Scaff
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The ARB settings worked a little too good for my liking. No matter the chassis, a setting of 1/40 would almost always produce the best lap times. I could count the exceptions from this rule on maybe 2 fingers. And that's a bit too good to be universally true without any drawbacks. Also the gearing should raise an eyebrow. Myself I'm quite lazy shifting gears, even more so with my G25 and clutch, but a single gear on Mugello? Thats a bit optimistic even for my liking. Just watched Gan-San doing the Nirdschleife in a Scooby in an old Best Motoring episode and he was changing gears so often I wondered if he simply did this to make a statement.
Very soft springs and especially very very soft compression (bump) settings along with extremely hard extension (rebound) settings and a low ride height should result in a car that's riding on the shock stops a lot. Or is constantly bottoming out. Please do correct me if I'm wrong. One downside was also poor braking performance, but this was compensated by the ABS.
Forza 3 dealt with this, as far as I could tell, by adding an impact penalty on the car underside. It did encourage folks to mind their settings as to avoid invalidating lap times, but was there a cure for the problem or only the symptoms?
Very good garages I remember from the top of my head were VVV (very fast and aggressive), WWR and SloPoke. Don't know if anybody is in touch with them, or if they are even still around.
Now don't get me wrong, I was fascinated by the effects of minor changes to the suspension. They reflected rather well on lap times. Instantly in fact. Quite enjoyable. It's just the realism (used in a casual sense, it's still a console game after all) I felt was hurt.
Take your time though, and I'm really open minded to the results.
OK - I've now spent some time with the above and broken it down into three areas:
- Anti Roll Bar settings
- Soft front springs combined with min bound and max rebound
- Single gear around a track
The car used was a Integra Type R (DC5) pretty much maxed out at 650ish PI (S class) and at B class, I will post up details of the exact upgrades and settings when I get the chance (posting this at lunch from work).
Anti Roll Bars
I'm looking at this one with an eye both to the ITR and other tunes I have put together and a setting of 1/40 certainly doesn't act as a golden bullet, certainly once you get out of FWD tunes. Even looking at the two different ITR set-ups the S class one I found better with a higher ARB setting that the B-class tune and neither warranted going as low as 1/40.
Soft front springs combined with min bound and max rebound
I set the front springs as soft as the would go along with the front bound and then maxed out the rebound and the only way to describe the results is just plain nasty.
Straight line throttle application - It wasn't too bad at B-class, however the S-class tune had problems maintaining contact with the road.
Braking - Nasty on both set-ups, with the front suspension hitting the bump stops almost immediately which resulted in a massive loss of traction occurring, telemetry shows this very clearly. The firm rebound also showed in a massive miss-match as to what the suspension wanted to do, resulting in longer braking distances (even with ABS) and a very unsettled car that was not easy to control. Shows internally as the front end bobbing up and down under braking.
Rumble strips - Unsettled the car quite significantly particularly if combined with braking
Cornering - Understeer city. The car just slams to the bump stops and as the spring rates effectively go through the roof it just looses all front traction, meaning you have to wind back on the steering and throttle to get grip back (which happens suddenly as the firm rebound delays it occurring) and then as soon as you steer or apply throttle again your back to square one.
Single gear around a track
Simply doesn't work effectively at all, you step so far outside the power and torque curves that it doesn't work as a method of lapping quickly.
Results
None of these areas acted as a glitch on the car in question at all, in either of the tunes or on any of the tracks I used (Mugello and Tskuba). I compared lap times from the these set-ups to a quick three lap burst from my own set-ups and in the B-class tune it was at least 4-5 seconds a lap slower despite putting in significantly more laps in the test set-up. The S class set-up showed an even bigger difference at around 10 - 11 seconds per lap and it was even more difficult to get consistent laps out of the car.
End result is that you do not want to set your cars up like this at all, ever, the springs didn't control the front end of the car at all, the soft bound setting allows the suspension to hit the bump stops when almost any load transfers forward (which means you go from the softest possible spring rates to a stupidly high value as the bump stops are hit) and the firm re-bound then unloads it very abruptly. Not a nice combination of factors at all.
What I also hope to get the time to do is expand this to GT5 and first see how the values we have to play with compare for suspension settings and then see how GT5 reacts under similar set-ups.
Scaff
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