isn't possible, or there's an alternative plan, but smaller teams may see it as a mutually beneficial promotional tool, I'm sure the videos would be interesting to lots of people outside of ACC too.

 

The idea is great of course, but I doubt teams will go into specifics since it takes lots of experience and time to work on setups. Therefore I think teams don't want to share these kind of informations.

 

I could understand that, however, 2018 is gone now, the cars aren't as relevant anymore.

I would have guessed that there must be some underlying industry standard when it comes to setup, what works, works. So not as secretive as with F1 where a method of setup might give away something about the cars construction. While it would be great to get the real world example of what they did last year, they could generalize it a bit.

Any guide on setups is welcome but I think it would have more gravitas coming from a real race engineer. There always seem to be a divide between the people who actually do this work and sim racers, there's always a middle man translating for us.

 

I would say these setups already made (safe, agressive and wet one) are already made by the some guides dev picked up from the intel they recived

 

This sort of info could be possible for a now extinct series like fia gt1 assuming someone wanted to share this or got paid to do so, which would be highly unlikely. For for big budget gt3 teams in current series, there is not much chance of anyone giving up their key trade secrets to help us in a game.

It would be interesting info for sure but for these guys its big business and not a $40 game. Its likely Aris could give some more info in the write ups re setups, though its already pretty cool what he has done.

 

I'm guessing that kind of info (other than the absolute basics) falls under the label 'confidential', or as mentioned above 'trade secret'. Sure, 2018 season is behind us but that doesn't mean they don't base their work in 2019 with many of the same cars and circuits on that past experience.

 

For what purpose? It would be useless to try copy it down to ACC for own benefits. So the only "purpose" would be to learn something and watch it like an episode of "How it's made". I'm not sure it's confidential, I think it's more about who is gonna pay the team for such a media production?
That said, it's not rocketscience, there's plenty of YT videos on how to setup real racecars.

 

For sure, and everybody gets an voucher with build 5 for a free testsession in an official car of his choise.
Finally everyone can ask the engineers, which button in the car is for enhanced understeer feelings.

 

There must be some sort of industry standard when it comes to setting up cars. I would have thought they're training engineers to follow a known process for setting up cars that it's not all based on personal experience.

My issue with learning setups has been with the process, where do I start, what are the steps. Most guides I find just explain what each setting does and that makes sense, but I haven't seen anything that pulls it all together into a system.

If I'm going to learn this stuff I'd rather get it from someone who really knows what their doing, sim racers figure this stuff out and find a way that works for them but they could be doing it wrong or there could be a better/simpler, or more effective way. Sim racing setup seems to be, make a change, drive for a while, how does it make you feel, make more changes, repeat, I don't have time for that kind of stuff.

 

There is the Motec Beginners Guide (from 2005). It's already quite old and I don't know if you still can find it to download. It was made for GTR (the first not GTR2) but in it you can find good help about setup process: testing procedure, controller settings, setup order, setup changes, where to begin and what to change first.

Try google "Motec Beginners Guide" or "GTR Motec Beginners Guide" or "Motec Beginners Guide by WR304" or "Motec Beginners Guide Racesimcentral" to see if you still can find it. There are two parts (Part I and Part II) but if my memory serves me well it's the Part II that will have what you might be looking for.
Let me know if you can find it because, if you can't, I think I still have a copy of it buried somewhere in my old files.

 

I do not think there is an industry standard or i would not imagine that one could exist. I think setting up a car is basically adjusting the attributes of the car improve the attributes of the driver , You have to know what all of the adjustments do and then adjust there is no quick way around this than using someone else setup that may match your driving style. To many variables

 

Chris Haye has a really good video guide to sim racing setups on you tube. There are about a dozen short videos and they are really easy to understand. He also links to a setup guide PDF that you can download and that is fairly process driven. I'm afraid that setups do seem to be an iterative process by nature though so an amount of trial and error is unavoidable.

 

No such thing as an industry standard, too many variables as mentioned. It's a craft you learn by people that has been doing it for years, supported by seminars available for racing team mechanics etc. Then, one thing that is similar to simracing setup: you study it and work with it so many times, making mistakes and learning from them, till you eventually become...better at it
Of cause, you can go get a physics phd as well, but getting you hands dirty is inevitable to learn.

 

Had a quick look and subscribed. The last few videos look like they might cover what I'm talking about.

But if they're teaching people and passing on information they must have a system to pass on, I find it hard to believe they just do it by feel, changing every variable and hoping to end up in a good place. Which is the impression I get from sim racers, just keep fiddling until your satisfied.

The fact they have seminars means someone must know something that's useful and productive. They're keeping secrets from us I tells ye.

If it's a matter of spending hours trying every settings I don't think I'll be doing much setup work. If I'm spending hours doing something I want to know I'm achieving something. I guess there's just no short cut.

 

As I said, you can study it. Physics is physics, which IS standard. Formulas are formulas, a damper is a damper, a rollbar is a rollbar etc
There's only a few ways each part can be adjusted, but how it affects things in total with the driver, car, track and conditions, is something only experience by doing can help you with.
Simracing can give you a grasp of this, the better the simulation is and the more you study how things work an why.
You're right, there is no short cut that says "How to setup this gt3 for Zolder", but you can be sure seasoned teams has data from prior seasons and last years model, so they have a hint on which way to go with a base setup for a given track. Then comes all the variables mixing things up and they can scrap a lot of the base setup and try to get the best setup possible with the available time. There's also quite stricked rules about this and getting the car validated for race.

 

I can't speak for everyone else in the paddock, but usually you see two types of workflow.

On a new car It starts by applying academic knowledge on vehicle dynamics to build your baseline and if the car is an aero based car, figuring out the aero window the car likes to be at. If the car is solely mechanical, almost all your work is on damping after you establish your springs and bar choice. Finding the aero window is probably the trickest, esp if the car has a sensitive underbody (be it the splitter or diffuser). You're not going to know anything about the tires before the car hits the track, but you know what to do with the springs, bars and dampers before it gets there to get you a baseline that shouldn't be out to lunch. Some mecha books are better than others in that they have kinematics information to help you along.

Experience plays a huge part of it. You have to know a few things -- the nuance of the track as it evolves throughout the day the tires, and how to interpret the drivers. This is why by the time a person gets promoted to track engineer after being a performance engineer for a few seasons,they would've already picked up the nuances. It isn't practical to rely just on data. unless you have more than one assistant / support engineer with you, you won't have time to look at data during a session to make a decision when the car is in pitlane.

Sim racing is trying to game the code. Real racing you're trying to game the tires to the conditions; except you almost never run into the same conditions twice.

 

From Tom Coronel









and from David Donohue and Jay O'Connell 3 more videos starting from the following (just click "next video" to see the 2 others)

 

There are very informative videos from the engineers (and drivers).
Here's another example.