Many thanks to Mark Roberts for his advice. Here, I'll post his exact
words... (You should have posted this, Mark!!) :-)
...
The two [ride height and suspension travel] are actually quite different.
Ride height shows how far off of the ground the bottom of the _car_ is. This
doesn`t take the plank into account. Therefore you need to get this set so
that it is as close to 10mm at the lowest point on the circuit (usually when
you are braking from high speed to enter a slow corner such as the hair pin at
Magny Cours, or steering through an extremely quick corner such as Curva
Grande at Monza). [The plank thickness is ~10mm.]
Suspension travel shows how much movement is left in the suspension before the
car goes onto the bump ***s [packers]. If the graph is at 5mm that means
that the suspension can compress another 5mm before it hits the bump ***s,
if it is at the bottom of the graph the car is on the bump ***s. You
should be looking at suspension travel for setting the depths of your packers.
[Set packers so that your replay data will show 0mm suspension travel on the
fast straights.]
If springs are set softly then the chassis of the car will roll and pitch a
lot. This means that generally the ride height would need to be set higher
than with stiffer springs because as one part of the car dives down it can rub
the plank. It also means that the handling of the car becomes less responsive
to changes in direction and coming off the throttle and onto brakes etc
because the chassis takes longer to get back to its neutral state. The
advantage is that you get better grip as the tyres stay on the road more over
the bumps. Also you get less tyre wear under braking and steering because it
is the springs that tend to take the load rather than the tyres.
So for springs: soft = better grip, less tyre wear, higher ride height, less
responsive chassis Stiff = responsive chassis, lower ride height, poor grip,
increased tyre wear.
I`m not very sure about dampers, but they seem to be very similar to springs
in the sort of results you get from them.
Anti roll bars are also very similar in operation. The stiffer you set them
the more they resist chassis movement. So once again stiffer settings mean
better response at the expense of grip and tyre wear. As the name suggests
they only affect roll and so their settings shouldn`t make any difference
under braking/acceleration.
Changing the brake balance will alter how the brakes are applied to each of
the four wheels. If you are having a problem with locking the fronts under
heavy braking then move the brake balance further to the rear, so brakes are
applied to the rear wheels before they are to the front. This will also
create more oversteer at turn in (if you are still on the brakes). Similarly
if you move brake balance to the front you tend to get understeer at turn in.
My general advice is to only change on thing at a time, then go out and drive
some laps, plus look at your telemetry to see how the change has affected the
car. Then if it has done what you wanted it to you could try increasing the
change. If it hasn`t worked then you could try changing the setting in the
opposite direction (for example if you made the front springs softer and found
it didn`t help try making them stiffer than they were originally). Also when a
ssessing changes you need to use tyres that are in similar conditions and
similar fuel loads as these can greatly alter the handling of the car. This
takes along time, but overall you tend to get better results.
That`s about as far as my knowledge goes but if you haven`t already done so I
would recommend "The Pits" web site. One of the sections (I think it is The
Racing Line) has some really good lessons about the mechanics/physics of
racing cars and how to set them up. Unfortunately this is geared more towards
the Papyrus sims, but I still found it helpful. If I ever find any good
information about the 4-way damper system I`ll let you know.
I hope this has been of help.
Mark
The location for The Pits is "[link lost in import]
