C, D and E is where you’ll learn your race craft, tracks, lines, braking points, you’ll also boost your reaction times because the racing is less predictable because more people make mistakes.
I’m not a fan of P or X either… S is the highest I’m prepared to explore at the moment as I’m having to relearn how to race to the same effect I was on previous titles.
Ok so. If your suffering from either oversteer or understeer you need to figure out the cause before you waste your time messing with the set up because you risk making the issue worse. So let’s go by this example.
You have a Lotus Elise 111S and you’ve got a very loose rear end all of the time. Now the throttle side is easy to fix. Drop the rear tyre pressures by about .5 to 2.0 PSI until you feel that’s improved your general traction it’ll also smooth out the bumps and turn the car more to understeer so keep testing every time you make a change restart the test drive that’ll give you a clean slate every time. Once you’re happy with that then start dealing with the Diff lock in 3% stages until you find the sweet spot for your driving style.
Now however you’re suffering oversteer on the breaks or lifting off the throttle. Simple fix increase the decel diff lock this will prevent 1 wheel locking and require greater force to lock both rears.
Now you’re suffering understeer on entry and oversteer mid to exit. Dial this out you need to start playing with springs, damping, alignment and ARBs. So we’ll look at ARBs first.
Now to deal with the oversteer mid to exit you’ll want to soften the rear ARB but never really past 60% of what you’ve set the front to or you’ll start loosing the rear through chassis flex overloading 1 wheel and unloading the other.
So if you’re running 28 front you don’t really want to drop the rear past 13. This will give you an understeery base. You can deal with that by speeding up turn in and resetting the camber front and rear.
The closer your camber to 0 the higher your caster should be because of the way the camber works. Think of it like a shopping trolley… High caster makes it quick steering low caster you’ll get a skateboard.
Now the camber depends on a few things including the cars weight and centre of gravity. A low lightweight car theoretically needs less camber front and rear because there is effectively less weight to transfer and it’s a more immediate transfer.
For the springs you can use a simple formula.
Weight X dristribution X tyre pressure
So a car weighting 3646lbs 51% front distribution with 30.5psi front and 28.5psi rear the formula would look like this.
3646x0.51x0.305=
3646x0.49x0.285=
If that’s too soft divide it by 0.8 to get a stiffer setting.
Damping set up is easy look at your telemetry you want the rebound to be set so the tyres are pushed back to the ground quickly over bumpy sections and peaks so check your suspension travel in telemetry as well as tyre loads.
Bump stiffness should be set fairly soft in comparison to the rebound because that setting effects how big of a jolt the suspension recieves from bump and kerbs which has a huge effect on balance. The smoother the ride the more stable the car the harder you can push before you find the limit.
The key to a good build is the balance. If it’s turbo charged leave them stock and flatten the initial boost curb with other upgrades, if it’s supercharged focus on using the mid range of the engine more than the top end.
Build the motor to its strengths not its weakness. Same with grip and aero. If the car doesn’t need it don’t add it.
Top tip when setting your car up with aero. Leave it till last create mechanical grip first and foremost then deal with the aero. Good mechanical grip beats aero 9/10 if your car grips good to begin with it’ll run like a train when you add it in.
