Experienced Tuners, I Have a Question For You

[SS_1182]

I have read the tuning guides and done experimentations myself based on tunes that I've gotten from other players, but I've spent most of the day today doing more research and trying to start from scratch myself in coming up with a tune that suits my own driving preferences.

Like I said, I understand what each of the settings do, but I'm having a hard time knowing when to implement them. So my first question is:


Do you have a specific order you tune your settings in, ie. brakes, then anti-roll bars, then dampers, etc.?



When I started out today, that was the order I went in. The problem I've encountered is that I have found brake balance, anti-roll bars, dampers, AND spring rates to all affect oversteer/understeer and general handling, and that's just from the lefthand column. I haven't even addressed the righthand stuff like toe, camber, etc. Since they all seem to affect the same basic principles in the long run, I'd like to know where you suggest starting out in forming my own tune for my cars.


I know that the brakes don't affect the same specific things that dampers and springs do, but in the end you can dial in or dial out oversteer/understeer with most any category within GT5's tuning system, and I'm a little suspect of how much specificity you can actually get out of it, and how in depth their physics actually are.


Appreciate any suggestions or input!! Thanks!

 

[BlueShift]

Do you have a specific order you tune your settings in, ie. brakes, then anti-roll bars, then dampers, etc.?

Yes and no, it's a matter of taste.

What I should do

Some modifications are automatic before driving the car for me :
* kill driving helps but ABS 1 (dualshock)
* -2 to front and rear extention
* kill the rear toe
* 90% of max front and rear aero
* finding where is the engine and puting -1 brake at the opposite side
* depending of the traction quickly set the LSD (or, better, driving with the stock not adjustable LSD if possible)

First, my top speed is always set on La Sarthe no chicane.
Then I come back to a short gearbox for settings.

After that I drive. I always starts by finding the minimal flat ride heigth, then by +10%/+10% or -10%/-10% to the spring force until it's ok for me and then I start with dampers until I'm happy with the combinasion of this + the aero. I fine tune the suspension before going on anything else.
Then I come back to the custom LSD and I finish by the brakes.

Aero/Camber is made along the whole process and suspension can vary aswell. I try to never use toe.


What I really do

All of this in no specific order. I'm playing this game quite anarchically.

 

[SS_1182]

Thanks. Great perspective to draw from. Can I ask, what do you have against 100% aero downforce? Loss of top speed?

 

[LiveWire11C]

I usually start with dampers and ride height. I get the car as low as it can go without bottoming out. I also get the handling as close to my liking as I can with just ride height and spring rate.

Next I move to the dampers, and use those to fine tune the handling even more. Sometimes I will revisit the spring rate when both damper settings are to my liking.

Then I move to camber and toe. Once again, I use these to fine tune the cornering aspects of the cars handling. Finally I adjust brake balance.

I am still learning to tune the LSD. I take the approach of adjusting the initial setting first, then acceleration and deceleration if needed.

I think the key is to only change one setting at a time, and always do a full lap (or more) on a track you know well to test it. This will really give you an idea of what each setting does. After you have a better handle, you will be able to change multiple settings at once, because you will understand their effects and relationships better.

 

[MrGrado]

First I will set rear toe to 0 and camber to -1.0 / -1.0. I set shocks to 5, 5, 5, 5. I raise ride height if its a car that is likely to be low like a caterham. I lower springs if they are set high like on any race car for example. I check the spring settings on the standard suspension for ferraris etc and use those settings on the FC suspension. I set brakes low 3 / 3 or 2 /2. I set downforce low.

Now I take it for its first drive with all aids off. If it spins excessively, under brakes and acceleration I will set rear toe to 0.50 and rear camber to -3.0, usually bring front camber up to -1.5 now too. I also raise ride height to max, set shocks to 3, 3, 3, 3 and lower rear spring rate. I set rear downforce to max.

I drive again and usually oversteer is completely gone, if it's not rear toe = 1.00. Now I bring those settings back and test until the car handles neutral again.

