I don't know much about setups but could you try changing downforce?

Quote from Stigpt :

In that case, you cant avoid the weight going to the rear outside wheel. But you CAN control how FAST it goes there. If you can make it go to the rear-outside a bit slower, it takes more time for that tyre to get too much load and start sliding.
Hence, if you have the rear slipping out when you are accelerating out of turns, if you make the rear suspension/anti-rollbar SOFTER, it reduces oversteer.
Because this makes the rear springs compress more, thus absorbing more weight, thus making the load on the tire take longer.
OR make the front stiffer, which has the same effect.
How to choose between softer rear or stiffer front?
If the track is bumpy, you'll want soft-ish suspension, so you dont bounce off the track. That means a stiffer front might not be a good idea.
On the other hand, your rear might already be VERY soft. in that case.. making it even softer is not a good idea.


HOWEVER, for you, I know what your problem is jarmenia.
OWRL + FOX + Blackwood.
Try changing your driving. Put the foot down a tad more slowly (respectfully, as if you were stepping on a lady's foot), AND (and this is quite an important bit) REMOVE STEERING LOCK.

Meaning as you press the accelerator, straighten your wheel.
Your rear will tend to slid out, but you straighten your wheel and it balances itself out. Ideally, you'd be making the turns with the wheel perfectly straight on the exits, and playing the rear sliding do the turn for you.

Do try it. Go to blackwood, drive the fox down the backstraight, then on the turn at the end of the backstraight, enter in 3rd@ 120kph, and just before the apex, (gently) accelerate till your foot is down. Foot should be down just as you touch the apex. as you put your foot down, swallow a brave pill and slowly straighten your wheel. When you have your foot down, your wheel shouldnt be more than a couple degrees to the right.

I'm not actually loose as blackwood (actually tight, but I'm working through a setup guide so its getting better. What I gave was just a example I was using to try to illustrate what I wanted to know. You did answer my question though I think. Its not that you don't want the weight to transfer but want to control how fast it transfers.

Thanks for the info though.

Quote from tristancliffe :

^^ Actually, track approaching infinity (not that it would fit on many tracks)

There is no such thing as a perfect world. You can have equal force on each tyre statically, but accelerations will change them. Weight distributions are rarely 50:50, and each end does different things (front steers, rear powers and steers (sort of) on all proper racing cars)... So then you have different sized tyres to cope with the different demands. They will require different camber curves (rears don't like as much camber as narrower fronts). One end is lighter, so will have a different roll resistance to the heavier end, and different static springs. Different unsprung weights will change that too, and the damping in bump and rebound, fast and slow. CoGs are always higher than you want, and track is never enough.

And then you throw in a driver, who may or may not be as talented as the next guy, and will demand different things from the car.

Then you put the above on different tracks

The ONLY gauge of a good setup is the stopwatch. If the stopwatch says it's slow (compared to where you want) then you ask the driver and look at the data what is wrong........

Motor Racing - Simple It Ain't.

The reason I asked the question the way I did was to gain an understanding of what you want the car to do. As a example, you are loose going out of a turn when applying l throttle. This means the weight is moving to the back of the car (acceleration) and to the outside of the car (the rotation of the curve). Since the car is loose, it seems you don't want so much of the weight going to the back outside of the car, so where do you want it to go? That is basically what determines the changes you make right?

I guess I didn't phrase my question right. Of course the goal is to have the fastest car, but to do this requires a setup that handles well. In a perfect world what would this be? Equal force on all tires? No movement in the weight distribution? I'm looking more at the mechanical goal than the speed goal.

When setting up springs, dampers, roll bars, and the other things what is the end goal? Are you trying to get the weight to stay evenly distributed among all four tires in all circumstances or do you want the weight to rotate and just control the rate at which it rotates?

Of course the perfect setup doesn't exist as its always a balance but I'm just trying to get a visual picture of what I want the weight to do before I start tweaking some things.

