Post by daniel on Nov 7, 2018 20:07:25 GMT 10
First, a disclaimer. A lot of what I'm going to explain is well known facts (ie what adjustments do), however some of it is essentially just my opinion, and I could well be wrong. If you think I'm wrong about something, please let me know. Also, everything I'm writing here applies mainly to the GT3 pack, endurance pack, and any other cars using the latest tyre tech. I'm not 100% sure how other cars will react. I should assume this will benefit any car. Also, this ended up being way longer than I hoped so I apologise, but if you really love your racing and want to get better and faster it’ll be worth it.
When we change the setup on a car, what are we trying to achieve? What should we be trying to achieve? Balance? Most information I found online when I was new to setup seemed to imply that balance was what setup was for. Essentially, fix the over/understeer and away you go. But then I always found that fixing the over/understeer was just chasing an impossible goal - the perfect setup would never come. The car always has little issues. Why? The answer that I found was simple - balancing the car is actually the second step. Not the first. You might've wondered how to get the car to behave well enough to do a long race without putting it in the wall or spinning or something. Again, the answer to that is not the right balance.
So, what then should we be trying to achieve when we adjust the setup? Well, three things. First, the suspension components (and aero) need to be working together well. This means we need all the work done by the suspension to be spread out equally amongst those components, and not one part doing all the work. Second, comes balance. And third, is to maximise the grip delivered by each wheel. Sounds like a lot to do, but it's actually quite simple. Doing the third will create speed, while doing the first will create predictability. Predictability will create consistency.
Before I dive into the how, I should say there are a few things you can and might do now that you shouldn’t. One of them is running aero that isn't balanced. I know a lot of people like to run low wing so they can go fast down the straights. Don't. You'll only lose that time in the first corner to someone with a proper setup. You need the aero to deliver more or less equal grip to the front and rear, and the mechanical grip front and rear to be more or less equal too. Anything other than this is a compromise. If you give the rear too little aero grip, you'll be asking too much of the mechanical grip and you won't be achieving the first thing that I just mentioned. Also, if you have some adjustment maxed out, it probably shouldn't be. Most of my really good setups have most of the adjustments right in the middle of the available range. Again, this all ties in with getting all the components doing equal amounts of work.
Before I scare you off with the next bit, just remember that this is actually really easy. Anyone can do this. To achieve the first step in setup, you need some telemetry.
Get MoTeC i2 Pro from here www.motec.com.au/i2/i2downloads/
My workspace so you don’t need to set anything up (just double click with motec installed)
Workspace
And a log file for you to load which I’ll use in this guide (or use your own)
log
I like to keep a separate workspace for each car, but you don’t have to. The reason I do this is so I can set the display ranges specific to the car. My workspace should be good for any GT3, but a prototype for instance might have some data out of range of the graphs. If you need to know how to adjust ranges for a very different car, just ask (or google it).
So, open up my workspace and then click the open file icon in the top left. Navigate to the log file and open it. Now all the graphs etc will be visible.
Now, I’m going to make this part as simple as possible. In reality it should only take 30 seconds of looking at motec before you are ready to go. Yes, there’s dozens of other things we could look at in the telemetry but in my opinion none more useful than this.
If you get overwhelmed by the next paragraph don’t worry, keep reading and I’ll break it down.
If you’ve never used motec before, there are simple beginners guides online for the basics, but essentially all you need to know to get started is how to access stuff. In the top left there is a drop down box that contains the different parts of the workspace. Most of them are left from default, the ones that you need to look at are Suspension and Tyres. Select suspension from the drop down box and you’ll have a bunch of pages open at the top, Susp Positions, Susp Velocities, etc. Since we’re trying to see if the suspension is working nicely, we’ll start with the histogram. Open the “Susp Histo” page.
When you look at the histogram, you generally want to look at the data from 1 lap. To do this, double click on whichever lap you want to look at on the bar at the top. Here you can see a visual representation of the time spent in bound/rebound at different suspension velocities. Sounds complex, but essentially all you need to know is that you want it to be symmetrical, ie same values for bump & rebound, but generally slightly more rebound than bump. In the example log file I gave, the histogram is quite close to symmetrical. It is not perfect, but I would say it’s “close enough”. So, symmetrical (or slightly rebound heavy) for bound/rebound, that handles each individual damper, but what else? We can also compare left to right to adjust for tracks that are heavy on one side. When a corner is more heavily loaded, the histogram will look flatter (think of it as “soft”) & also heavier on rebound, so from this you can see the loading on each side of the car. Again, you want it to be close to symmetrical, so if one side is flat and the other tall, stiffen the flat side and soften the tall side (use spring, arb & even adjustments to bump & rebound). Finally, the front to rear balance can also be looked at. Front to rear, however, doesn’t necessarily need to be symmetrical, it totally depends on the car. The Bentley for instance needs the rear to be softer by about 10% or so. This means the middle bar of the histogram will need to be 10% shorter to achieve the best balance. This is also affected by aero balance but as I said, you should be running balanced aero anyway. Just remember that while symmetry is best in the individual wheel and also side to side, front to rear is completely dependant on the car.
