Instead, we found enormous performance gains by leaning more heavily on the front aero+stiffness bias. Initially, we tried to dial back both of these to a more balanced setup, but both changes resulted in slower lap times. Secondly, the lateral load transfer distribution was much farther forward than the weight distribution, which would point to a risk of understeer. First, maximizing downforce with the rake shifted the aero balance forward, which brought the risk of oversteer at high speeds. Initially, I was concerned by two offset vehicle characteristics. Much like in the ModeFRONTIER optimization, this became a battle of how low we could make the car before the necessary front spring stiffness destroyed performance.Ī lot of performance came from vehicle balance as well. I will discuss some of them below.įirstly, maximizing downforce was the single biggest performance gain, and this largely came from lowering the ride height and increasing the rake as much as possible. Throughout the process, there were a few key trends that we were able to extract in order to maximize vehicle performance. In reality, it's impossible to decouple these adjustments and treat them independently, as the entire vehicle package mus work together, but it is still an interesting observations as to where the majority of the time savings came from: From there, we started anti-roll bar tuningĦ) After realizing we no longer passed the plank test, some more adjusting of suspension balance with ride heights and ride rates.ħ) Experimentation with lock and coast settings on the limited slip differentialĨ) Finally, some experimentation with toe alignment and ackermann.Īll told, the contributions roughly added up as indicated by the summary table below. In the end, the max downforce setup had the most performance gains.Ĥ) From there we adjusted damping rates to improve overall grip and front/rear balance.ĥ) Further suspension balance adjustments, starting with adjusting static camber and camber gain. As a starting point, Derek changed the pickup points to achieve a similar gain rate as the rear, and a similar roll center heightĢ) From there, we sampled the ranges of final drive ratio and wing level available, to compare the effect on performance on the long Le Mans straightsģ) Next, we incorporated the ride height configurations developed in the previous sections. Naturally, there was some iteration and back tracking involved and the real progression was not this clean or linear.ġ) First we fixed the camber gain on the front control arm geometry. Instead, I'll list the general areas we tackled, in the rough order that we addressed them. It would be very inefficient to walk you through all 100 of our runs, and the notes between them, so I will refrain from that. Some of these included:ġ) Driver behavior page (steering, throttle, velocity, brake pressures)Ģ) Tire loads page (acceleration traces, downforce and aero balance, tire normal loads)ģ) Engine page (throttle, rpm, gear, rear wheel speeds)Ĥ) Stability page (understeer via steer angle, understeer via yaw rate, stability index, throttle and steer)ĥ) Suspension page (pitch/roll angle, ride heights, camber channels, steering)ħ) Extra page and scatterplot to act as sandbox areas In order to best evaluate the performance of the different setups and gain the most insight possible, I created a custom Motec workspace for this competition, with several pages laid out to provide key performance metrics.
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