Now tune shocks. If you have a force feed back wheel you can feel the grip you get in the steering. Drive with all shocks set at 4, then 5, then 6, maybe 7 too for a heavy car. Most cars drive good with shocks on 5 or 6.

Now you should have a car that has a soft setup and drives nice and pretty fast. Getting a car to this point takes only 5 mins. Write these settings down somewhere before you fiddle with more stuff.

 

[vett'e]

I take a more methodical approach, I recommend tuning aerodynamic properties first before touching anything else because they don't affect any other variables. If the car's characteristic was to oversteer, then increase rear downforce (or front downforce) or vice versa if it were to under steer.

Once thats done, focus on the brakes. Most cars should have brake bias towards the front (this is because of weight transfer under braking). Most cars I've tuned run well on 7 / 5.

Next I take into account the weight distribution of the car and divide the curb mass accordingly to find the mass on each axle. I divide again to find the mass on each spring. From this you can find a neutral spring rate that offers the same sprung height. Afterwards I also calculate weight transfer during full braking and acceleration using variables you can find in the replay telemetry - depending on the layout of the car, you may wish to add stiffness to the rear or front. At this point, you may stiffen either the front or rear to reduce or increase more under or over steer (by small increments).

Damper set up should be set relative to the spring rate. So obviously a stiffer spring would require a stiffer compression and rebound - if either is weaker than the other, then essentially your car is riding solely on the spring or damper.

A conventional racing set up requires the rates of rebound higher than compression - this allows the car to return to its sprung height quicker, particularly important on twisty roads.

Again, camber settings have to be made with considerations on car layout. On most occasions, a FF car would have more camber at the rear than the front, and vice versa for MR and FR cars. However, it was pointed by oppositelock that some do exceed the expected. I don't support extreme camber settings, despite its agility, because they tend to wear your tires quicker and is detrimental to top-speed.

Finally, toe and anti-roll bar settings are always dealt with last. Anti-roll bar settings do not affect lateral weight transfer and only work in the bends, but in essence they work very much like the springs, so adjust them to your preference on over or under steer. On the other hand, there should be slight front out and rear toe in if oversteer, or rear toe-out if understeer.

I stress here again, that weight distribution is REALLY important - get this right and the rest is easy.

Hope this helps!

 

[oppositelock]

Since GT4 I've used a spreadsheet with a set of baseline setups for each drivetrain: FF, FR, MR, RR, front-engine AWD, mid-engine AWD, and rear-engine AWD. When you understand the basic principles of vehicle dynamics you'll find that tuning a Miata is really not that different than tuning a Corvette, for example. After that I just make minor adjustments to suit the idiosyncrasies of that particular vehicle and I'm good to go. I'm still working on my GT5 spreadsheet as I continue to learn the new physics engine. I hope to share it here when I'm done. Until then, I suggest using the swaybars as your first go-to setting. Springs, shocks, and ride height are all interconnected and require careful balancing to function properly. Swaybars are independent of these and can be changed without having to alter anything else.

 

[SS_1182]

I take a more methodical approach, I recommend tuning aerodynamic properties first before touching anything else because they don't affect any other variables. If the car's characteristic was to oversteer, then increase rear downforce (or front downforce) or vice versa if it were to under steer.

Once thats done, focus on the brakes. Most cars should have brake bias towards the front (this is because of weight transfer under braking). Most cars I've tuned run well on 7 / 5.

Next I take into account the weight distribution of the car and divide the curb mass accordingly to find the mass on each axle. I divide again to find the mass on each spring. From this you can find a neutral spring rate that offers the same sprung height. Afterwards I also calculate weight transfer during full braking and acceleration using variables you can find in the replay telemetry - depending on the layout of the car, you may wish to add stiffness to the rear or front. At this point, you may stiffen either the front or rear to reduce or increase more under or over steer (by small increments).

Damper set up should be set relative to the spring rate. So obviously a stiffer spring would require a stiffer compression and rebound - if either is weaker than the other, then essentially your car is riding solely on the spring or damper.

A conventional racing set up requires the rates of rebound higher than compression - this allows the car to return to its sprung height quicker, particularly important on twisty roads.