I think the best way to understand all this is to just do it. That means you’ll have to download a couple more things. First you need the plugin so you can generate your own log files. Get it from here: forum.studio-397.com/index.php?threads/damplugin-for-rf2.49363/
You need to configure the plugin to enable some extra channels, but to make it easier just grab this config file and put it in your rf2 folder under userdata\player, then open it up and change the log file location (if you forget and you don’t have a D drive you’re doomed):
Config
Thats it, now you’re ready to generate a log file. Pick a car you know decently, for those of you running the gt3s at the moment, the car you’ve been driving should be perfect to use for this. Pick a track that you know very well, preferably one with a good road surface, as opposed to a poorly made conversion with a perfectly smooth surface. The bumpiness of the surface will affect the shape of the histogram, and an excessively smooth surface will result in a very tall histogram that essentially will give you less information to go by. If you don’t have a realroad preset saved with lots of rubber down for the track you picked, let the ai run on it for a while and once it’s nice and rubbered in save the preset (or quit and set the preset to “autosave”). Also set the realroad timescale to static. You really don’t have to do this but it will stop you going backwards with setup but not noticing as the track grips up.
Before you jump in the car, load up your best setup for it. If that’s default, that’s fine. Then, you need to ask yourself: are you doing anything questionable already? Is your aero balanced? If you picked a car you know, you should know what is roughly balanced aero. For the Bentley, minimum rake and rear wing on 9 is balanced. Are you running excessive or no toe? Start with a little front toe out and a little more rear toe in. Did you leave some packer in the car? Set it to 50% of what is available. Is your diff working too hard? Preload very high? Soften it. Your springs and arb should not be max or min, but somewhere near the middle (if they aren’t it’s ok at this stage). Don’t bother touching dampers yet. Essentially a good option is to look at the available ranges in an adjustment front to rear (ie arb might be max 12 front and max 6 rear), and try to get each one even, so if the front has twice the range, you give 2 clicks front for 1 click rear. You could also just go out with your own setup and not touch it if you’re confident it’s good.
If you’re using the config file I provided, logging will be disabled by default. When you jump in the car you’ll hear a tone indicating logging is off. Press ctrl+m to enable logging and a different tone will play. It will stay enabled then until you restart the game, so you don’t have to do it every time.
Now put half a tank of fuel in and soft tyres, and try to do half a dozen clean laps. Keep going until you have at least one lap that you are happy with, with no mistakes. If you have excessive under/oversteer, and the track has majority high speed corners, stiffen the end that has more grip. If the track has majority slow corners, soften the end that needs grip. Do this with spring and arb.
When you manage to complete a clean lap (or a few preferably), save your setup and go and open motec. If you get sick of quitting to do this you could always set your log folder as a network share and access from another pc. Open the suspension section from the drop down box in the top left, and then open the “Susp Histo” page. Now, if you’re doing this all from the 1 pc, grab your phone and take a photo of the histogram page and fire rf2 back up to the track you were on. If you haven’t already set a static realroad preset, either do it or remember that the car will get better as the track grips up.
Before we start, untick “symmetrical” at the top of the tuning window. Strictly symmetrical setups are nearly always a major comprimise (ie slow). First, look at the histogram for the front left. We will focus on slow damping first. Is bump/rebound symmetrical or slightly rebound heavy (2% or so)? If there’s adjustments to make, first look at the other side to determine which direction to go. You want to adjust towards the other side. So, if the front left is taller on the slow bump side (bump heavy) and the front right histogram is flatter (softer) than the left, we know to adjust by softening. If the right was taller, we’d stiffen instead. To bring the bump down to match the rebound, soften it. The amount depends on the car. The Bentley for example has something like 1-2% adjustment per click, every car will be different. Now, while still looking at the front left, look at the fast damping. Again, is it symmetrical or slightly rebound heavy? If it’s too rebound heavy for example, and the front right is softer than the left, soften the rebound.
