I have a car with 54% front weight, 235mm tires all around, and no aero. Would I want to set my dampers in a ratio of 5.4:4.6, front:rear total damping, or close to that, to equally control the weight and motion at all 4 corners, or something else, and why?
You will want to setup your dampers according to your front / rear spring rate ratios. If your front spring rate is higher than your rear spring rate then your front dampers should be higher than your rear dampers and vice versa.
Im not taking about absolut numbers here but percentage in relation to front / rear weight.
Can you share more? What are the use cases for a unbalanced dampers?
The 4-3-2-1 damper pattern for drifters?
Inverted bump ratio on the front of drag cars?
High rebound on the rear of FWDs?
I’ve seen a rear-engine tune in LFS with 1:1 bump:rebound on the rear and 0.9:1 on the front, that drives great. I’ve also seen a drift tune with an inverted rear bump ratio–LFS, keyboard driver, miss that dude…
The FH2 stock rally setups had more bump than rebound. I’ve seen an LFS rally setup with more bump than rebound.
Some drifters like more rear damping than front. Some people say don’t overdamp the rear if you’re drifting, ever, because you rely on the rear wheels to grip consistently more than anything (I’ve always
been of the latter mentality).
Why does your app give me the same damper settings for wildly different weight distributions? I feel like you honestly don’t have a clue. Your app is useless to anyone with a calculator. I can find the perfect spring rate balance to within +/-0.5%, and fine tune with a handful of tuning laps. What do you know about dampers? Prove me wrong.
So you open up a discussion in which you’re asking for the help and opinions of others. And then proceed to berate the first person who is kind enough to give you their opinion on your opening question.
Ever heard of treat others how you would want to be treated yourself. There is constructive criticism and then there is being quite rude and insulting. I would certainly say you were the latter. And I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be treated the same way.
There are plenty of people on the Forums who will offer you advice and insight into your original question. But a bit of advice. People are far less likely in life to want to help you at all if you treat them with that attitude…
I would never put a base tune on a car with dampers so far from balanced according to weight distribution. Am I wrong? Are dampers not that important? Do they not work as I understand them to? Please, enlighten me. This is my only wish.
This is a game. Do not over science it. In my experience scientific tunes are ok base tunes in these games.
But plenty can be had doing things science suggests you should not do.
With regards to dampers I only tune based on the cars behaviour not numbers.
If you tune your dampers based on any of the formulas mentioned in this thread does it behave how you like it to?
After reading this a few times, as it was mentioned, when you treat people wrongly, they are more reluctant to actually answer your question, but I am in a good mood so I will tell you the old formula on how to balance this out as it was in previous versions of the game to find the actual balanced formula.
When trying to balance a vehicle, we took the vehicle weight and did a mathematical equation for the balance. to do this we need the minimum and maximum value of said setting. to make it easy, we will use 1 and 10. From there we divide the vehicle weight from the value. Now since you have the value already of 5.4, I will go ahead and assume you did this type of equation already. Since you have 5.4, the offset value is 4.6 because 5.4 and 4.6 is equal to 10. Now for the other portion, it was offset by around 10-25% of the original value, which usually from a 5.4 it went to around a 4.4 or 4.6 and there was a small gap in front and behind this value.
As far as my knowledge this was the last known equation that people can use to balance their vehicles. But I do believe that the new system has different numbers which means you will have to redo these values. So if the minimum value is still 1 and the new maximum is let’s say 20, now you have to redo this equation. I am not sitting in front of the game so we will just do simple math.
.54 (54%) * 20 = 10.8 So the first value will be 10.8 and not 5.6. From their, we know the first value and now we subtract that number from 20 and get 9.2.
To get our second value you can either use .25(25%) * 10.8 and you will get 2.7, and then you subtract that from 10.8 and get 8.1, or you can reverse it and do .75(75%) and get 8.1. Now you do the same exact thing from your second value, which is 9.2, and you will get 6.9.
So for your new car, the values will look like this from front to rear :
Front : 10.8
Rear : 9.2
Front : 8.1
Rear : 6.9
The same can be found for the springs, but that will require you to again know the minimum and maximum spring rate of the vehicle. Once you know this amount, you again find out what the 54% and the 46% value is and now your car will be completely balance.
To make this easier, you can actually make an excel spreadsheet and have these calculations done for you so all you need to do is enter the value and the excel will actually make the calculation for you. For instance, you can have the spreadsheet have one cell for the minimum spring value and the maximum spring value and in a cell underneath this, you can input the weight distribution value (45%-55%) and below that you can have 2 cells to show you the exact spring rate needed for front and back springs so it does all the work for you. Using the same method, you can do this for your dampening settings and have it broken down further by showing you both fronts and both rears so all you need to do is feed it this information.