Quote from KSheppard :

I'd be willing to make up an excel sheet we could all use if folks want to give me some input as to what they are thinking/want to see. BTW I've asked Bob to include a .csv export to the VHPA so I could integrate his data with the spreadsheet but I don't know for sure yet if it'll fly.

I like the idea of adding a comments section to the setup screen & while we're adding things I'd like a field added for Setup Best Time (wrong thread I know). Really I think the whole concept of how setups are saved, stored & retrieved needs to be re-worked.

Those are all good ideas. Being a noob I can't really tell you what I want to keep track of. I was kind of hoping someone might tell me

Quote from KSheppard :

Ye that's what I do as well (I've been meaning to get a notebook) I name mine: TRACK CODE-PB TIME (* for testing)....if I did 2:21:18 at Kyoto GP I'll drop the 2min. and name the set: KY3-21.18 then copy it to test and name the copy KY3-21.18*, make a little change, test and if I dont like it put it back.

This really dosen't work for different setup combinations though, I tried to print a spread sheet but it was a bit to cumbersome if someone else has a form or something I'd be intersted in sharing

Yeah in my (rather limited) experience it seems that it takes more than one change to adjust a setup. The first change may make the car slower, the second a little faster, and the third much faster. That makes the make a save file for each change a little bit more difficult. I too would be interested in seeing if someone else has a form they use.

When you've got a setup that's pretty decent, how do you track any changes you make to a setup? I imagine most people use a notebook. What do you write in it? If you don't use a notebook what do you use?

Quote from bbman :

It's more the experience I got from tweaking setups than knowledge about what happens, but I'll try to explain: as you steer through the hairpin and enter the chicane, all the load is on the left side... If you then turn in the opposite direction, the weight will stay longer on the left side as it'll take longer to decompress, giving you less load on the right side, thus the car will initially understeer... If you don't get that, don't worry, it's fine...

The understeer on the second part of the chicane is exactly what I am getting. So what would you think the best way to correct that is without causing entry problems. I'm really happy with the way the entry to the chicane feels.

Quote from Woz :

If you set to 720 in both CP and LFS and then set wheel comp to 1 in LFS then LFS only responds when you turn in the range the car has.

So if the car had 360deg then even though the wheel is 720 it will only respond to 180 in either direction and FFB will stop you going past the ends. Its not a hard limit so you can force past the limit but I never notice the difference between the hard (cp set) and soft (ffb set) end stops.

Thanks for the tip, I'll give that a shot when I get home.

Quote from bbman :

So you basically dynamically lowered your car by not letting the front get up while the rear still compresses like before...


What it will affect for sure is turning into the second corner in a chicane or s-bends...

Can you elaborate more on this? I'm having issues with the chicane at Blackwood GP. I was very loose going into the first turn into the chicane. That's fixed but I'm still not as fast as I think I should be through there.

Quote from bbman :

Depends on what you want to do... The important thing to know is what you feel is wrong/off: If I want the front to decompress slower, I increase front rebound, if I feel the weight shifts too slow initially at the rear, I decrease rear bump... It all depends on the type of corners you do, if it's bumpy, if you're kerbing and so on...

Bob wrote an application where you can load your setups and see the effects of your changes statistically (and graphically): http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=16961

Yeah I've played with it, its a bit over my head yet so usually what I do is make changes in the car until it feels better, then look at the old and new setup in the analyzer to see what the end result is.

The example I was talking about was that my car was lose under throttle at corner exit. The problem is the mass of the car is basically moving to the rear to fast when I got on the throttle. To solve the problem I could either decrease rebound damp on the front or increase compression damp in the rear. I decreased rebound damp instead of increasing compression and it worked but I just arbitrarily picked one since it seemed both would do the same thing. There's got to be a better way to choose than flipping a coin.

I've started getting into tweaking the default setups for my needs. Some things like springs and ARB seem easy. Change springs if you want softer or ARB if you are just adjusting tight / lose. But for things like dampening if you can increase the front rebound or decrease the back compession which do you do and how do you choose?