Repeat this for the front right, comparing against the left to see whether to stiffen or soften. If the bump/rebound is near symmetrical but left to right doesn’t match, soften or stiffen both bump & rebound at the same time. If the track loads one side of the car a lot more than the other, you may need to give the heavily loaded side a stiffer spring, or run a softer spring on the lazy side. In that case, knowing which to choose comes down to experience and being able to tell “this histo should be taller at this track given how I’m loading it through the corners” for example. Every corner of every track has an ideal spring rate, practice to find out which it is.
Repeat the last 2 steps for the rear wheels. At this stage, don’t make any adjustments to bring the front and rear closer to symmetry. We will find the right front to rear balance soon.
Drive the car (make sure you’re logging!) Depending on how much of a swing you had to take at it and how good your guesses where as to how much to adjust, the car will be either somewhat or day-and-night better. There may still be over/understeer, we have not yet made any attempt to address that (we are on step 1 still!) If you have high speed over/understeer, adjust the rear wing. It’s important that the aero is balanced now! Once again, try to do several fast, clean laps. If at this stage you struggle to lap cleanly because of general over/understeer, adjust with anti roll bars and springs, leaving the dampers alone. You may also need to adjust rear toe angle and diff settings if you get too much entry oversteer for your liking (increase preload, coast if available, give it slightly more rear toe in, or less if it’s high). Once you have logged a few fast, clean laps, save your setup, separately if you’re not sure if it improved or not, and go and open up motec again.
Go straight to the suspension histogram page, and compare to the last one. Either compare against a photo/screenshot or google how to compare data in motec. Comparing the two, you can see how much your adjustments affected the histogram. Take note of how much you think 1 click of damper adjustment will do. Compare front to rear, keeping in mind the overall balance of the car. Let’s say you think the aero is perfectly balanced and the rear is 5% softer than the front, and that gives slight oversteer. From that you can guess that it needs to be about 6 or 7% softer than the front. Things like this you can pick up on as you go and learn more about the car.
Again, if you’re using 1 pc, take a photo of the latest histogram page. While you’re at it, in the drop down box, switch to the “Tyres” section, and take a photo of the “Tyre Temps” page. We’ll use this information to adjust the camber. Now we will finish working on step 1 (kind of), and take a big, well informed swing at the second and third steps. The amount of time it took to get to this point, and the amount of time you’ll need to finish the setup, will reduce dramatically as you learn the car. I’m at the point with the Bentley now that I can tune it to a track and end up with a ridiculously fast car in less than half an hour.
Fire up rf2 again and load the track. Load your latest setup and remember to enable logging with ctrl+m before you start driving. Now, how close is the histogram to symmetrical? Repeat the steps above where you made the first adjustments based on the first histograms. If you are happy with a corner (remember, symmetrical bump/rebound or couple % rebound heavy, and relatively even height compared to the other side), leave it alone. If you took some big swings at it, you should go back to motec now and get yourself a fresh histogram photo before you carry on. If you only made small changes, you don’t really need to check now, unless you don’t know for sure what effect your adjustments will have. If in doubt, check!
With the histograms now balanced, we should have more or less achieved the first step of ensuring the components are working together. If you’ve done things like maxed out the dampers or arbs etc then you might still have some issues. We will address these now. If you’ve tried to be as sensible as possible and made your adjustments evenly over all the components, you shouldn’t have any issues now. If the balance of the car changes during the corner (loose in, tight mid corner etc etc), that’s a sure sign that you still have an issue with one component working too hard. Issues at this stage can be solved with the help of one of the setup flow charts floating around, if you need one. Just try to keep the balance in the damper adjustments otherwise you’ll go backwards. If you change much at this point, go back to motec and get a new histogram photo to go by for the next step. After adjusting, you may well need to make adjustments on damper symmetry again. If you have to make big adjustments to the dampers to achieve symmetry again, chances are you need to make your adjustments with arbs, spring, toe, diff etc instead of dampers. Changing springs and bars will always have some effect on the histogram.
We’re almost there. Have a look at the tyre temps page that you took a pic of (or on another pc), and look at the front left first. For each wheel, compare the center, inner, and outer temps. Ideally you want the center and outer temps to be equal during the highest load corners. Unless there’s really only one fast corner which you feel you can sacrifice, always aim to set an ideal camber value for the fastest corner. It’s much better to have the whole tyre on the ground for the fast stuff and half of it on the ground for the slow stuff, than to come into the fastest corner and lose it because the outside edge took all the load and cooked. In practice, with minimum tyre pressures (my advice is to run minimum), you may find it difficult to match the center and outer temps. If the inner and outer temps match and the center is slightly lower, this is fine, don’t spend too much time trying to get it better as it might not happen. If the outer temp is higher, give the wheel more camber. If the outer never reaches the temps of the inner/center, reduce camber. We could’ve done this to begin with but I find that a “sensible” camber angle is more than adequate up to the point of extracting all the grip. Don’t worry about the inner edge of the unloaded (inside) wheel getting hot, this is an unavoidable consequence of camber, unless of course you’re on an oval. Setting optimal camber angles is the first thing to do in step 3, which is to extract maximum grip from the car.
