Nissan GTR/Monza Hotlap Special Event

Going to try this set up now, see if it makes a difference to my 47.8, going to try shifting up to 2nd earlier in the first chicane.

 

Thanks for the detailed write up Really helpful, these two especially gained me a lot of time although catching that curb right at the second chicane is a hit and miss affair. I knocked a few tenths off to get down to a 1:48:4xx and had seen another two tenths better on my delta but lost it on the rest of the lap.

 

Broke into the 1:47s last night with a 1:47.850 Video: https://streamable.com/txs7j
(overshot the 2nd chicane a little, and 1st lesmo exit wasn't ideal)
I had another lap going where I was up two tenths but lost it by spinning out of ascari. Before I had set that time I had a lap where I was up four tenths but overshot parabolica. I need to do myself a favour and stop looking at the delta all the time, hah!
What helped me was easing onto the throttle earlier, especially through the lesmos. The second lesmo still catches me out as touching the curb on the inside spins me around with the setup I have, and if I turn in any later I lose time. Sure I can brake later, but then I spin on turn-in. It's a tricky balancing act. Shifting down to 3rd helps through the lesmos provided you can straighten out the car quickly.

I'm running Chriss' setup (on the first page of this thread), but with the ride heights set as low as possible while maintaining a ~3.1% aero balance, I also left the steering ratio at default. The car is a tad bit unstable on an aggressive turn-in, backing up your braking points helps quite a bit.
nimp's damper (and his slight ride height changes) setup is pretty stable on turn-in, however you need to be really careful with throttle and steering input on corner exit. I mixed this setup with CoproManiac's suspension settings, but couldn't feel a difference myself after doing that, might have to mess around with the suspension's bumpstops.

 

Hey @nimp thanks for sharing your setup! I tried that out for ~20 laps tonight and found an interesting thing: I was not able to improve my laptimes with your setup, although you have proven that it is fast. With my own setup however, I was able to improve 2 tenths to 1:47.5 and I already know where on the track I find another 2 tenths

That in fact once again proves to me 2 things.
1) There is simply no "one size fits all" setups. Different driving styles, routines, brake pedal travel settings etc. may require different setups that can be equally fast.
2) Setups are important to squeeze out the last 3-4 tenths, but 99% of the laptime improvement is simply your own driving skill - if someone is 3 seconds behind the world record, at least 2 of these 3 seconds will not come from the setup but from skill and hours of practicing. And for sure you need a bit of luck to get all "best ever" apex hits in one single lap.

 

@Hexadecimator congrats to your solid lap Interesting findings on the setups! Looking at your latest video, to me it appears that indeed you lost time in first lesmo (not only exit but also entry), but I think the greatest improvement you can have in Ascari: taking even more curb at the entry and get the weight transfer from left to right as quickly as possible, so can you can completely floor the gas at the apex of the righthander within Ascari. Once you found a "perfect mix" of the different setups for you, please share your latest version here

 

Yep, I turned in too early. I normally try to late apex the corner but in previous laps I had problems keeping the rear end planted on turn-in running that line. Instead of gaining time my focus was to break even and get a time posted. My faster laps that I did not complete however used that ideal line.
As for Ascari, again the lack of stability on entry means I can't take as much curb unless I really straighten out my wheel and coast while I go over it. That may be because of my ride height changes, I'll likely raise the car a bit tonight. I'll also attempt to fix the stability on turn-in by adjusting the toe at some point.

How did you decide on what tire pressures to run? I've always run the same pressure on all four tires when working on my own setups, as I don't have the experience to figure out asymmetrical tire pressures.

 

@Hexadecimator mainly by monitoring my temps and trying to get them all lined up on all 4 wheels. The increased pressure on the front/rear left should help those tires in very heavy load situations such as in Parabolica. In theory, a very fast track like Monza would benefit from slightly increased tyre pressures overall for straight line speed. However, as nimb has proven, 1:47.0 is possible also with the lowest tyre pressures so it should not make too much of a difference.

Please do let me know about your findings regarding toe. I also thought heavily about increasing rear-end toe-in to stabilize the rear when accelarating, but did not take the time yet to try different settings in details.

 

Oh definately, like I said it was more of a WIP setup. I estimate there are around .3sec more in the setup and I lost at least a tenth coming out of parabolica getting a bit squirmy. So I'd guess best possible time would be around high 1:46.4s to low .5s. I just uploaded the run, cause it seemed to me like a good example of where to put the car in the turns.

