- 1,984
- A field in England
Hi all, sorry if it's been posted before, I tried the search and couldn't find anything.
So, generally I'm fairly competent at tweaking cars. Typically I tune road cars for racing tyres with a decent amount of success. I have a youtube channel where I'm making a video series aimed at helping beginners set up their cars since the tuning menu isn't all that approachable. I've got a good understanding of downforce balance, weight dist., differential tuning, ride height, natural frequency and anti roll bars.
However, I'm now at the point where I'm trying to explain how negative camber and damping ratio affects the car's handling characteristics, and I've quite honestly found very little difference.
With damping, I've tested race-tuned cars on a high natural frequency, and found that low settings make the car bouncy and unsettled more by the bumps, and other than that, there's very little effect between having a mid-to-high setting, or using higher settings at the front vs. rear or the other way around. I found it had even less effect when I tried stock cars with customisable suspension. So basically as long as Damping ratio isn't set close to or at the minimum, any other changes don't make much difference.
I then tested camber. I ran tests on blue moon bay to test performance on high speed corners with camber set to 0.0, 2.0, 4.0 and 6.0 front and rear, and the lap times were all within 2 tenths of each other. I tested at suzuka east for low-speed corners and found no difference again, and then tested multiple cars with different settings to try and find subjective differences, and all I found was that setting camber higher at the rear makes the car slightly more prone to oversteer under braking but less prone to power oversteer, and higher camber at the front makes the car slightly more agile on turn-in but more prone to power oversteer. I found this with road cars on mostly stock settings as well as race-tuned cars with mostly stiff settings.
Beyond that, I struggled to feel any real difference. Has anyone else found this or am I missing something?
So, generally I'm fairly competent at tweaking cars. Typically I tune road cars for racing tyres with a decent amount of success. I have a youtube channel where I'm making a video series aimed at helping beginners set up their cars since the tuning menu isn't all that approachable. I've got a good understanding of downforce balance, weight dist., differential tuning, ride height, natural frequency and anti roll bars.
However, I'm now at the point where I'm trying to explain how negative camber and damping ratio affects the car's handling characteristics, and I've quite honestly found very little difference.
With damping, I've tested race-tuned cars on a high natural frequency, and found that low settings make the car bouncy and unsettled more by the bumps, and other than that, there's very little effect between having a mid-to-high setting, or using higher settings at the front vs. rear or the other way around. I found it had even less effect when I tried stock cars with customisable suspension. So basically as long as Damping ratio isn't set close to or at the minimum, any other changes don't make much difference.
I then tested camber. I ran tests on blue moon bay to test performance on high speed corners with camber set to 0.0, 2.0, 4.0 and 6.0 front and rear, and the lap times were all within 2 tenths of each other. I tested at suzuka east for low-speed corners and found no difference again, and then tested multiple cars with different settings to try and find subjective differences, and all I found was that setting camber higher at the rear makes the car slightly more prone to oversteer under braking but less prone to power oversteer, and higher camber at the front makes the car slightly more agile on turn-in but more prone to power oversteer. I found this with road cars on mostly stock settings as well as race-tuned cars with mostly stiff settings.
Beyond that, I struggled to feel any real difference. Has anyone else found this or am I missing something?
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