If you’re sitting there thinking “really? All this for a bloody game, I just want to drive!”, then realistically you’ve done enough. The car should now be predictable. It should react the same way at the same corner given the same inputs. At this point, you should be able to stop reacting to the car, and start predicting. You should be able to catch a slide before your body even has time to register it, simply because you can predict it. It’s ok for the car to oversteer a bit if you know exactly where and how much it’ll oversteer and exactly what it’ll do when you change your inputs to compensate. You don’t need to have great reaction times when you’re not reacting! Having said that, everyone has their own limits, and I only know me. I don’t know if this applies to you as much as it does to me.
If you’re now wondering, what about step 3, read on. Essentially all you’re doing when you adjust the suspenion is change the load placed on each wheel (springs, arb), and controlling the speed at which the load moves around (dampers). It really is that simple. So it is with maximising the grip. The tyre will have a maximum load that can be applied at any given moment. I’m not going to get into the maths of it or a proper explanation because I honestly can’t. I don’t need to know either. Essentially, the faster the corner, the more load you’re going to put on the loaded side. If you have too soft suspension the car will feel bad in a heavily loaded turn because too much weight transfer will happen. You will also end up with a “sloppy” unresponsive feel at high speed direction change. In a slow corner there will be significantly less weight transfer than a fast corner, so to extract the most grip from the tyre in a slow corner you’ll have to let the body roll more than you would in a fast corner. In the end, unless every corner is identical, it’s a compromise.
It’s pretty simple in practice to find the most grip, just takes a little time. Make sure you log everything so you can refer to the telemetry later. It’s invaluable to know what a good setup “looks like” in telemetry (it’s different for every car).
First, work out what direction to go in. If you’re looking for greater slow corner performance, go softer in adjustments. If it’s high speed corners that you want to take even quicker, start by trying stiffer.
My first move is usually to tweak spring rate. Higher or lower, depending on the track, 1 click at a time. Adjust all 4 corners of the car at the same time, trying to preserve balance (ie go by % of available range rather than actual values, if there’s 10 clicks front and 5 rear available, go 2 front 1 rear when adjusting). I rarely run full hard or full soft springs. Make an adjustment, if it’s better, adjust more. When it doesn’t help, go back one click. If it doesn’t help at all, don’t go backwards just yet, but keep in mind you might need to if the next adjustments don’t do the trick. When you think you have the ideal springs, move on to arbs. Use the same theory for the arbs, preserving balance. Next adjust slow damping evenly on bump and rebound. As a general rule, stiffer damping is faster, however it can certainly be overdone. Remember, you don’t want any single component doing too much work. Finally, play around with fast damping. Fast damping is very important to mid corner grip, not enough and you lose grip, too much and the car becomes twitchy and harsh over bumps.
Now it’s time to check the telemetry again. Do some clean laps with your latest setup and open up the log file. Check the histograms and tyre temps, if necessary take a photo again and tweak as before. If you tweak the dampers at this stage, you might want to determine which way to go based on the front to rear balance, rather than side to side symmetry. For example, if you still have slight oversteer and the front is rebound heavy, you might want to try increasing bump regardless of how the fronts compare on the histogram.
So, that’s step 3, is that it yet? Well, no. Honestly you could keep going for a very long time. There will be diminishing returns, though. If you think I’ve missed things with motec, yes I did. I haven’t explained how to check for bottoming out, I’m not touching rake, stuff like that. If I was using the Oreca as an example, I’d have mentioned those things. I do however want to stop writing at some point, and I think those things are easy to find info on online. Or you could ask here, I’m happy to answer any questions. There’s pages in my motec workspace that I also didn’t explain, again either ask here or google it.
If you wanted to keep going and find the last tenths, the next step is to literally tweak the other settings I haven’t mentioned much or at all, 1 click at a time and test for each adjustment. Yeah, it’ll take time. If you do get this far though, every single thing you do will teach you something about the car until you and the car become one. You won’t find tons of time at this point, but you’ll learn every nuance of the car, which can be incredibly satisfying. And the more you learn, the quicker you’ll be able to tailor the suspension to any given track.
