What is the best way to increase mechanical grip in an AWD car to reduce push or understeer? I realize that adding aero to the front or reducing the rear will help. What are some good ballpark diff settings to aid turning in AWD cars? Any advice would be appreciated.
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Depending on the car/class, I have used ARBs as wide as 1/40. Specific to your question around the Diff, in some cases I have tried getting a RWD like behavior by going to 100/0; 100/0; 100
In other cases, many tend to swap the Springs to Low/High independent of %F weight.
Then, depending on the track, adding front tire width could be beneficial, though it comes at a great penalty on PI…though many cases you get the rear width for “free”.
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Try these AWD settings for minimal understeer and that mimic RWD behaviour as close as you can get:
Front: 68/0
Rear: 100/35
Midpoint: 70
This is for modern production cars though. For race cars you may want to increase front accel and mipoint slightly and/or decrease rear decel sligthly. For older cars you may want to reduce front accel and midpoint slightly and/or increase rear decel slightly.
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I tend to use
60/0
70/10
65-80
Sweeping turns are bit of an issue but most often I combat that with soft front ARB and stiff rear ARB. and quite low rear downforce.
For bit more sharper turns I brake before the turn so I can be on full throttle well before the apex, and there is the reason for low deceleration diff setting. I want the car to start turning, possibly even have minor slide under brakes, so can pull trough the turn with the rear slightly loose, but not so much that someone could say that I’m “drifting”
Also in my AWD builds I tend to bias towards acceleration over grip.
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Here is something that had been posted by BIG W0RM 80 awhile ago, do not recall the thread (from someone else) where W0RM posted…
All wheel drive
Front Accel = 25% to 40%
Front Decel = 0%
Rear Accel = 65% to 100%
Rear Decel = 5% to 30%
Split = 60% to 75%
He also had some recommendations for FWD and RWD (Front & Mid-engine) cars.
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depends on the car…
but i usually start at:
FRONT
Accel 15
Decel 0
REAR
Accel 90
Decel 0
Centre 65%
And tweak from there.
Thanks everyone!
Lots of different answers here
I tend to send very little power to the front, just enough to help pull the nose around the corner
Front
Accel: 10-15%
Decel: 0%
Rear
Accel: 40-50%
Decel 0% (Front Engine) 20-40% (Mid Engine, use the lowest number that gives you stability when lifting off into a corner)
Torque Split: 85-95% to the rear, as much as you can while still maintaining traction during hard acceleration out of a tight corner
Basically I’m nearly turning my AWD cars into RWD but using the front just enough to be able to get the power down earlier in corners and have the front end pull the car out
I allmost forgot. There are some AWD cars that might have some turn in issues, and when you get them in check that car is prone to coming unstabile in various situations.
So far I have ran in to few of these, althuogh none in FM7. How ever I still remember that I had Subaru SVX set up to be more like FWD car with center diff set on 40-45% (to rear tires) and it that really setteled the car, and I got bunch of wins in random hoppers, and while racing with my friends.
I’m not saying that this would be the case in all AWD’s but if there comes that 1 car that doesnt seem to be good in any way shape or form you can try this.
I like to start tuning AWD cars by setting the accel and decel settings for front and rear to 0, just move it all over to the left. I find that this helps me focus better on getting the swaybars adjusted correctly. As PRKid said sometimes you end up with some absurdly extreme ARB settings to get the car to turn well and not plow under power. If the split starts to get large I’ll start adding some rear spring to see what effect that has. On some cars I’ve gone with aero up front only, but on some cars rear aero set to minimum is decisively faster.
At that point you start to get a good sense for which axle needs the increase in the diff accel settings or if you need to adjust the front/rear split. I think the reason AWD cars can be so difficult to get just right is because the car’s weight balance and tire width difference between the front and rear have a huge impact on what works. An extreme example for me is the '14 911 Turbo. Huge weight on the back with the rear engine with wide rear tires and relatively skinny front. I can’t quite get it to behave how I want without converting it to RWD, and then I go play with a '17 GT-R with the front engine with more weight on the front axle and get the balance nailed down in five minutes.