Need help with tuning cars for drifting any advice on what I should do to fine tune cars for drifting
In order to “fine tune” you would have needed a rough tune as a base to work off of.
Please provide additional details as to how you currently tune your cars. Also please provide detail as to how you like your cars to handle.
As for tuning I use sport tires and negative camber and trying to decide if I should make a soft setup or a stiff setup to drift
To my knowledge,
If everything is stiff then weight isn’t properly catered for and the car is unpredictable despite feeling responsive, if everything is soft then the car shifts too much weight in corners resulting in multiple bad characteristics.
I always try to run soft springs to allow for a desirable amount of weight transfer, paired with stiff ARB’s to stop unwanted body roll when sideways. This also allows you to use the ARB’s to directly increase or decrease understeer/oversteer whilst having minimal effects on the rest of the setup.
You haven’t made it clear on what exactly you are struggling with, so here are a couple of pointers and tips I gave my friends when they started out doing their own drift builds.
Tires - Keep them in grip range, you want them around 32-35 PSI when hot, Grip is still necessary for drifting. If you have a car with high HP you could afford to run lower tire pressures.
Alignment - Firstly avoid extremes in anything except caster, 2-4 degrees of negative camber on the front seems to be the norm. 1 degree or less on the rear. Stick to toe out on the front, although again nothing extreme should be necessary otherwise the car gets unstable.
Anti-Roll Bars - Pair soft springs with stiff arb’s, try to run them stiffer in the front than the rear unless your cars current understeer/oversteer balance dictates otherwise.
Springs/Ride height - Soft springs will shift more weight, which can be beneficial in many cars as it will increase drift speeds. Springs should be softer in the rear. I also avoid slamming cars, as you can see when you apply race springs the cars lower automatically anyway.
Damping - Damping is useful for adding or removing grip from a tune using the shocks, stiffen front damping to add grip at rear wheels, stiffen rear damping to add grip at the front. It can be baffling to think that you might want grip in a drift car but you may sometimes need it, more grip allows for more speed. On the other hand if your car is struggling getting sideways you may want to reduce damping to reduce grip at the wheels.
Other settings such as Braking, Gearing, Aero & Differential settings are down to personal preferences and/or the track being used, a lot of people use similar settings in all of their builds so play around and see what works for you.
Hope this helps…
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As for tuning I’m just experimenting with stuff like camber, roll bars, springs, and also tire pressure and how I would like my cars to handle is probably either loose or stiff whatever’s best cause I would like to drift without it over steering