Again, camber settings have to be made with considerations on car layout. On most occasions, a FF car would have more camber at the rear than the front, and vice versa for MR and FR cars. However, it was pointed by oppositelock that some do exceed the expected. I don't support extreme camber settings, despite its agility, because they tend to wear your tires quicker and is detrimental to top-speed.

Finally, toe and anti-roll bar settings are always dealt with last. Anti-roll bar settings do not affect lateral weight transfer and only work in the bends, but in essence they work very much like the springs, so adjust them to your preference on over or under steer. On the other hand, there should be slight front out and rear toe in if oversteer, or rear toe-out if understeer.

I stress here again, that weight distribution is REALLY important - get this right and the rest is easy.

Hope this helps!

Great info!! Thank you! Do you have any sources for learning how to determine things like curb mass and weight distribution? How can you tell how the weight is distributed throughout the car simply from looking at the given menu information? Any equations you could throw at me? Thanks again!

 

[BlueShift]

Thanks. Great perspective to draw from. Can I ask, what do you have against 100% aero downforce? Loss of top speed?

Exactly nothing. I don't care loosing 5km/h at the end of a long 30 second straigth line. The power of the engine compensate this.

But 100% front and rear is not equilibrated all the times with all cars.

With 90%/90% I have some margin to put in front and rear : I have first to find out if it's front or rear (100% front if understeer, 100% if oversteer) then I put 100% minus 1 tick there and I work to augment the opposite side to things like 98% depending of how drive the car when my suspension/LSD/camber gives me the almost final results of understeer/oversteers problems at high speeds.

 

[BlueShift]

I take the approach of adjusting the initial setting first, then acceleration and deceleration if needed.

Way to do !

I think the key is to only change one setting at a time, and always do a full lap (or more) on a track

Way to do !

on a track you know well to test it.

Beware. If you stick on one track only, you'll do a setup for this track only.

All of the roads have not the same properties (dust, no dust, slow curves or not, etc). Pay attention when you use city track, the grip is maximal there.

 

[BlueShift]

I recommend tuning aerodynamic properties first before touching anything else because they don't affect any other variables.

This is not true. You have to do this after your LSD/suspension/camber is set for the most part, because these setting plays a major role for understeer/oversteer properties of your car and you can compensate this with the aero.

Once thats done, focus on the brakes. Most cars should have brake bias towards the front (this is because of weight transfer under braking).

This is partially true. While you have a certain weigth transfer to the front if using front brake higher than rear, you must brake "flat" and avoid this weigth transfer at all cost. I guess most of your RR/MR/Rear 4RM understeer, then. Or at least are quite unstable when entering a corner.

If the engine is in the rear, braking more a the rear will reduce the weigth transfer to the front and give more manoeuvrability to the car at the begining of the curve.

I'll give you two of "my" tuning secrets :
1 - The cost of this is your rear wheel will suffer more strength difference at braking/accel. With RR/MR/rear 4RM and on quick corners, this mean a wall in your head, like when accel sensitity is set to high with some RR/MR.
So even this rule is not enterily true. On some powerfull RR/MR (those of you kill the accel setting because the car slipering is too much at the end of the curve), it is good to work with brakes like 4/3 or 3/2. But the other standart MR/RR/Rear 4RM should be 2/3 or 4/5 or 4/6.
It's especially true on R 4RM or M4RM.

2 - You could have some front brakes low / rear brakes higher setting too even on FF/FR cars to force your car to stabilize by it self at the begining of a curve, like when you have a decel setting set low, but using a true decel setting higher, which is great using the motor brake while turning, even with FF car... This is a great setting to use on tracks you brake very late (these are kind of emergency brakes), like Sarthe or the Nürburgring for exemple.

Next I take into account the weight distribution of the car and divide the curb mass accordingly to find the mass on each axle.

Where do you find "the curb mass" ? I'm very interested.

I agree with you for flat springs. But I beleive the gamedesigners put already the good flat weigth distribution of spring rates with stock settings. Even when reducing the weigth of the car (from 1/8) because when you're "almost" happy the flat rate with this method, you can still add 300g more on front or rear to fine tune it.

