Here's the (my) step by step for the PS '05 LMP (680 HP):
stock:
0/0
13.8/14.8
8/8
8/8
6/6
0.5/0.5
0.00/0.20
10/40/20
bb-5/5
Before I run any car I set the toe to 0.00/0.00, the camber to 1.5/1.0 and in this case dropped the car to -15/-15 (general ride height common to most of my LMP tunes).
The first thing I found (as with almost all LMP's) is that pressing the gas at all can be disatrous - Spin city. But I wanted to find out how well the car is balanced, not how it responds to the throttle input so I ran without using gears 1 and 2 for a couple of laps to see how it took the corners.
After the 2 lap try, it was obvious the LSD needed adjusting first to make driving the car at all possible when accelerating. Under deceleration the car turned fine and didn't lose traction. Changed LSD to ~10/10/20. (normally i change at 10 pt. intervals, but LMP's are.... special).
** The car would lose traction and oversteer as I released the brake pedal so I changed the BB to 6/5. The way I determine if the brakes or LSD are to blame for the loss of traction is to slow down well before the corner to about apex speed. If the car can complete the turn properly without using the brakes then the LSD is not the problem and the brakes get adjusted so the rear has less.
Ran a couple more laps, and it was much better but it wasn't turning as fast as I wanted. Set top speed only using the final gear (no tranny trick yet), and moved on to fine tuning.
Then using Ramon's guide:
Changed springs to 14.8 / 14.8 (evens up the car to determine steering characteristics)
Changed Dampers to:
8/8 - same as before actually
6/6 - as per Ramon's guide
And changed rear toe to -0.15 (my standard rear toe starting point now)
After a few more laps, I was sure I was getting somewhere
I found the car was faster through the turns at -20/-20, so I raised the springs a touch to compensate (16/16).
However, the grip was a bit off and the car was understeering so I raised the front camber to 2.5 to see how it would affect the car now. It worked really well (I also tried 3.0, but it was too much - and 2.0 was not enough).
At this point knew I was pretty close to the tune I wanted as it took the turns really well, and really needed to be loosened up a bit more than anything.
Changed rear toe to -0.20 and it was still fine (not over turning) so I changed it to -0.25.
LSD was changed to 8/8/20 to help with rears spinning when exiting slower corners and turn 2.
That made acellerating out of turns 2 and 4 a bit understeery so changed the front toe to +0.05 and changed springs to 16.5/15.5.
As with before, the tuning changes worked, and more importantly worked as expected - that never used to happen with my tuning tests before Ramon added his guide. I was really guessing a lot before and rarely had my expectations match results.
From there, slight adjustments followed until I ended up here for my quali tune:
-20/-20
16.5/15.5
8/8
7/6 - added a bit more turning grip
6/4 - same
2.5/1.2 - raising to 1.2 made the car 'feel' better in the T2 chicane and turn 3.
+0.08/-0.25
6/7/22 - rear grip entering turns was never an issue, acel was the only problem.
bb 7/6 ABS 1
PB 1'40.217, Quali'd at 1'40.533 (second hot lap was .557)
BTW - the only changes I plan to make at all for the race (to make the tune 'safer' for 2+ hours and easier on tires) is to change the LSD and Toe to ~:
6/5/22 (less likely to spin rears under acel)
0.05 / -0.20 (less likely to oversteer - esp. in the final chicane)
BB will probably change to 7/5 ABS 10 but I tend to change rear bias and ABS during the race as tires wear.
The tranny wasn't overly specific in this one, just use whatever variation of the tranny trick you like.
When I setup the LMS for the event in the practice lobby it took all of ~30 minutes to get a 1.49.6xx from a scratch tune using the same principles and Ramon's tips.
As mentioned by Hasslemoff, it really does come down to the driver as fine tuning goes. I for one cannot drive Praiano's tunes, but Tim tends to really like them and we are usually separated by .0xx in what ever we run.
As you get used to tuning for yourself, you can control the aspects of your tuning better and just as importantly - you can re-tune someone else's posted tune to your liking - quickly.
I was reading Ramon's thread in the TT forum earlier. Does most of what he wrote apply to online settings or do we throw all that info out when it comes to online? I know for sure ride height info applies to offline only.
I'm not sure I have the 'finesse' to pull it off.
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