So if you managed to read this all, well done and thank you. In the end if there’s less DNFs I’ll be satisfied, if someone gives me a race I’ll be even happier. Either way, I can now stop internally debating whether or not to write this guide. I hope this information helps you enjoy the latest cars as much as I do. If you have any questions please ask, I’m happy to help if I can.
When we change the setup on a car, what are we trying to achieve? What should we be trying to achieve? Balance? Most information I found online when I was new to setup seemed to imply that balance was what setup was for. Essentially, fix the over/understeer and away you go. But then I always found that fixing the over/understeer was just chasing an impossible goal - the perfect setup would never come. The car always has little issues. Why? The answer that I found was simple - balancing the car is actually the second step. Not the first. You might've wondered how to get the car to behave well enough to do a long race without putting it in the wall or spinning or something. Again, the answer to that is not the right balance.
So, what then should we be trying to achieve when we adjust the setup? Well, three things. First, the suspension components (and aero) need to be working together well. This means we need all the work done by the suspension to be spread out equally amongst those components, and not one part doing all the work. Second, comes balance. And third, is to maximise the grip delivered by each wheel. Sounds like a lot to do, but it's actually quite simple. Doing the third will create speed, while doing the first will create predictability. Predictability will create consistency.
Before I dive into the how, I should say there are a few things you can and might do now that you shouldn’t. One of them is running aero that isn't balanced. I know a lot of people like to run low wing so they can go fast down the straights. Don't. You'll only lose that time in the first corner to someone with a proper setup. You need the aero to deliver more or less equal grip to the front and rear, and the mechanical grip front and rear to be more or less equal too. Anything other than this is a compromise. If you give the rear too little aero grip, you'll be asking too much of the mechanical grip and you won't be achieving the first thing that I just mentioned. Also, if you have some adjustment maxed out, it probably shouldn't be. Most of my really good setups have most of the adjustments right in the middle of the available range. Again, this all ties in with getting all the components doing equal amounts of work.
Before I scare you off with the next bit, just remember that this is actually really easy. Anyone can do this. To achieve the first step in setup, you need some telemetry.
Get MoTeC i2 Pro from here www.motec.com.au/i2/i2downloads/
My workspace so you don’t need to set anything up (just double click with motec installed)
Workspace
And a log file for you to load which I’ll use in this guide (or use your own)
log
I like to keep a separate workspace for each car, but you don’t have to. The reason I do this is so I can set the display ranges specific to the car. My workspace should be good for any GT3, but a prototype for instance might have some data out of range of the graphs. If you need to know how to adjust ranges for a very different car, just ask (or google it).
So, open up my workspace and then click the open file icon in the top left. Navigate to the log file and open it. Now all the graphs etc will be visible.
Now, I’m going to make this part as simple as possible. In reality it should only take 30 seconds of looking at motec before you are ready to go. Yes, there’s dozens of other things we could look at in the telemetry but in my opinion none more useful than this.
If you get overwhelmed by the next paragraph don’t worry, keep reading and I’ll break it down.
If you’ve never used motec before, there are simple beginners guides online for the basics, but essentially all you need to know to get started is how to access stuff. In the top left there is a drop down box that contains the different parts of the workspace. Most of them are left from default, the ones that you need to look at are Suspension and Tyres. Select suspension from the drop down box and you’ll have a bunch of pages open at the top, Susp Positions, Susp Velocities, etc. Since we’re trying to see if the suspension is working nicely, we’ll start with the histogram. Open the “Susp Histo” page.
When you look at the histogram, you generally want to look at the data from 1 lap. To do this, double click on whichever lap you want to look at on the bar at the top. Here you can see a visual representation of the time spent in bound/rebound at different suspension velocities. Sounds complex, but essentially all you need to know is that you want it to be symmetrical, ie same values for bump & rebound, but generally slightly more rebound than bump. In the example log file I gave, the histogram is quite close to symmetrical. It is not perfect, but I would say it’s “close enough”. So, symmetrical (or slightly rebound heavy) for bound/rebound, that handles each individual damper, but what else? We can also compare left to right to adjust for tracks that are heavy on one side. When a corner is more heavily loaded, the histogram will look flatter (think of it as “soft”) & also heavier on rebound, so from this you can see the loading on each side of the car. Again, you want it to be close to symmetrical, so if one side is flat and the other tall, stiffen the flat side and soften the tall side (use spring, arb & even adjustments to bump & rebound). Finally, the front to rear balance can also be looked at. Front to rear, however, doesn’t necessarily need to be symmetrical, it totally depends on the car. The Bentley for instance needs the rear to be softer by about 10% or so. This means the middle bar of the histogram will need to be 10% shorter to achieve the best balance. This is also affected by aero balance but as I said, you should be running balanced aero anyway. Just remember that while symmetry is best in the individual wheel and also side to side, front to rear is completely dependant on the car.