Setups are a mix of 2 things for me. One is maximizing the grip the tires provide around the circuit and the second is adjusting it for driving style, adding a bit of flavour on top. And getting the first point absolutely right would consume a ton of time doing runs and sticking the nose in telemetry. Right now for me it's just about learning how the game reacts to setup changes when it comes to handling. Making actual improvements over the provided basesetups, when it comes to potential pace would be a serious piece of work, as they are already really good. With the aggressive base I was able to do a 1:47.5, not even adjusting brakebias or TC/ABS.

Edit: I tested running higher tire pressures and went up to around 2bar/29.5psi and gained maybe 1kmh at the end of the straight, so i deemed it to not really be worth it.

Edit 2: Also ran some different front toe values. Running more negative makes turn-in slightly snappier, but adds understeer mid turn. I found, if i push brakebias backwards, turn-in is good enough to run minimal toe-out and still get sufficient turn-in, while preventing the car from pushing too much midcorner.

Does anyone here know, if these cars run pro- or anti-Ackermann? I'd assume anti, but can't find a source on it.

 

I increased the rear toe in to 0.08, it brought some stability provided you don't turn the wheel hard when entering or accelerating out of a corner. However I also needed to wait longer for the car to rotate through the first lesmo and parabolica before getting on the gas. I eventually worked the toe down to 0.02 (below the default) and found the car to not only be a little more stable on turn-in, but also rotate the corner better to where I'm able to get on the gas much earlier. I'm going to leave it around 0.02 or 0.03
I felt increasing the rear toe in made the rear not want to follow the front into a corner if anything.

The stability problems still persist, however I feel it's damper related as I mostly lose the rear during load transfers - Getting on/off the brakes especially. I made sure to check that it wasn't the brake balance locking up the rears. I don't know too much about dampers on GT3 cars, so I'm going to do some reading and leave it to those who know what they're doing.

 

Oh yes, I'm with you - also made the experience that in ACC the top speed increase is marginal with increased tyre pressure. It's interesting though that as long as you stay in a, say, reasonable range between 25,0 and 28,0 psi, they do not seem to affect the lap time too much. Maybe that is because of the idealistic scenario of the hotlap event, I would assume we would feel more difference in an endurance race with dry/wet transitioning weather etc.

Now that is a very interesting finding and I tried this out myself. I gained another 2 tenths to 1:47.3. Similar as for the ride hight, the game reacts reaaally sensitive to toe changes, you can really feel the difference of a 0,01 change. Same as in a real-world car, changing toe-in on the rears from 0,08 to 0,00 is a really big difference when turning in and when accelerating out of corners. So as for nimp's comment, here we have examples where the game reacts very quickly/sensitively. Hexadecimator's value of 0,02 on the rears is what I currently like the most. On the front's I slightly reduced toe-out to -0,07

 

Decided to test out the lower front toe angle in addition to my findings with the rear toe angles the day before. It brought my time down to 1:47.757 Video: https://streamable.com/2cwg8 (I was testing the new setup so the lap isn't the cleanest, took the safer line through ascari because I wanted to get the lap in. Expected to lose more time through the second chicane and lesmos).

Apart from that, I decided to test some damper settings today. I raised the rear fast rebound to 33 to test, turn in still felt the same but the rear felt a little more stable on the exit of the lesmos and parabolica. I wasn't 100% sure about it so I reset it to the defaults. Went on to attempt adjusting the front values, but then I had remembered @nimp shared a setup with well worked on damper settings. So I applied his front damper settings (30 bump, 15 fast bump, 28 rebound, 18 fast rebound) and found the front handled better than it ever has for me.
Didn't get around to testing his rear damper setting with this current setup, but I recall the rear wanting to step out quite a bit on corner exit. Might apply the settings and raise the rear fast rebound a little or up to the default some time later.

 

Here is a twitch video of Jardier doing 146.740 on monza in a race no less.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/446873131?t=02h44m19s

 

That's a Merc tho, and not in the hotlap event

 

If it was a hotlap he may have done much better, it was the only 146 I have seen in a video, so I thought I would post it.

 

Aside from the fact he was driving a totally different car, hotlap events don't necessarily have the fastest conditions. The hotlap event right now has rain conditions for example.
Amir Hosseini did a 46.7 (from memory) in that specific hotlap event. Here's a video of him doing a 45.8 with the Lambo in faster conditions.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1118223620780773377

 

Guys this is an old thread from March where ACC still had a different BoP compared to v1.0 we were discussing Nissan setups, so unfortunately meaningless to post new Merc videos etc here