Quote from The Moose :

You really need to get online to learn this. Passing the AI wil teach you nothing.

It's time to get stuck in!

Yeah, there was no one running the track / car combo I've been working, otherwise I would have been online.

Well I broke 1:12.00 today! I ran a 1:11.84, just 0.01 seconds off my goal. Now I need to start learning how to pass so I don't wreck people on line.

Quote from Woz :

Set wheel to 720, lfs to 720 and wheel comp to 1. Wheel turn will be 1:1 in all cars then

Get DX Tweak and adjust the clutch pedal so bite is only over part of the travel otherwise 100% travel is the same as the tiny part of the travel that normally does anything on a real clutch. Stops miss-shifts and makes it feel more natural

Have fun.

I just got mine yesterday and found setting it to 270 was perfect for open wheel racing. Anything more and I had to turn the wheel to much.

Well I decided to get the G5 based on these comments, not for the 900 degrees but for the feel.

Thanks for the info guys.

If anyone is insterested in looking at my replay here it is. I set a PB on lap three of 1:13:00 and lap 5I set of a PB of 1:12:85. I'll take any comments you've got.

Well I made more progress working on the fox at BL GP tonight. I went online and set several personal bests topping out at 1:12.380 (Even qualified second out of three drivers once). So now my PB is just under my goal of 1:11.82 which is what my AI guy was running the other day when I was watching him. I wasn't consistently in the 1:12's today but I was consistently in the 1:13's which is about a 1 second improvement from yesterday where I was in the 1:14 - 1:15's.

The big improvement from today was cutting almost a second off my first sector time (the chicane). I was running on average a 23:80 first segment today, which is 0:54 seconds off the AI's time. That allowed me to carry more speed down the straight. I still need to knock some more time off the first sector, but I think tomorrow I'll work on the second sector as I'm loosing a bunch of time in that turn right after the straight. It looks like I'm getting too slow, but if I go in much faster the tires start screaming which won't work for a race of more than about 6 or 7 laps I think. I'll have to look at the analyzer to see where exactly the problem is.

I also took some of your guys advice and watched a few races on a server. They were running 1:12 and change so I'm thinking they may not even have beaten my AI which makes me think setting that as my first goal isn't such a bad idea after all.

Small steps... and eventually I'll get there. Thanks for all the tips guys, its working!

Oh yeah, and if people are willing, I'd like to post replays as I learn the track with my own analysis. The intent to be I hope people can point out where my analysis is wrong and right so I can learn to self diagnose most problems.

Quote from Gnomie :

You sound like a dedicated guy, jarmenia. With that attitude you'll get far. Keep it up!

Regarding setups: I agree that setups from setupfield and such are generally very on the limit, and usually designed to last only ~5 laps. Not very useful. I recommend searching the servers on lfsworld and going online on one where people are driving the car/combo you're interested in, and asking kindly if someone could share with you a race setup. (you can specify that you're looking for a stable setup rather than a super-fast one) They probably will.

Then you use that as a base for further tweaking. Normally stuff like camber and tyre pressure are pretty intuitive if you press F9 while driving and take a look at the pressure and temperature indicators. Brakes might also need adjusting. But for most people, the fine tuning of suspension and dampers and such is just too complex. (at least for me.. :shy

Thanks Gnomie. I'm thinking of taking part in http://www.owrl.de/news.php. The two week schedule give me something to work towards as I try and learn the track. For the first season, my goal will just be to finish each race and get as good as I can driving the default setups with the only things I'll change being gearing, fuel level, tire pressure, and tire type. Once I get through a full season, I should have enough Seat time that I can start asking about tweaking setups ect. I realise driving the default set that I have no chance of winning but my first season will be for the sole purpose of experience.

Once season two starts, I hope to use that experience to finish better and better. As long as people are willing to answer my noob questions (and it seems the are), I think I'll be ok. I was able to master Falcon 4, so LFS should be no problem if I put the time in.

