GRAND PRIX 2 ARTICLE OF THE MONTH March 1998 Each month I will try and provide you with the best of either technical or "how to" articles that can be found or stolen (just kidding) from the web. This months article is by Y. F. Hung. It was sent to me by a friend a while ago with no return e-mail address. So I didn't know how to contact the author. Past Articles February 98 How to setup a car by Y. F. Hung
The secret to the fastest lap in any circuit is how the car is setup. With a setup that suits the driver's style, fast lap times comes easy. However, many people get put off by the complexity of the setup screen used by GP2 whether it is in level 1 or 2.
For example, one of my friends never goes beyond changing the wings, gear ratio and brake setting and he always wonders why I’m constantly breaking lap records while he is few seconds over it. When I ask why he doesn't set the car properly, he says it's too complex and he doesn't understand any of it.
Here, I am trying to help all the people to have a better understanding in how the car would react to different elements of the setup screen. There will be no equations, just plain English explanations on what happens when one changes something.
There is a logical way to set a car up and it is very similar to the way real F1 teams work. The best way to start setting up for a particular circuit is from a "base" setup. This can be the default setup provided by the game for all the circuits or one that the player set. The important thing here is that this setup is what all changes are compared with.
Wings:
Due to the design of the current F1 car, the front and the rear wings work independently. Therefore, only the rear wing setting determines the top speed of the car while the front wing determines the balance. So the first thing to do is to have an idea of the top speed for the circuit. Let's use Monza as a example. The top speed here will be about 203-205 mph and therefore the rear wing has to be as low as possible, i.e. setting of 1. The gear ratio will also be adjusted so that the car won't run out of steam before reaching top speed. Once the rear wing has been set, the next item to adjust is the front wing. The situation here is more complicated than the rear wing because the mechanical setup affects how the car will handle as well as the front wing. So the way to approach this is to alter the front wing only and do a few laps to have a feel of the effect it caused.
Break ratio:
This is possible the easiest thing to setup. Just brake at the end of the long straight and see whether there is any wheel locking. If the wheels lock up early into the braking zone, put more braking force on the back wheels. If the lock up happens late, the ratio is probably ideal since a slight lift on the brakes will eliminate the lock up with maximum braking force applied to the wheels.
Gear Ratios:
This is another easy one. Once the top gear ratio has been set along with the rear wing, the other one is the 1st gear. The technique I used to determine the 1st gear ratio is when the car reaches the slowest corner of the circuit, the rev count will have 2 green lights on. This means that the engine is kept in the power band and the car can accelerate out of the corner faster. After those 2 gears, the rest of the gears should be evenly space out with the top gears having a slightly closer ratio than the lower ones. This is because it is much harder to accelerate at high speed than low speed and therefore a closer ratio is needed.
Spring rate:
Now we get into a more difficult area. The stiffness of all 4 springs are determined by how bumpy the circuit is. For a bumpy circuit like Monaco or Interlagos, a softer spring rate on all wheels than the default setting is needed. Softer springs also make the car easier to ground itself at high speed, so an increase in ride height may be needed as well. Soft springs increase overall grip as well, especially in low to medium speed corners. The trade off, as I mention earlier, is grounding but also less responsiveness to change of direction. The difference between the front and the back springs rate determines how the car handles in the corners. The default rate, i.e. front 1300lbs, rear 900lbs, tends to understeer. So if you want the car to be more responsive, either increase the rear spring rate or decrease the front. These changes affect the overall handling, i.e. both fast and slow corners.
The key to faster lap time is testing, many miles of testing. It is very important that every time you change something, you go out and test the effect. But don't change too many things at the same time as this will only confuse which changes actually affect the car handling. So change one, or at the most two things at a time.
