Car set-up wisdoms

If I have one thing to say about car setup, it's this. You are making the car go fast, not the other way around. It's all about comfort. You can download a race-winning setup by Greger Huttu, but if you don't feel comfortable with pushing it you're not going anywhere fast. There are definitely things that increase speed outright, such as reducing aero for less drag at a track like Monza, but confidence in the handling of your car is where the vast majority of your speed will come from. Don't get too hung up in overanalyzing deep physicalities; get the car handling so you can push it comfortably, and the rest is up to you.

My experience has been the complete opposite. Whatever works for you, but lowering and stiffening is one of my go-tos when I need outright speed. For suspension, I just get a stiffness that feels good (stiff enough for speed, but soft enough for grip, balanced) then adjust the ride height to where the chassis isn't bottoming on bumps. Easy peasy.

 

Motec -> Ride Height .. you know that it is bottoming when it reaches 0 ..

 

@Ethan_Dean

And I do my best times with 1/3 stiffness or so. Very fast times, mind you.

So as this proved, setup is indeed driver based. Like I said, you can't just DL an oversteery setup if you can't handle oversteery cars and would rather overcome understeer, or like a slightly slower neutral car but can drive the hell out of it.

Schumacher said that an understeering car is fastest and best, Hamilton prefers an oversteery setup that no one else in F1 can drive as well.

 

Great post Arch, the ride height is interesting. I had always assumed from seeing how sports cars are lower, that the lower the car was the better it's handling would be.

What kind of sequence would you go through when making a setup? I only really have two stages to my setup routine. Getting the car to be just hitting the limiter at the end of the main straight and trying to get the tires to a decent temp using just tire pressures. I'll do some messing with toe if I want better front turn in but generally I'm at my limit of understanding at that point. Often the gearing setup can be irelivant.

I think for the most part I should focus on more practice, that I'm not really at a stage to take advantage of setups. I can put in fast laps within 105% of the records on RSR but consistency leaves a lot to be desired.

 

Now I'm pretty much a newbie; but what tracks are more flat (also in corners) and probably better suited for a lower ride height?I assume that it works that way though as a bumpy track with stiff suspension sounds like a bad combination.

 

@Turk

A lower car that doesn't bottom out is always better, as long as the suspension geometry is designed for it. Theoretically, having a car that rides just above the ground at all times would be superior to a higher car, but we all know why obviously this can't work in the real world.

The most common reason why a lower, unmodified car is a worse car is the roll center change: suspension arms that point a lot more downward at different relative angles from stock, can throw the roll center out of whack and affect handling dramatically. That's why you need roll center adjusters, commonly to change the lower arm angles, when you lower your car. Having your CoG and roll center change a lot from stock affects how your chassis rolls, and what kind of camber and toe curves your wheels get.

I do not think roll center wandering is at all important in the slightest, so I don't consider that: many of the best cars have a roll center that *theoretically* goes underground, very high etc. during suspension movement. I haven't seen a single real world problem from that in real suspension design. Some race engineers think it's vital, some like me dismiss it completely.

GT cars in AC can be ran at 60mm in the front with no geometry problems, if you want, because they're designed for a far lower ride height, but I suggest a slightly higher car.

If you're one of the kinds of drivers who always under-brakes earlier, and it's a conscious decision, you can run lower wing angles and a lower car without fear of bottoming out on braking, thus allowing you to get the same downforce for less drag, but you can't brake hard or upset the car at all.

I know an F1 driver who does/did this, although I've forgot his name. It's more for race strategy than for outright speed.

If I got more into depth as to why I think a slightly higher car is better, it'd go into opinion and not fact, but there are a host of benefits and drawbacks. Depending on the track and how important the curbs are, you might need to run a high car, for example.

@How I make a setup

When I begin a setup, I add in some generic values that I know to work or if I know nothing about the car, just leave it be and make judgments about it after a few laps. (General wing angles, tire pressures, gears, limiter, brake bias, desired ride height etc.)
After that I think about gearing in the corners and where I want high and low torque, and if it even matters on the track. Differential is tuned at this stage.

I generally strip all the wings and ARB's off at this point, setup the suspension to drive how I want via dampers, then add in ARB's to counteract body roll and tweak reaction speed. After that I add wings, tweak suspension balance back to where I had it with the downforce amounts I want and make sure the aero works well via advanced suspension tuning like packers.

At this point it's basically fine tuning, so tire pressures, camber, toe, adjusting brake bias to lock the rears first under high downforce loads but preferably lock the fronts under low loads etc. I setup my aero to understeer slightly, and my low speed to oversteer a bit, so that's why I want the rears to lock first at high speed.

That's how I'd do a "good enough" setup and not a really fast setup. With a really fast setup, I'd just throw the dampers all to minimum and start working off that.

I think if you can get under 1% of RSR times and need to do this kind of really high level setup to get a WR, you already have your own method, so I won't go too in depth.

If you're doing times 5% from WR's on Optimum, 26c and Clear on the stickiest tires, get consistent first.

If you can't do a full, at least 30min league sprint race with all of your times differing 0.2sec from each other max and preferably 0.1sec, then you're not consistent enough and probably won't spot most setup changes anyway.

At least I know that setup made no real difference to me when my hotlap and race times differed more than about 0.2 sec. Once I hit that level of consistency (That's like pro level, mind you.) then I started really improving.

Added points if you can get under 0.05sec difference three times in a row on your best car/track combination.