Quote from gezmoor :

Yes you should be able to get to within a second or two of an AI by watching how they drive, (assuming both are using the same sets). But to surpass them, (which you need to do if you ever want to be competitive on line), you will need to watch on line drivers. Like I said you'll be surprised at how differently they are driving. Why waste your time learning a slow driving technique, when you can be learning the fast one from the beggining?

From the WR I've watched, they are on the absolute cutting edge and if I try and emulate what they are doing I generally don't make it through one lap. The same was happening with me when I tried to emulate the AI, but I've slowly gotten better. My theory is, that as I get better at keeping up with the AI, I will learn to feel where I can push the car a little more and then overtake the AI.

Quote :

Sets are not the magic bullet you seem to think they are. The pace of the fastest guys is 90% driving and 10% set on a lot of the cars. So using someones set is not cheating in any way. It just ensures that you can emulate their driving style and not run too deep because you've locked up the wheels for example or spin out because they're using a higher gear ratio in the same gear than your set. Chances are they're using a set that was given to them anyway.

I don't think the sets are a magic bullet in anyway shape or form, but from what I've read, for a driver to truly get the most out of the car, they need to have their set built to the way they drive. I tried downloading a set for the FBM and it was so lose I couldn't keep it stable around the first two turns. Now a lot of that is my driving style of course as I'm still learning, but if I can't make it around the track in as set what good will the fact its a WR set do for me?

Quote :

Also, I wouldn't worry about any inability to be able to produce a set. Real racing drivers rarely have any clue about how cars should be set up, that's what the team techs for. Schumey was renound exactly because he was one of those rare drivers that really could give useful feedback to the tech guys to make the car faster.

This kind of goes with what I was saying above. I know most real life racers don't know how a car should be setup. But I would like to learn, to me that's half the fun of racing. Add to the fact that with that knowledge I can make a car better suit the way I drive and it seems like knowing how to setup a car can be a big help. I don't want to depend on getting a set from someone else just so I can be competitive.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I don't want to just win a race, I want to win many races and to do that I think I need to know both parts of the equation. The first is how to drive, and the second is how the setup works. To use an analogy, great cooks don't just use other peoples recipes, they create their own, even if they do learn from others first.

LFS username: jarmenia
LFS racername: John Armenia
Age: 30
Location: Gainesville, FL
Controller: Black Momo
Date of first LFS race: 2001?
Racing frequency: almost none. Trying to get back into it to learn to do it right
Normal race times: Evening

I really enjoy driving the open wheel cars. As I lurk around here I see that most people don't like wheels that have less that 900 degrees in them. Is this something I need for open wheel racing?

I realize real world cars have 900 degrees or more in the steering wheel but for racing LFS what does that extra maneuverability get you? Even when driving my real world car I don't tend to turn the wheel that much unless I'm parking. I'd probably rip the wheel off my desk if I tried cranking it 900 degrees as fast as I could.

Quote from gezmoor :

Get on line - pronto !! The best and quickest way to get better as a complete beginner is to sit in car with a fast guy on-line and see what they do, (make sure you have "show pedals" set to on). You'll probably be amazed at some of the things they are/aren't doing that you are/aren't. Oh and of course some of the lines they take will certainly surprise you if you are 7 seconds off the AIs lap times.

Note - just make sure you sit in with a driver who is using the same controller as you and preferably using the same set. You can always ask them to try their set, most people are pretty generous in this way.

Watching others is the same idea as what I've been doing with the AI using the default setup. Even if the AI does take corners too slow, I would think since I'm 5 seconds behding them I should at least be able to match them. Is that correct?

Asking for and using someone else's setup feel like a cheat to me as I wouldn't really learn much. I'd rather learn and understand why I am slower and then develop my own setup based on what I have learned. It may take me longer to be competitive at first, but in the long run it should help me improve at new courses / new cars much quicker.