Unless this, the stock cars would drive like bricks or dragsters and teh setups of premium cars are quite good already on that aspect of the car... What do you think on this ?

using variables you can find in the replay telemetry

Oooooooooooh ! I will use that, so many thanks !

Damper set up should be set relative to the spring rate. So obviously a stiffer spring would require a stiffer compression and rebound - if either is weaker than the other, then essentially your car is riding solely on the spring or damper.

You're wrong. Damper compression/extention control the speed at which your spring compress or come back. The strength of your springs is controled enterilly by the spring rate.
For exemple, I will give you another one of my secrets : try low spring rate and very high compr/ext on rally cars. It is a great setup to grip the dirt.

I should post a rally car, most people don't have a clue how to tune them

Again, camber settings have to be made with considerations on car layout. On most occasions, a FF car would have more camber at the rear than the front, and vice versa for MR and FR cars. However, it was pointed by oppositelock that some do exceed the expected. I don't support extreme camber settings, despite its agility, because they tend to wear your tires quicker and is detrimental to top-speed.

Camber should be used only to increase turning grip ability, it's not automatic.

What I do is a 90° slip at high speed in a long and large straigth line (high speed ring is good for that). If the front loose the grip, I increase the front, if the rear loose the grip I increase the rear.
When I'm happy and have a balanced slip, I've got my front/rear camber distribution and work on it with entering/going out of a corner.
If I have to increase or decrease the front grip by a few %, I apply to same modification in % at the rear, taking in consideration the out of cornering slip too.
This is a quite effective methodology, you should try.

To much camber on the traction wheel mean lower accel seting for your LSD, and you'll try to avoid that if possible. Not required, but having a good accel seting is really a plus in long curves.

Anti-roll bar settings do not affect lateral weight transfer

You're totally wrong there, mate... Please try 1/3 or 5/7 on a stock Zonda and you'll see a big dfference in lateral weigth transfer.

Anti-roll bars setting depend a lot on dampers. Loose damper = loose anti-roll, high dampers mean high anti-roll. The only exception to this are rally setups (high damper / medium anti roll)

On the other hand, there should be slight front out and rear toe in if oversteer, or rear toe-out if understeer.

It's a matter of philosophy. Never using toe will cut you a lot of problems in corner too. You can compensate most of uses of the toe with your LSD settings without breaking your accel/top speed/using your tires so I try to avoid that whenever it's possible.

I stress here again, that weight distribution is REALLY important - get this right and the rest is easy.

I 100% agree you with you there ! 👍

 

[BlueShift]

Since GT4 I've used a spreadsheet with a set of baseline setups for each drivetrain: FF, FR, MR, RR, front-engine AWD, mid-engine AWD, and rear-engine AWD.

This is definitly a quick working method and give a good boost on most cars, but it will do half the benefit of setting up a car with personalized settings.

Stock setup << spreadsheet setups << personalized tuned setup.

There's a lot of cars that require unconventional setups to work and get of good boost of this.

 

[abaxas]

I cant believe this hasn't been mentioned yet.

The first and most important part of any tune is deciding what you want to achieve. If you take real world racing as an example there is no correct way to set-up your car. Why should GT be any different?

I start by defining weak points or areas on the track where control is hardest. Ie I try and dial out my own driving problems not to improve speed but to make it easier to maintain speed without error.

Once I have a reasonable level of 'tune', I delete all the settings and go for something mad, do a few laps then try to improve that tune, rather than starting again. This is useful as lots of optimisations lead you down a path to a point of what you believe is good, when in fact something different can be better.

Also remember that any tune is defined for a purpose eg time trail or long races. I would prefer a car setup which was 1 second a lap slower but more stable for a 30 lap race than one with more risk of crashing (usually about 5-10 second penalty per incident).

Finally, never forget that gear ratios are not a slider you just change to get more top speed/acceleration. They need to be defined not only to hit the rev limiter at the brake point of the longest straight but also can be used as a tool for removal of power on over steer (power slide) and obtaining speed in/out/during corners without a gear shift.

