BaselineSetupMethod

This is Wolf-Dieter's work below, about a method to set up cars in a simple and standard mode, to speed up both car & track & simu development:

Preface

What we would need is a "M. Schumacher" and his chief engineer, you need the faculty to explain what you feel driving a car to an technician expert in one direction and on the other side you need to be able to understand the language as input to physical problems. For the feedback to the "driver" you should be able to express technical demands to someone who is not a technician without missing the needed details. If Andrew would have time, I think he should be the best solution here, because he knows about both sides.

Basic setup

Let's have a look at a simplified car setup screen. The main question commonly discussed here is under- versus oversteer. But there are different parameters you can use to make a car under- or oversteer. For a car without wings you can use the weight distribution and the suspension settings. The weight distribution is understood as fixed for a car, but for formula cars with a minimum weight it is usual to be able to adjust it by using weights to the car a different positions. So the normal way would be to use the suspension settings.

Suspension settings

After a first setup of all the detailed suspension settings it is common to just change the bellcrank values. A lower value makes the car softer, increasing it makes it stiffer. To increase the cornering speed, the suspension should be softer. Making the front axle softer you get more oversteering, and if making it stiffer the car gets understeering.

So such a screen should have two sliders. One for the total of the bellcranks to make the car softer or stiffer but keep the balance. The other one to change the relation of the front bellcrank against the rear one. With it you could adjust under/oversteering.

Wings

Same for wings. Increasing wings (in a fixed relation depening on the wing areas) increases the cornering speed but decreases the top speed. A second slider for the front/rear relation would allow to control under/oversteering in fast turns, the suspension works for slow speed as well.

Anti-roll bars

The anti roll bars work similar. Increasing the front anti roll bar makes the cars front axle stiffer and results in understeer. Increasing both reduces the side sweeping of the car but reduces the cornering speed. So after a first setup, you should not need it in a simplified car setup.

Brakes

While braking there is the brake balance influenced by the front/rear brake pressure distribution. What has to be used here depends on the initial weight distribution (a racing car should have about 40:60) and the brake dimensions, typically 2:1 - 3:2. Again two sliders, one for the total brake pressure and one for the front/rear distribution.

And that’s it.

Differental, gear, shifting

For a real setup screen we should have an additional slider to adjust the differential ratio to the top speed allowed by the track. Shifting and the gearbox is something more difficult. There are a lot of "rules" (i.e. defined by Kristóf in [SetupGearRatios]), but in fact these all are not OK in all cases. There are two basic cases, one is to have access to the gear ratios, the other is having no access.

If you do not have access you can only define when to shift. For some cars it is trivial, i.e the trb1-boxer, here the torque curve has its peak near the revs limit, so you always have to turn out the gears as much as possible. But there are other cars, my trb1-sector or the LS1 cars. Here depending on the gear ratio setup you can have to shift earlier, because the next gear already has a higher torque (AT THE WHEELS, this means you have to include the different efficiencies of the different gears!). If you shift at this point, the torque difference between the gears is minimal. The bad effects Kristóf reported for the Toro are eliminated! But the human driver geartronic does not know about such things (The simplix includes code to find the revs to shift up).

So if you have access to the gear ratios, you should setup the values in a way that results in as much torque as possible (if you have a simplix geartronic) or to get the geartronic shift at suitable points if it uses fixed shift values related to the revs max.

(The only additional parameter here is the revs limit that could be used to bring the shifting to better points, but this is commonly a fixed value per car type.)

Wolf-Dieter