I think the best way to understand all this is to just do it. That means you’ll have to download a couple more things. First you need the plugin so you can generate your own log files. Get it from here: forum.studio-397.com/index.php?threads/damplugin-for-rf2.49363/
You need to configure the plugin to enable some extra channels, but to make it easier just grab this config file and put it in your rf2 folder under userdata\player, then open it up and change the log file location (if you forget and you don’t have a D drive you’re doomed):
Config
Thats it, now you’re ready to generate a log file. Pick a car you know decently, for those of you running the gt3s at the moment, the car you’ve been driving should be perfect to use for this. Pick a track that you know very well, preferably one with a good road surface, as opposed to a poorly made conversion with a perfectly smooth surface. The bumpiness of the surface will affect the shape of the histogram, and an excessively smooth surface will result in a very tall histogram that essentially will give you less information to go by. If you don’t have a realroad preset saved with lots of rubber down for the track you picked, let the ai run on it for a while and once it’s nice and rubbered in save the preset (or quit and set the preset to “autosave”). Also set the realroad timescale to static. You really don’t have to do this but it will stop you going backwards with setup but not noticing as the track grips up.
Before you jump in the car, load up your best setup for it. If that’s default, that’s fine. Then, you need to ask yourself: are you doing anything questionable already? Is your aero balanced? If you picked a car you know, you should know what is roughly balanced aero. For the Bentley, minimum rake and rear wing on 9 is balanced. Are you running excessive or no toe? Start with a little front toe out and a little more rear toe in. Did you leave some packer in the car? Set it to 50% of what is available. Is your diff working too hard? Preload very high? Soften it. Your springs and arb should not be max or min, but somewhere near the middle (if they aren’t it’s ok at this stage). Don’t bother touching dampers yet. Essentially a good option is to look at the available ranges in an adjustment front to rear (ie arb might be max 12 front and max 6 rear), and try to get each one even, so if the front has twice the range, you give 2 clicks front for 1 click rear. You could also just go out with your own setup and not touch it if you’re confident it’s good.
If you’re using the config file I provided, logging will be disabled by default. When you jump in the car you’ll hear a tone indicating logging is off. Press ctrl+m to enable logging and a different tone will play. It will stay enabled then until you restart the game, so you don’t have to do it every time.
Now put half a tank of fuel in and soft tyres, and try to do half a dozen clean laps. Keep going until you have at least one lap that you are happy with, with no mistakes. If you have excessive under/oversteer, and the track has majority high speed corners, stiffen the end that has more grip. If the track has majority slow corners, soften the end that needs grip. Do this with spring and arb.
When you manage to complete a clean lap (or a few preferably), save your setup and go and open motec. If you get sick of quitting to do this you could always set your log folder as a network share and access from another pc. Open the suspension section from the drop down box in the top left, and then open the “Susp Histo” page. Now, if you’re doing this all from the 1 pc, grab your phone and take a photo of the histogram page and fire rf2 back up to the track you were on. If you haven’t already set a static realroad preset, either do it or remember that the car will get better as the track grips up.
Before we start, untick “symmetrical” at the top of the tuning window. Strictly symmetrical setups are nearly always a major comprimise (ie slow). First, look at the histogram for the front left. We will focus on slow damping first. Is bump/rebound symmetrical or slightly rebound heavy (2% or so)? If there’s adjustments to make, first look at the other side to determine which direction to go. You want to adjust towards the other side. So, if the front left is taller on the slow bump side (bump heavy) and the front right histogram is flatter (softer) than the left, we know to adjust by softening. If the right was taller, we’d stiffen instead. To bring the bump down to match the rebound, soften it. The amount depends on the car. The Bentley for example has something like 1-2% adjustment per click, every car will be different. Now, while still looking at the front left, look at the fast damping. Again, is it symmetrical or slightly rebound heavy? If it’s too rebound heavy for example, and the front right is softer than the left, soften the rebound.
Repeat this for the front right, comparing against the left to see whether to stiffen or soften. If the bump/rebound is near symmetrical but left to right doesn’t match, soften or stiffen both bump & rebound at the same time. If the track loads one side of the car a lot more than the other, you may need to give the heavily loaded side a stiffer spring, or run a softer spring on the lazy side. In that case, knowing which to choose comes down to experience and being able to tell “this histo should be taller at this track given how I’m loading it through the corners” for example. Every corner of every track has an ideal spring rate, practice to find out which it is.