Decide on that you want first, tune it to your desires.

 

[HKS racer]

I cant believe this hasn't been mentioned yet.

The first and most important part of any tune is deciding what you want to achieve. If you take real world racing as an example there is no correct way to set-up your car. Why should GT be any different?

I start by defining weak points or areas on the track where control is hardest. Ie I try and dial out my own driving problems not to improve speed but to make it easier to maintain speed without error.

Once I have a reasonable level of 'tune', I delete all the settings and go for something mad, do a few laps then try to improve that tune, rather than starting again. This is useful as lots of optimisations lead you down a path to a point of what you believe is good, when in fact something different can be better.

Also remember that any tune is defined for a purpose eg time trail or long races. I would prefer a car setup which was 1 second a lap slower but more stable for a 30 lap race than one with more risk of crashing (usually about 5-10 second penalty per incident).

Finally, never forget that gear ratios are not a slider you just change to get more top speed/acceleration. They need to be defined not only to hit the rev limiter at the brake point of the longest straight but also can be used as a tool for removal of power on over steer (power slide) and obtaining speed in/out/during corners without a gear shift.

Decide on that you want first, tune it to your desires.

I agree, decide what you want and then work for achieve it. I suppose this thread talk about what are you going to do while building up a "general purpose setup".. Let's said you can achieve it in many different ways depending on car, driving style, type of race etc. Usually the first thing I do is a 2 lap run with the standard setup, I need a basic idea on how the car work by default then I come back to the box and I radically modify suspension by lowering the car as much as possible (my setups ar 99% race minded) and prevent undesidered oversteer adjusting spring rates softering the rear. Usually I go for 5/5 Dampers Extension and 4/4 for Dampers Compression (these are just basics tunes, the ending result could be very different). 6/6 Anti-Roll Bars and 1.4/1.3 Camber not a bad idea to start with.

 

[vett'e]

This is not true. You have to do this after your LSD/suspension/camber is set for the most part, because these setting plays a major role for understeer/oversteer properties of your car and you can compensate this with the aero.


This is partially true. While you have a certain weigth transfer to the front if using front brake higher than rear, you must brake "flat" and avoid this weigth transfer at all cost. I guess most of your RR/MR/Rear 4RM understeer, then. Or at least are quite unstable when entering a corner.

If the engine is in the rear, braking more a the rear will reduce the weigth transfer to the front and give more manoeuvrability to the car at the begining of the curve.

I'll give you two of "my" tuning secrets :
1 - The cost of this is your rear wheel will suffer more strength difference at braking/accel. With RR/MR/rear 4RM and on quick corners, this mean a wall in your head, like when accel sensitity is set to high with some RR/MR.
So even this rule is not enterily true. On some powerfull RR/MR (those of you kill the accel setting because the car slipering is too much at the end of the curve), it is good to work with brakes like 4/3 or 3/2. But the other standart MR/RR/Rear 4RM should be 2/3 or 4/5 or 4/6.
It's especially true on R 4RM or M4RM.

2 - You could have some front brakes low / rear brakes higher setting too even on FF/FR cars to force your car to stabilize by it self at the begining of a curve, like when you have a decel setting set low, but using a true decel setting higher, which is great using the motor brake while turning, even with FF car... This is a great setting to use on tracks you brake very late (these are kind of emergency brakes), like Sarthe or the Nürburgring for exemple.


Where do you find "the curb mass" ? I'm very interested.

I agree with you for flat springs. But I beleive the gamedesigners put already the good flat weigth distribution of spring rates with stock settings. Even when reducing the weigth of the car (from 1/8) because when you're "almost" happy the flat rate with this method, you can still add 300g more on front or rear to fine tune it.

Unless this, the stock cars would drive like bricks or dragsters and teh setups of premium cars are quite good already on that aspect of the car... What do you think on this ?


Oooooooooooh ! I will use that, so many thanks !


You're wrong. Damper compression/extention control the speed at which your spring compress or come back. The strength of your springs is controled enterilly by the spring rate.
For exemple, I will give you another one of my secrets : try low spring rate and very high compr/ext on rally cars. It is a great setup to grip the dirt.

