go out and buy a book on vehicle dynamics. a real book on real vehicle dynamics. not a gt4 book on gt4 vehicle dynamics. if you can adjust a hypothetical real car to your liking, you can do the same in any game, be it gt4 or gpl.
I rarely made too many adjustments to cars in gt3 because you just cant tune a car accurately when you dont know what the settings do. you can make a car overly stiff and have it plow through corners like a boat, put on some supersofts and set record laptimes. but if you want to really be able to set a car up to your liking, if you want to know how every slight adjustment is going to affect the handling ahead of time, you need to learn from those who know best in the real racing world.
i suggest checking out saemotorsport.org . they have a great bookstore, or you can pick any of the books up at amazon or bn.com .
which book to start with?
-going faster: mastering the art of racedriving (by carl lopez, it is basically the curriculum that is applied at skip barber racing school. great book to get you to start thinking as a race driver)
-carroll smith's tune to win (smith also wrote drive to win and engineer to win. i think the above book is a better starter, but smith conveys his points well and you can learn a lot from all of his books)
-fundamentals of vehicle dynamics by thomas gillespie (pretty advanced, isnt really applicable to anything other than building your own openwheel racecar. interesting stuff though)
if you have an old pc and a wheel, or just an old pc. go buy a wheel and buy grand prix legends at an online shop for $10 or whatever it costs. get good enough so that you can control a car for a lap without crashing, then checkout this great site.
http://website.lineone.net/~richardn/Setups.html
some personal advice. I try to refrain from the terms understeer and oversteer when I talk about car handling, because a car doesnt just simply understeer or oversteer. it behaves differently based on the situation it is in. you need to think about when a little understeer may be your friend, then use it to your advantage. I dont really like an "oversteering" car, because it may point into the apex fine, but then when i am exiting a corner and applying throttle i have to refrain as the tail doesnt know what it is doing. thinking outside of the box yet?
for example, when i was setting up the M coupe with custom suspension, i set the rear springs 1 or 2 lbs heavier than the front. why on earth would i do this? the car would understeer horribly right? well in this case "understeer" actually means that the rear tires are having grip when they need it, now that isnt so bad now is it? i like a relatively softer front spring so i can get near all of the cars mass over the front wheels when im braking into a corner, this of course equates to front grip.the M coupe is especially squirley, and by making sure the rear is planted i am allowed to accelerate out of corners with brute force. corner exit is probably one of the most important factors for quick laptimes.
so i take this advantage we have here upon exiting corners, and I want to keep it. but actually what one would assume still happens to be true, this car doesnt want to point itself into the apex. i must dial this out, but instead of balancing the springrates more i leave them, remember i want all that rear grip on corner exit. i use my knowledge of other variables to get that "oversteer" i want on corner entrance. ah yes, stabilizer bar, i still have you in my bag of tricks. crank up the front stabilizer to max, and leave the rear relatively low, say 3 or 4. the car seems to understeer a lot less now, that stiff rear all of a sudden doesnt seem to be a problem, but we use the sideffect of a stiff rear to our advantage. also, if you look at the front end, the softer springs gives us a lot of longitudinal weight transfer to play with on corner entry in the form of grip later, when we adjust shocks, but because of the stiff stabilizer, lateral weight transfer is minimized.(couldnt word this to sound any better, but it makes sense)
try this yourself, and it may not workout so well. the rest of your car should be well balanced. You still need to fool around with shock valving to get weight transferred where you need it, when you need it. and i like to keep camber angles as close as possible. starting at -2 degrees at both ends, and adjusting up if i need any extra lateral grip at an end, or down if i dont like the sideffects you get with camber. i find generally i dont need to use too much camber if i get the car setup good otherwise, and im glad because a car with a lot of camber can be tougher to keep control of with just a joystick.
i hope my little narration has given you a little bit of an idea of how you should be thinking when setting up a car. i didnt intend on telling you how to setup a car, but try it if youd like. pickup one of the above books to really get these concepts cemented into your brain. youll be glad you did.