If you don’t feel like doing an excel spreadsheet to do this for you, which actually saves time, then just remember the original equation and do the calculation for you for each and every vehicle which is (Weight Distribution) * (Spring Rate) = Front / (Front Spring Rate) - (Spring Rate) or (Weight Distribution) * (Rebound Rate) = Front / (Front Rebound) - (Rebound Rate)
This calculation was used mostly for drifters to even out the car for their turns for their slides. This can also be used for Road/Street racing and I am sure it can be used for Drag racing if they truly want to even out their car, unless they want to set the tune so the car is rigid and not want to turn at all so it ensures it will only go in a straight line.
Now onto your small rant about having cars where the rear is more stiff than the front, you are correct on that. On my drift tunes I often have the rear more stiff than the front, but that is my preference on how I drift. People will tune their cars to their preference and share their tunes out because there might be someone else who prefers the same type of set up to their liking, but either does not know how to tune correctly, or they do not want to take their time to tune their vehicle, or maybe they are testing out a tune to see if they like how it is over what they have tunes and may contact the tuner to ask them how it was set up so they can understand how to better tune for themselves.
As far as balance, it may work wonders on a track, but on an open world simulation, things can change for obvious, environmental reasons. What may work extremely well on a track, might not do diddly squat on a street variation. Keep this in mind when balancing your vehicle because even a small miscalculation or change in the equation or the environment can send your car reaching for the moon and possibly into a tree, tractor, house, or random farm animal running for sweet baby Jesus.
Ok. Maybe I should explain how I’ve been tuning.
Spring rate: front, a little softer than default race, unless the car is short on travel. If front weight is 54%, my initial rear spring for RWD cars would be frontspring/54.5*45.5, which I do under the assumption the front weight number rounds to the nearest .01%.
I usually set my ARBs a touch towards understeer. Nothing crazy like the 30/20 stock settings on some cars, more like, 24/19 for a 54% car. The overall amount depends on travel, springs, ride height, tires, possibly suspension geometry, and whatever I ate last.
Dampers, my bump damping can be 4/5 or as low as 1/2 of the rebound. If the rebound on the front of a 54% car was 7, 7/54*46=5.962, so, 6… I often round down or remove a point or two, on the assumption the resultant transitional understeer will allow me to maximize steady-state grip with spring and arb balance. I have a 2017 GTR set up for cruising 53% iirc, 961PI, with 7.5/6.8 rebound and 4.4/3.8 bump. I set a PB on a drift zone with it by accident. My original Speed 12 was set up with 4.4 on all 4 sliders for a while. 50% weight, 2000 pounds, 450lb springs. Light ARBS, rally tires, aero. I liked how it drove at the time. Lately I’m settling mostly for 50-70% bump for ease of use.
Then that sounds like a personal setting to how the car feels to you rather than having the car even and balanced. So anyone reading this will now not understand what you are asking because it almost sounds conflicting. Whichever the case, if you know you like a bit softer suspension set up, more power to you. Just remember how you tuned your one car and apply the same mechanics to your other cars. I have my way of tuning my drift cars and I set all of mine up very similar to each other because I like the feel of how they drift.
and I will excuse myself for the formula. I had just gone back to check it as it is an old formula and I was close, but I forgot to ass 1 at te end of those numbers as the original formula is (A-B)C+B=X
To further go over this, here is the old tuning guide found here http://web.archive.org/web/20130312174826/http://forums.forza.net/forums/thread/4869639.aspx
EDIT
I went ahead and did a spreadsheet on Google Sheets. Here you can change the values and it will automatically do the calculations for you.
As long as the minimum and maximum values that are preset are correct still, all you need to do is input the correct weight distribution so that you get all of the correct values to even out your car. I hope this helps. As mentioned, if you like things a bit softer, just adjust your settings to be a bit softer than the results you get.
The only formula I use is front [tuning parameter] divided by frontweight multiplied by rearweight, to determine the weight-matched rear value, or vice versa, to set the front for a given rear. I use it all the time to ballpark before fine tuning. If I double the stock rates I’ll choose a front or rear rate, ballpark the opposite, ditto dampers, arbs.
Many cars do well with perfectly matched springs. I’ll usually spend 15-30 minutes starting SP races, feeling it out, adding or subtracting 2-5 lbs from one end of the car, until I find the ideal value. A team adventure or day away from it later, I might tweak more. Btw, I use race bracing in almost all of my builds–this is a factor in spring balance sensitivity.
Front bump damping goes up until corner entry feels controlled. Rear bump usually matched per weight. Rebound… high as possible without feeling sluggish, also matched per weight. Dirt and cross country builds sacrifice road performance for big-hit control. Anything AWD over 53-54% front weight, I’ll start picking up the rear spring and dropping front roll bar, usually pushing the drive balance forwards to 60-70, vs 70-80 in more balanced AWDs. I have a handful of FWD A classers with 1 front roll bar and 30 rear, 60% front weight, matched springs though. I just built the Forzathon Mugen Civic into C class today. It’s happy with high rear spring, on stock tires. The A class FWDs can become too difficult to control with high rear rates and the 1/30 ARBs seem to keep them neutral enough. Tuning still feels like full-time study and part-time success.