I should post a rally car, most people don't have a clue how to tune them


Camber should be used only to increase turning grip ability, it's not automatic.

What I do is a 90° slip at high speed in a long and large straigth line (high speed ring is good for that). If the front loose the grip, I increase the front, if the rear loose the grip I increase the rear.
When I'm happy and have a balanced slip, I've got my front/rear camber distribution and work on it with entering/going out of a corner.
If I have to increase or decrease the front grip by a few %, I apply to same modification in % at the rear, taking in consideration the out of cornering slip too.
This is a quite effective methodology, you should try.

To much camber on the traction wheel mean lower accel seting for your LSD, and you'll try to avoid that if possible. Not required, but having a good accel seting is really a plus in long curves.


You're totally wrong there, mate... Please try 1/3 or 5/7 on a stock Zonda and you'll see a big dfference in lateral weigth transfer.

Anti-roll bars setting depend a lot on dampers. Loose damper = loose anti-roll, high dampers mean high anti-roll. The only exception to this are rally setups (high damper / medium anti roll)


It's a matter of philosophy. Never using toe will cut you a lot of problems in corner too. You can compensate most of uses of the toe with your LSD settings without breaking your accel/top speed/using your tires so I try to avoid that whenever it's possible.



I 100% agree you with you there ! 👍

Thanks Blueshift!

Just to reiterate, I don't think anti-roll bars affect the weight transfer between front to rear when decelerating or accelerating (is this not lateral or am I mistaken here?)

Anyway, camber settings depend on the drive wheels and hence my rationale.

 

[oppositelock]

This is definitly a quick working method and give a good boost on most cars, but it will do half the benefit of setting up a car with personalized settings.

Stock setup << spreadsheet setups << personalized tuned setup.

There's a lot of cars that require unconventional setups to work and get of good boost of this.

I agree absolutlely, which is why I said I only use it as a baseline and do fine tuning for each particular vehicle. Starting from total scratch on each vehicle is basically like flying blind and massively time consuming with inconsistant results. This gets me within perhaps 95% of ideal in one tenth the time.

 

[SS_1182]

This is turning into a lecture. Appreciate you guys lending your experience.

 

[BlueShift]

Just to reiterate, I don't think anti-roll bars affect the weight transfer between front to rear when decelerating or accelerating (is this not lateral or am I mistaken here?)

Lateral is left to rigth to left to rigth. These bars correct that. And yes, front to rear also, only when you turn.

Because I think if all the weigth goes to the left while turning and you have low front bar, the weigth will go to your front left wheel, not only to the left front/rear. Same for corner exit with the rear bars.

You didn't told where do you find the weigth graph like you said !!

Starting from total scratch on each vehicle is basically like flying blind and massively time consuming with inconsistant results.

Of course you gain time, but only on 50% of your tunes... Because tuning from scratch will help you read easier the car than coming from stock to a typical tune : for me, changes are too fast so you can't tell what's really wrong from the strong points you wanted to keep and the weak points you wanted to negate. It's quite the same for tuning softwares I wanted to do a long time ago. I beleived it was rigth, with more experience I know now that it's a wrong method.
Now, like I told in #2 post, I starts without even driving the car, so it's quite a slight spreadsheat method with one entry for me to

And LSD can be classified themselves too.

Like 4RM LSD for road setups :
Use the torque distribution in rear, say 30%/70%. Keep that 70% (=0.7)

In front you will have 0.7* the rear initial torque (so something like 7/10)
Accel front you will have 0.7*the rear accel (with values like 28/40)
Decel front will be cut (5) and the rear will have 5/0.7 = 7 to increase while tuning.

And then you tune from there.

Typically, MR will have like 10/20/30, FF will have 30/30/always 5, FR 15/10/25 etc. Stock value of GT's LSD always have been destroying the stock setups so ppl should learn to tune them (I see a lot of setups here with stock LSD).

 

[LiveWire11C]

Beware. If you stick on one track only, you'll do a setup for this track only.

Yeah, I should have specified better. I meant stick to one track until OP understands the role of each setting.

