Thanks for the replies.
Great analysis nomis. I'm curious, did you make proper adjustments to spring rates and dampers when you changed the ride height? Typically the lower you go the stiffer you want to be.
Nope, the only setting changed was ride height. Yeah normally I'd be tweaking dampers and springs to suit, but the point of my testing is to find out whether
- too low (regardless of whether sparks are seen or not) causes grip loss because of running out of travel or scraping bodywork etc
- too high reduces grip because of the extra lateral weight transfer
- and whatever else is burped up along the way in my tests!
Like I said earlier in the thread; lower ride height has a similar effect to softening the spring rate; higher ride height has a similar effect to stiffening the ride height. It also adjusts the amount of body weight transfered, but there can be more than one benefit or consequence to any adjustment done. Linear thinking gets you nowhere.
Oh, I thought you were talking about raising one end relative to the other. Actually I think for lowering/raising both ends equally, it works the other way around if anything. Raising is similar to textbook theory for softening springs (ie more body roll) and lower reduces body roll (as per stiffer springs).
Vaguely-related thought: I didn't find changing the ride height made any change in mid-corner grip, though. As you might know, textbook theory says lower CG should be increase the lateral grip because the tyres are loaded more evenly.
Also, as for your tests, your intervals are far too spaced to find the results you are looking for. Normally you find a soft spot range of about 5mm (say -8 to -3mm for a random range), then generally the best lap time comes out of some setting in that range. If you want to find real optimizations then test at 3 or 5mm intervals until you identify a prospect range then test each variable at 1mm increments in the target range.
Yeah my intervals were very large, and I'm in the dangerous territory of testing extreme values! But since I'm trying to find general trends (see my reply to Chyler above) rather than finding the best ride height for car X at track Y, I thought it was ok to use 10mm (and 20 above zero). Also, I thought if there is a threshold value for bottoming out, then everything below that would suck. And if extra weight transfer (when raising) made things bad, then it would get linearly worse.
(finally... this isn't the best reason in the world... but I won't pretend that I can run lap after lap with 0.1s consistency!
So, for me, the subjective feel is perhaps more important than the lap time. And it can be hard to identify the difference if you're making changes in very small steps)
Shortcut: Run the car on stock settings in endurance mode, find the sweet spot fuel capacity with a new sets of tires...
Sorry, I totally don't understand what you're saying. Mainly I don't understand how the extra variable (ie changing fuel mass between laps) is any help.
i generally work the suspension set up first and get it to handel the way i want then mess with the ride hight. usually lowering the front untill i feel a loss of grip under a hard load or bumpy corner, depending on the track im settting up for. For exsample the high speed ring turn 2. Ill lower the front untill it looses grip in the middle of the turn. i then lower the rear untill its about 15 higer than the front or it also looses grip in that turn, witch ever happens first. I then go back up about 5 on each.
Thanks for sharing your method. For what I'm testing, though, I'm worried that altering the angle of the car (because you lower the front on its own to start with), that could affect my results.
However with some cars it is really hard to tell if a problem is due to bottoming out, so some sort of scrapping noise from the game would be greatly apperciated.
+1 !!!