Repeat the last 2 steps for the rear wheels. At this stage, don’t make any adjustments to bring the front and rear closer to symmetry. We will find the right front to rear balance soon.
Drive the car (make sure you’re logging!) Depending on how much of a swing you had to take at it and how good your guesses where as to how much to adjust, the car will be either somewhat or day-and-night better. There may still be over/understeer, we have not yet made any attempt to address that (we are on step 1 still!) If you have high speed over/understeer, adjust the rear wing. It’s important that the aero is balanced now! Once again, try to do several fast, clean laps. If at this stage you struggle to lap cleanly because of general over/understeer, adjust with anti roll bars and springs, leaving the dampers alone. You may also need to adjust rear toe angle and diff settings if you get too much entry oversteer for your liking (increase preload, coast if available, give it slightly more rear toe in, or less if it’s high). Once you have logged a few fast, clean laps, save your setup, separately if you’re not sure if it improved or not, and go and open up motec again.
Go straight to the suspension histogram page, and compare to the last one. Either compare against a photo/screenshot or google how to compare data in motec. Comparing the two, you can see how much your adjustments affected the histogram. Take note of how much you think 1 click of damper adjustment will do. Compare front to rear, keeping in mind the overall balance of the car. Let’s say you think the aero is perfectly balanced and the rear is 5% softer than the front, and that gives slight oversteer. From that you can guess that it needs to be about 6 or 7% softer than the front. Things like this you can pick up on as you go and learn more about the car.
Again, if you’re using 1 pc, take a photo of the latest histogram page. While you’re at it, in the drop down box, switch to the “Tyres” section, and take a photo of the “Tyre Temps” page. We’ll use this information to adjust the camber. Now we will finish working on step 1 (kind of), and take a big, well informed swing at the second and third steps. The amount of time it took to get to this point, and the amount of time you’ll need to finish the setup, will reduce dramatically as you learn the car. I’m at the point with the Bentley now that I can tune it to a track and end up with a ridiculously fast car in less than half an hour.
Fire up rf2 again and load the track. Load your latest setup and remember to enable logging with ctrl+m before you start driving. Now, how close is the histogram to symmetrical? Repeat the steps above where you made the first adjustments based on the first histograms. If you are happy with a corner (remember, symmetrical bump/rebound or couple % rebound heavy, and relatively even height compared to the other side), leave it alone. If you took some big swings at it, you should go back to motec now and get yourself a fresh histogram photo before you carry on. If you only made small changes, you don’t really need to check now, unless you don’t know for sure what effect your adjustments will have. If in doubt, check!
With the histograms now balanced, we should have more or less achieved the first step of ensuring the components are working together. If you’ve done things like maxed out the dampers or arbs etc then you might still have some issues. We will address these now. If you’ve tried to be as sensible as possible and made your adjustments evenly over all the components, you shouldn’t have any issues now. If the balance of the car changes during the corner (loose in, tight mid corner etc etc), that’s a sure sign that you still have an issue with one component working too hard. Issues at this stage can be solved with the help of one of the setup flow charts floating around, if you need one. Just try to keep the balance in the damper adjustments otherwise you’ll go backwards. If you change much at this point, go back to motec and get a new histogram photo to go by for the next step. After adjusting, you may well need to make adjustments on damper symmetry again. If you have to make big adjustments to the dampers to achieve symmetry again, chances are you need to make your adjustments with arbs, spring, toe, diff etc instead of dampers. Changing springs and bars will always have some effect on the histogram.
We’re almost there. Have a look at the tyre temps page that you took a pic of (or on another pc), and look at the front left first. For each wheel, compare the center, inner, and outer temps. Ideally you want the center and outer temps to be equal during the highest load corners. Unless there’s really only one fast corner which you feel you can sacrifice, always aim to set an ideal camber value for the fastest corner. It’s much better to have the whole tyre on the ground for the fast stuff and half of it on the ground for the slow stuff, than to come into the fastest corner and lose it because the outside edge took all the load and cooked. In practice, with minimum tyre pressures (my advice is to run minimum), you may find it difficult to match the center and outer temps. If the inner and outer temps match and the center is slightly lower, this is fine, don’t spend too much time trying to get it better as it might not happen. If the outer temp is higher, give the wheel more camber. If the outer never reaches the temps of the inner/center, reduce camber. We could’ve done this to begin with but I find that a “sensible” camber angle is more than adequate up to the point of extracting all the grip. Don’t worry about the inner edge of the unloaded (inside) wheel getting hot, this is an unavoidable consequence of camber, unless of course you’re on an oval. Setting optimal camber angles is the first thing to do in step 3, which is to extract maximum grip from the car.