 

[calan_svc]

Some very good info here, but I thought I would toss in a few comments if you don't mind.

I recommend tuning aerodynamic properties first before touching anything else because they don't affect any other variables.

IRL, aero will affect suspension settings due to spring compression at high downforce loads. Not sure if that is modelled correctly in GT5 though.

Once thats done, focus on the brakes. Most cars should have brake bias towards the front (this is because of weight transfer under braking). Most cars I've tuned run well on 7 / 5.

It's dependent on the car's weight (and gaming setup; i.e. brake pedal). Lighter cars need less brake pressure to prevent lockup. I run as low as 3/2 on some really light cars like the Elise. There's also times when you want more rear brake than front, depending on how you want the car to enter a corner.

Damper set up should be set relative to the spring rate. So obviously a stiffer spring would require a stiffer compression and rebound - if either is weaker than the other, then essentially your car is riding solely on the spring or damper.

A conventional racing set up requires the rates of rebound higher than compression - this allows the car to return to its sprung height quicker, particularly important on twisty roads.

Dampers (shocks) are also about controlling weight transfer. For example, if a car is understeering while entering a corner, you may want to increase rear extension and/or decrease front compression to help shift the weight forward at a faster rate. If it oversteers on corner exit, you could increase front extension and decrease rear compression.

But...In GT5, adjusting the LSD usually seems to work better for fine tuning oversteer/understeer during accel and decel than shocks do.

Roll bars perform basically the same function as shocks in this regard, but work on lateral weight transfer (side-to-side) rather than front-to-back.

I don't support extreme camber settings, despite its agility, because they tend to wear your tires quicker and is detrimental to top-speed.

I agree with the tire wear (depending on the track), but camber shouldn't affect straight-line top speed to any noticable degree. Toe on the other hand should have a major effect on wear and somewhat of an effect on top speed.

Nice write up!

**************

EDIT:

DOH! Either I type really slow, or just completely missed Blueshift's comments.

 

[VillageBC]

This is turning into an informative read. Which I really appreciate as I've only started tuning my own cars. Currently feels like I'm just throwing random numbers into the settings and seeing what sticks. I have a general idea of what I want from a car, slight controllable oversteer that gracefully lets go. Doesn't just snap out.

Problem is, I only have a basic idea how to tune for that and not really how to start to get a car to really feel right. I can hodgepodge something together, but tunes I get from the shops here often give me the same setup I like but feel much better over all.

 

[mulholland]

to those asking... "curb mass" woukd be the weight of the vehicle... duh?

if you still need to know where to find it since you now know mass means weight... you may want to cease tuning attempts lol.

weight balanced tuning is the key to every good tuned car in the game really, and in regards to this, altering the moment of inertia of given vehicles to be more on center to create a more nuetral handling vehicle with a lower center of gravity, and then to begin dialing in its characteristics at its limits of adhesion when cornering.

those who simply click off some settings and go run around in the car will always struggle to find a sweet spot without the prior ground work put in to any cars tuning.

 

[VillageBC]

Question about body bounce, is it bad? What I mean is the cars whole body moving as it goes over bumps. I noticed in the replays my GTR Spec V that I lightened, lowered and adjusted toe/camber but not springs or dampers. Good enough to gold the event, so mission accomplished.

But I'm interested in the cause, and assuming I should be tuning the suspension to be doing all that work. Is it merely a factor of spring rates being to high for the weight and ride height to low. Do the damper settings have any affect on that, to high compression rating cause the car to jump rather then suspension working?

I've been working on my own 135i tune trying to learn how it all relates to each other. But it hasn't shown that characteristic at all.

Thanks for any advice.

 

[LiveWire11C]

If you are happy with the overall handling, I would start stiffening the spring rate, keeping both settings proportionate. For example, if it starts at 12.6/11.4 (Front/Rear), then try 13.6/12.4, then harder or softer depending on how that effects handling.

Also, the dampers will slow this bouncing. You can keep them proportionate too, if you are happy with the current handling. I would start with the expansion dampers first.

Always run a full lap or more to judge the changes.