i'm working on a setup for the upcoming UF1 fern bay race and i figured i'd give it a run through VHPA to see what it thinks...

no matter what i do though, it seems i can't please the understeer/oversteer bars.

really what i'm looking for though, is to solve an issue with braking... when i was doing some offline runs and i noticed that when i braked hard, the car would sometimes lose control... especially in these two corners. at first i thought it was the brakes, but i tried a bunch of pressure and balance settings, none of which seemed to help.

i realize the suspension isn't the same as the UFR, but the UF1 handles like crap compared to the UFR. i can't really make the same comparison between the XFG/XFR.

i attached the setup too, if you want to look at it... maybe i just suck at driving this car.

tips, suggestions?

thanks

I tried your set and your rear suspension is definely the problem. Bump the stiffness to the max and your setup work wonders.

thanks, i'll give that a try tomorrow when i wake up. (night shifts :woohoo

Don’t take those graphs literally. They are not there to show you the perfect handling setup… The colored bars are there just for reference, showing roughly how each change affects handling.
A red bar which indicates oversteer, doesn’t mean necessarily that the car will overseer at that state but more like that there will be more oversteer - less understeer, as the bar “climbs”. (Till a point, exaggerating with the values does not bring the result VHPA predicts)

Quote from bunder9999 :

really what i'm looking for though, is to solve an issue with braking... when i was doing some offline runs and i noticed that when i braked hard, the car would sometimes lose control... especially in these two corners. at first i thought it was the brakes, but i tried a bunch of pressure and balance settings, none of which seemed to help.

Thats more like it. You have to adjust the setup acording to what you see.
First of all in situations like that you use the force view to see which tire loses traction first and try to figure out what is happening.

Your brake balance (60%) is way back for a car with that weight distribution.
That makes you to keep the brake max force really low... this is bad for league racing because you are always in danger rear ending someone with stronger brakes than you.

The other major mistake is the suspension travel you have. It might not bottoms out doing jumps in garage. But you have to be sure that this isn't happening at any crutial part of the track... or else everything you so carefully tuned in the dampers or the springs goes to the trash... running on the bump stops.

Also keep in mind that because rear tires don't get stressed really that much in FWD cars, you can go silly with them, seeking rear end stability while not wanting to reduce the front end grip to gain that.
So lower the pressures and give some more negative camber there...

And lastly, because UF1 doesn't have ARBs it's good to go with stiffer springs. (then you can lower your UF1 a bit more).
+because of the front open diff you have to work with a lot harder springs at the back to keep the front inside tire to the ground.

Anyway back to the basic problem.
I have attached 4 screenshots. The first 2 show your setup and the other 2 show your setup only with my fixes in ride height and brake balance. (Also with higher brake force so you have to get used to it a bit if you want to gain advantage while braking)

i gave it a try and i didn't like it (something didn't feel right)... however, i've come up with this happy medium which i kinda like.

thanks for all the suggestions, and more are welcome.

To further elaborate on the balance bars in VHPA, if you are looking at the suspension ones, then they are tell you the springs or dampers influence on either steady state or transient handling. The tyre balance bars are supposed to show you the absolute balance (in steady state conditions), but the tyre modelling in VHPA is far short of LFS to be accurate. The current lack of suspension kinematics being modelled is another important factor as to why VHPA is inaccurate in this regard.

Since you're mentioning the effect of tyre pressures on balancing, how is that supposed to work?

When I was working on my XRG set, keeping constant the absolute difference was more neutral than working with a fixed ratio between front and rear, but I still had the feeling it affected the balance somewhat.

The effect of tyre pressure on balance is quite complex and certainly non-linear, hence neither constant difference nor constant ratio and quite perfect. From my own experience, I would agree that constant difference is closer to the mark.

To explain why:
* Lower tyre pressures make the tyres vertically softer, so they deform more, increasing the length of the contact patch, thus giving slightly more longitudinal and lateral grip
* These softer tyres also deform under lateral loads, creating adverse camber, reducing lateral grip (to some extent, more static camber can counteract this effect)
* Softer tyres also create more heat, meaning the tyres are running on a different point of the temperature-grip curve - this could cause grip could go in either direction
* Less pressure will also reduce cornering and braking stiffnesses somewhat, so your peak slip angles and ratios will increase, the former of which can change cornering feel, leading to a change in under or oversteer feel even, if there is no change in maximum grip.

There are likely more effects too, nobody knows exactly how detailed the tyre modelling is in LFS. I can say for sure that it's a lot more detailed than VHPA though.

Hi Blunder.

I've just taken the latest set for a spin and I can drive a 3.35 exactly with it.

That is a full 7/8 seconds than the standard setups that are on setupgrid for this combo.

The car is too high, too soft and wrongly geared mate.

Split 1 should be in the 1min 12's/1min 13's I got 1min 14 high.

The third split section is only 20 seconds long and my split was 22 seconds with it.

I like what you are doing - but i would seriously look at forgetting about this setup method on the base set that you have used and see if you can apply it to a fundamentally faster setup in the first place.

HTH

Dru

Quote from Dru :

That is a full 7/8 seconds than the standard setups that are on setupgrid for this combo.

i don't see any on setupgrid.

Quote from bunder9999 :

i don't see any on setupgrid.

just use the fe3 sets

I find these setups work well for fe4.