Jiminee
02-10-2008, 07:25 PM
Evening guys
After my little spin in heat 2 I was able to race wheel to wheel with some of you for the first time and it was good climbing up through the field but I wanted to pass on a set up tip after seeing a few things last night.
A lot of you were locking the front brakes of the Porsche two or three times a lap, which makes it very difficult to be consistent and can’t be doing much good for your tyres either. There are a number of reasons why this might be happening, I know we have a lot of guys here new to sim-racing who are using keyboards or joypads as a controller, I have never done this but I know a lot of people do so maybe investigating (at racesimcentral when it gets back is probably the best place) for how to adjust sensitivites and such to make things a lot smoother would help.
The default setup for the car last night did have a strong front brake bias, which means a higher percentage of the braking power goes to the front wheels. Actually a lot of the default setups in this mod are a bit pants and while it takes a fair amount of time to understand all of the setup variables this one is pretty simple.
To set brake bias requires driving a few laps and seeing if the brakes are locking and then adjusting to reduce this happening, rFactor does not simulate flat spotting a tyre (LFS does and nKPro may as well) so its not super critical if you lock the odd brake but regularly locking either the front or rears (usually its only possible to lock all 4 in a panic stop in rF) increases your braking distances and makes it hard to be consistent.
So using last night as an example: With only the fuel tank at the front in a 911 there is very little load over the front wheels and with the approach to turn 1 being angled (its actually one of the trickiest slow corners in the sim I think) it was very easy to end up with very little load on the right front making it very easy to lock. To fix it we put more of the braking power on the rear wheels, normally this doesn’t have to be a big change but I made a fairly significant change here from the default. Be careful not to go too far though as locking the rears is much harder to gather back up, especially in a Porsche but if you have put it as far back as you feel comfortable and are still locking the fronts try reducing the braking power to 90 or even 85% which should make things much smoother.
Also, some brake modulation and a blip of the throttle on down changes will help, just jumping on the anchors at the start of the tyre marks will land you in a world of hurt.
There are numerous setup guides around to read but don’t underestimate the helpfulness of just jumping into a practise session by your self and changing a setup variable to one extreme and driving a few laps, then setting it to the other extreme and trying again. Don’t change anything else and then just see what effect it has. Its likely the car will be undrivable but it’s the best way to get an understanding in your head of what each adjustment can do.
After my little spin in heat 2 I was able to race wheel to wheel with some of you for the first time and it was good climbing up through the field but I wanted to pass on a set up tip after seeing a few things last night.
A lot of you were locking the front brakes of the Porsche two or three times a lap, which makes it very difficult to be consistent and can’t be doing much good for your tyres either. There are a number of reasons why this might be happening, I know we have a lot of guys here new to sim-racing who are using keyboards or joypads as a controller, I have never done this but I know a lot of people do so maybe investigating (at racesimcentral when it gets back is probably the best place) for how to adjust sensitivites and such to make things a lot smoother would help.
The default setup for the car last night did have a strong front brake bias, which means a higher percentage of the braking power goes to the front wheels. Actually a lot of the default setups in this mod are a bit pants and while it takes a fair amount of time to understand all of the setup variables this one is pretty simple.
To set brake bias requires driving a few laps and seeing if the brakes are locking and then adjusting to reduce this happening, rFactor does not simulate flat spotting a tyre (LFS does and nKPro may as well) so its not super critical if you lock the odd brake but regularly locking either the front or rears (usually its only possible to lock all 4 in a panic stop in rF) increases your braking distances and makes it hard to be consistent.
So using last night as an example: With only the fuel tank at the front in a 911 there is very little load over the front wheels and with the approach to turn 1 being angled (its actually one of the trickiest slow corners in the sim I think) it was very easy to end up with very little load on the right front making it very easy to lock. To fix it we put more of the braking power on the rear wheels, normally this doesn’t have to be a big change but I made a fairly significant change here from the default. Be careful not to go too far though as locking the rears is much harder to gather back up, especially in a Porsche but if you have put it as far back as you feel comfortable and are still locking the fronts try reducing the braking power to 90 or even 85% which should make things much smoother.
Also, some brake modulation and a blip of the throttle on down changes will help, just jumping on the anchors at the start of the tyre marks will land you in a world of hurt.
There are numerous setup guides around to read but don’t underestimate the helpfulness of just jumping into a practise session by your self and changing a setup variable to one extreme and driving a few laps, then setting it to the other extreme and trying again. Don’t change anything else and then just see what effect it has. Its likely the car will be undrivable but it’s the best way to get an understanding in your head of what each adjustment can do.