Hi AO
First here're the rough 'n' ready settings I came up with for 'Seca:
Settings:
Springs: 11.4/10.8
Ride Height: 105/105
Bound/Rebound = 5/6 Front and 4/7 Rear
Camber: 3.0/1.6
Toe: -1.0/+0.5
Stabilizers: 4/4
Brakes: 12/10
LSD (F): 8/18/16
LSD (R): 21/46/20
Auto Set gears: Level 28
Final Drive: 4.288
ASM = 0; TCS = 0
VCD: 26%
To set the box I used 3.498 @ 28 then re-adjusted the Final to 4.288. This gave me revs just touching the redline at the end of the downhill start/finish straight. You'll notice that these settings don't include the augmented ride height or rear biased spring rates as I found these gave me too much oversteer braking into corners.
Acceleration out of corners using my ride height and springs suggestions was great but I have a psychological aversion to sliding in corners (from RL experiences on two wheels (in fact that should probably be physical aversion given the amount of titanium holding my arm togther!)) so I went to a more FR style set-up.
The only problem that I found with the above was that the moment you choose to lay the power down was very critical (a definite indication that I hadn't got the car balanced quite right). If you went for the gun a fraction too soon then she understeered a fraz too much (she'd make the turns alright but she felt tight on the way out).
Your settings for the Forest look good. You've softened the springs to cope with the rough, undulating surface and, most importantly have made an effort to match the dampers to them. That's a vital point often overlooked.
When it comes to adding power to a car and aiming to avoid power-on oversteer, there're a fair number of things you can try.
The primary one is throttle modulation. The drivers input at the controller becomes logarithmically more important the more the HP goes up. Choosing your point of acceleration and gentle application of the throttle work wonders in quelling oversteer (until I mastered this I used to run TCS up at 6's and 7's for things like the Speed 12 - the shame of it!). The old adage about exiting as straight as you can is very true.
The next is gear box values and the choice of gear for corner exit. The less direct torque you feed into the tyres exiting a sharp corner the better basically. For although torque is what gives you low-end acceleration, too much torque will just get wasted shredding your tyres rather than pushing you forward.
Increasing rear camber (up to a point) will enable more grip (and thus less oversteer) in powering out of corners but beware of the fact that it can also cause entry understeer if the rear is outgripping the front even under braking.
Front springs stiffer than the rear and front stabiliser stiffer than the rear are also both good ways of quelling oversteer. Again though, caution is required when adjusting the springs as they can totally destroy your cars overall balance if set incorrectly. Plus, if you alter the springs then you will more than likely have to reset the whole suspension to match.
The LSD tweaks covered so well by Oosaka (may have spelt that wrongly!) are a vital part of the process of handling power but they cannot overcome a chassis setup that promotes oversteer.
Sending more power to the front through the VCD may also help but can just bring you back to the original problem of exit understeer.
The dampers again can be very useful in this matter. Setting them up for less oversteer in the final phases of a corner is almost mandatory for high HP cars. Decreasing the Front Rebound and increasing the Rear Bound is probably the right way to go for this.
Finally, toeing out the front and toeing in the rear is capable of producing very marked success in dealing with high horse power cars oversteer problems on corner exit. I almost always use values around -0.5/+1.0 (sometimes even +1.5).
As you can tell from the above, there's a lot of compromise involved in setting up a cars suspension and it's extemely important to remember that what works for one style of driving is likely to be utterly wrong for another!
Hope some of this directionless meandering is of assistance
MAB