If you’re sitting there thinking “really? All this for a bloody game, I just want to drive!”, then realistically you’ve done enough. The car should now be predictable. It should react the same way at the same corner given the same inputs. At this point, you should be able to stop reacting to the car, and start predicting. You should be able to catch a slide before your body even has time to register it, simply because you can predict it. It’s ok for the car to oversteer a bit if you know exactly where and how much it’ll oversteer and exactly what it’ll do when you change your inputs to compensate. You don’t need to have great reaction times when you’re not reacting! Having said that, everyone has their own limits, and I only know me. I don’t know if this applies to you as much as it does to me.
If you’re now wondering, what about step 3, read on. Essentially all you’re doing when you adjust the suspenion is change the load placed on each wheel (springs, arb), and controlling the speed at which the load moves around (dampers). It really is that simple. So it is with maximising the grip. The tyre will have a maximum load that can be applied at any given moment. I’m not going to get into the maths of it or a proper explanation because I honestly can’t. I don’t need to know either. Essentially, the faster the corner, the more load you’re going to put on the loaded side. If you have too soft suspension the car will feel bad in a heavily loaded turn because too much weight transfer will happen. You will also end up with a “sloppy” unresponsive feel at high speed direction change. In a slow corner there will be significantly less weight transfer than a fast corner, so to extract the most grip from the tyre in a slow corner you’ll have to let the body roll more than you would in a fast corner. In the end, unless every corner is identical, it’s a compromise.
It’s pretty simple in practice to find the most grip, just takes a little time. Make sure you log everything so you can refer to the telemetry later. It’s invaluable to know what a good setup “looks like” in telemetry (it’s different for every car).
First, work out what direction to go in. If you’re looking for greater slow corner performance, go softer in adjustments. If it’s high speed corners that you want to take even quicker, start by trying stiffer.
My first move is usually to tweak spring rate. Higher or lower, depending on the track, 1 click at a time. Adjust all 4 corners of the car at the same time, trying to preserve balance (ie go by % of available range rather than actual values, if there’s 10 clicks front and 5 rear available, go 2 front 1 rear when adjusting). I rarely run full hard or full soft springs. Make an adjustment, if it’s better, adjust more. When it doesn’t help, go back one click. If it doesn’t help at all, don’t go backwards just yet, but keep in mind you might need to if the next adjustments don’t do the trick. When you think you have the ideal springs, move on to arbs. Use the same theory for the arbs, preserving balance. Next adjust slow damping evenly on bump and rebound. As a general rule, stiffer damping is faster, however it can certainly be overdone. Remember, you don’t want any single component doing too much work. Finally, play around with fast damping. Fast damping is very important to mid corner grip, not enough and you lose grip, too much and the car becomes twitchy and harsh over bumps.
Now it’s time to check the telemetry again. Do some clean laps with your latest setup and open up the log file. Check the histograms and tyre temps, if necessary take a photo again and tweak as before. If you tweak the dampers at this stage, you might want to determine which way to go based on the front to rear balance, rather than side to side symmetry. For example, if you still have slight oversteer and the front is rebound heavy, you might want to try increasing bump regardless of how the fronts compare on the histogram.
So, that’s step 3, is that it yet? Well, no. Honestly you could keep going for a very long time. There will be diminishing returns, though. If you think I’ve missed things with motec, yes I did. I haven’t explained how to check for bottoming out, I’m not touching rake, stuff like that. If I was using the Oreca as an example, I’d have mentioned those things. I do however want to stop writing at some point, and I think those things are easy to find info on online. Or you could ask here, I’m happy to answer any questions. There’s pages in my motec workspace that I also didn’t explain, again either ask here or google it.
If you wanted to keep going and find the last tenths, the next step is to literally tweak the other settings I haven’t mentioned much or at all, 1 click at a time and test for each adjustment. Yeah, it’ll take time. If you do get this far though, every single thing you do will teach you something about the car until you and the car become one. You won’t find tons of time at this point, but you’ll learn every nuance of the car, which can be incredibly satisfying. And the more you learn, the quicker you’ll be able to tailor the suspension to any given track.
So if you managed to read this all, well done and thank you. In the end if there’s less DNFs I’ll be satisfied, if someone gives me a race I’ll be even happier. Either way, I can now stop internally debating whether or not to write this guide. I hope this information helps you enjoy the latest cars as much as I do. If you have any questions please ask, I’m happy to help if I can.
...excluding speeding in pit lane lol 
