Had to try it...













Tartan design courtesy of https://www.solm.co.uk

 

Yes.

 

Probably the alignment is going to affect mechanical grip the most. Can’t adjust that from the wheel. 😂
Springs are primarily there to hold up the car and keep it from bottoming out. Provided that you have enough spring rate to support the weight of the car and prevent excessive rolling over, you’re probably better off adjusting your sway bars, dampers, diff to increase tire grip.
The tire pressures do work as a spring, but more importantly the pressure affects the contact patch as well as wall stiffness / rolling over of the tire.
Sway bars affect the handling balance during lateral transitions and affect the loading and unloading of the tires. Sway bar adjustment should be way above changing your TC settings for modification of car balance. If you are adjusting your TC to compensate for improper sway bars balance then you are not maximizing the tire grip. Maximizing the tire grip/contact patch is critical, handling balance is better determined by the dampers, swaybars, springs.
You’re also better off adjusting the diff before the TC because TC is going to cut engine power or add braking to control the car, whereas the diff adjustments use full power, but just change the way that power is delivered.

 

i was assuming everyone was already happy with their camber/alignment.....camber adjustments are not done in-car.....caster either. Yes the diff makes a huge difference when powering out of a corner.

 

This is inaccurate. Changes to the damper settings are in fact changing effective wheel rates during weight transfer (which is when it matters for road courses). That's actually the very thing (slow) damper adjustments do. They are not there to make the track feel less bumpy. They dictate the distribution of forces during weight transitions.

When you start designing a car from a clean sheet, getting spring rates wrong will screw up everything, and it will be impossible to correct via other means. But if spring rates are already reasonable, it's not the primary go-to for fine-tuning the car's handling - it's too blunt of a tool. Shocks and antiroll bars are the ways to fine-tune spring behavior - they allow for changing effective wheel rate during weight transfer, separating compression and rebound force, and latitudinal vs. longitudinal weight transfer. With springs, you can't say - "I want harder springs for compression but softer springs for rebound, and I want the rear springs to be softer for front-rear weight transfer than for left-right weight transfer" - but it's easy to accomplish all this with antiroll bars and dampers.

Also, using tire pressures to adjust spring rates is just wrong. Tire pressure should be optimized for content patch and in some cases temperature. If you need a stiffer wheel rate, you don't compromise traction by overinflating tires - there are many better ways to get there.

In race cars, I adjust dampers from track to track, and antiroll bars even for weather changes at the same track (and if I had cockpit adjustable antiroll bars, I'd adjust them during a race to compensate for changing fuel load and tire conditions). Spring changes are usually needed only for wet races, and at non-pro level most don't bother doing it even for rain.

 

you basically agreed with what i said....spring rates are first, dampers are fine tuning, or last. And regarding tire pressures, I assumed everyone already knew that the contact patch is already taken into account. Of course none of these matter if you dont know the line, apex, or how to drive. A weekend warrior might notice the car feels different when he maxes out his shocks, but that doesnt necessarily translate into faster lap times or higher apex speed.

 

You can work up to it. Ultimately, it's just more grip in faster corners, and we know what to do with more grip - go faster. Outside of braking, the change of aero grip is not that significant while going through each individual corner and is safe to ignore initially. Just drive as if you have the same grip at trackout as it was at apex, and you will leave less than 1% on the table. But eventually, the brain will adapt to progressing to full throttle faster and opening the steering wheel slower to fully utilize the increasing available grip at the track-out (faster) portion of the turn. Braking is the hardest one, but this car has ABS which will work as training wheels - it will release the brake pressure for you as aero grip fades through the braking zone if you forget to do it proactively. So most people will be just fine and almost everyone will be faster right away, but it will take more skill and ***** to get that last 1%-2% than for non-aero cars.

The aero is also not as direction-sensitive as LMP or formula cars, which require very straight airflow from front to back to work well, so the loss of aero while sliding will not be as dramatic, but it will still happen when going full sideways or spinning. There is zero aero when spinning, and lift when going backward! So slides and spins will be more abrupt, but only slightly. The offs will be at higher speeds due to more grip, which would be my biggest concern.

 

I put together a quick google sheet that I will be keeping rudimentary data in. I make these kinds of changes often in my simulator and if there is one thing I learned over the years is change 1 thing at a time lol. I don't have columns for tire temps but not sure I want to keep track of that, mostly just lazy there.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

 

Yes its 525PS - typo on my part. Corrected in original post and noted in reason for editing

 

Amazing work as always-stunning

 

Anyone think we will see US allocations drop in October?

 

Im told beginning September.

 

Sounds like a re-release Hopefully more info to come after that.

 

I just assumed October because last year in October there was a pretty large allocated batch of GT cars. If it’s September that would be amazing and the first deliveries would probably take place in Spring.

 

FAL is 7kg