I drove Akina Downhill in rFactor for countless laps and could do that all day, so I learned some of my consistency there. Albeit the car physics and track surface made it A LOT easier: you basically had to just memorize the movements.

 

On the soft setup topic... this works great for a bumpy tracks, especially when they are laser scanned... but for a particularly flat ones stiffer suspension can be better. In extreme we could take a mod track that doesn't have a properly detailed bump mesh, and basically welded suspension (max springs, lowest ride height etc) will be the fastest.
After all with stiffer suspension allowing for lower car, even if roll center is out of whack, there is little roll in the first place, and possibly resulting in even better cambers/toes curves.

I remember running a setup for old Donington mod (before road overhaul) in GT2 and the best times i got were on very stiff suspension (and dampers) and absolute minimal ride height.

So there is a balance to strike in all that. And while often I'm also leaning toward softer setups, i'd not be surprised at all if stiffer setups were just as fast in some cases, if a driver using them was able to exploit faster car movements (transfers, taking set etc)

 

It's all mostly driving style, although there is a general range of values that works best for whatever car/track combination.

My circuit driving is based on smooth, sweeping lines, with a 4 wheel drift at every rotate apex. Understeer biased for stability, with oversteer coming from purposeful braking and accelerating. The car is constantly switching between understeer and oversteer, and I use more steering to counteract oversteer rather than countersteereering, especially in F1 cars.

A really stiff car won't do me any good, at best it'd just unsettle the car on bumps and make sliding the rear harder. On the contrary, I try to run as stiff a car as possible on the touge, or on very slow tracks.

 

Sorry but no. We still haven't RH in Motec cause Kunos...

 

Wait, imho thats a very bad advice especially for somebody starting to work with setups... If you strip downforce/ARB off the car and do basic setup, then when you put it back on, it's possible there will be a lot of small things to change and tweak, (to a point where you will be redoing the whole setup) which is kind of pointless, and possibly outright confusing if player is unexperienced.

I mean for downforce, 1) often it's hard to retain balance due to difference between front and rear downforce generating elements, 2) some of the car elements will work differently like: diffusers, tyre pressures, packer springs, wheel aligments etc.
I get it that basic damper effect on wheels does not change with aerodynamic load but there are tons of details that will make you want to tweak dampers again after getting proper downforce on.
And then there is even bigger problem with ARB's which in most cases add to springrate and need additional damping (not talking roll damp rate - which ofc always is good enough) but a weight transfer damping (sharp turn in) or just a one side bump.

Honestly with how well rounded default setups are in AC, for anybody that wants to start journey into setting up a car, i think best would be to try to adjust/fix one thing on default and see what other changes did that bring.
Trying to work on a car from ground up >is effective< and possibly faster if the combo is tricky/has problems, but it requires a lot of knowledge up front which more likely than not will result in frustrations for inexperienced.

 

You can use it, there's a tool that exports data, look in the app section or general modding

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really? .. sorry didn`t know .. that`s bad .. not even via ACTI? .. i`m not bothering with setuping without MoTec support but I was assuming we have all basic channels except tyre surface temps .. than probably just replays, headphones and good camera angle (do we at least have sparks?)

 

http://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?threads/10198/

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@Nao

That's why it's my method, because I have a ton of knowledge already there and I know what kind of cars I generally run.

I don't know how to advise someone who's just starting out.

 

That has been my experiance too...
@Alexandre Baptista I don't use Motec often but what i'd recommend would be to try the following (i'm not sure if this would work well enough thou):

Make a new math channel, and add all the tyre loads together, divide by car weight in newtons to get downward pushing power on tyres in g's (roughly) and possibly subtract 1 here to remove car weight, (that will leave only downforce and track related car movenets to show up) then subtract CG vertical acceleration.

With something like that every time there would be a short bump that's been cleared by suspension without chassis ground contact it would show a spike upwards, and any big spikes down would show a bottoming out (or hitting kerb with front spoiler/wing)... It's not perfect but bottoming outs should be clearly visible as spikes close to or past zero. (run a "CG Accel Vertical" channel alongside to confirm that there is corresponding jump up on it when car bottoms out)

Math channel would look like that:
('Tire Load FL' [N]+'Tire Load FR' [N]+'Tire Load RL' [N]+'Tire Load RR' [N])/(carmasshere*9.81)-1-'CG Accel Vertical' [G]

Possibly a little simpler would be to run a "tyre load sum divided by mass" channel alongside "cg vertical acc" one and search for when they are not in sync (one goes up when other goes down), but it's harder to see that way.

 

I make my setups exactly how Arch described it. In ac different kind of setups can achieve the same laptime, it all depends on your driving style.

 

ACTI is up for RH channels but they are still not working from Kunos side..
PS. Nao is explained this hard way ))) I Can't do it bymyself in Motec...( sorry guys for offtop)

 

I think what would be good to explained in this thread , would be to explain to be beginers a hard setup for say a high speed pretty flat track compared to say a setup needed for a track like zandvoort which is bumpy. I can do setups but to be fair i just guessed lol and had to make lots of changes. I used to think in the diff max on both would just mean faster !

 

@Hany

You're bloody fast too, so it's not some "sunday driver" method. I developed it myself, as well, or at least, up to now I hadn't heard of anyone using the exact method I do.

The easier method for a non-optimal car is already pretty extensive, but the "all values to 0" method for the best time possible demands a really good test driver and a lot of setup knowledge. I don't recommend it at all for beginners who don't know how every single setup option works and feels ingame.

 

Fast guys from gtr2 use this method, joco gorenc told me about this kind of setuping.