When setting up springs, dampers, roll bars, and the other things what is the end goal? Are you trying to get the weight to stay evenly distributed among all four tires in all circumstances or do you want the weight to rotate and just control the rate at which it rotates?
Of course the perfect setup doesn't exist as its always a balance but I'm just trying to get a visual picture of what I want the weight to do before I start tweaking some things.
I suppose you always want the tyres that are doing the most work at any given time to have the most grip you can give them, and have the car be predictable and correctable during transitions.
God knows how you achieve it though, my setups are always deadly.
The aim is simply the fastest lap (for qualifying setups), or the minimum race time (for races). How you achieve this is 100% up to you.
Setups control a) how much grip the tyres generate at any given moment and b) how the car reacts to driver inputs.
You might prefer a car that's harsh over bumps and reacts really quickly, whereas I might prefer a car that is complient over bumps and reacts a little bit slower. Both might produce identical lap times for us, but if we swapped we'd lose whole seconds.
I guess I didn't phrase my question right. Of course the goal is to have the fastest car, but to do this requires a setup that handles well. In a perfect world what would this be? Equal force on all tires? No movement in the weight distribution? I'm looking more at the mechanical goal than the speed goal.
The most perfectly handling car is one that, given a perfectly smooth surface, has a CoG height approaching 0, track approaching 0, wheelbase approaching 0, spring rates approaching infinity, and camber approaching 0 (measured at the contact patch).
^^ Actually, track approaching infinity (not that it would fit on many tracks)
There is no such thing as a perfect world. You can have equal force on each tyre statically, but accelerations will change them. Weight distributions are rarely 50:50, and each end does different things (front steers, rear powers and steers (sort of) on all proper racing cars)... So then you have different sized tyres to cope with the different demands. They will require different camber curves (rears don't like as much camber as narrower fronts). One end is lighter, so will have a different roll resistance to the heavier end, and different static springs. Different unsprung weights will change that too, and the damping in bump and rebound, fast and slow. CoGs are always higher than you want, and track is never enough.
And then you throw in a driver, who may or may not be as talented as the next guy, and will demand different things from the car.
Then you put the above on different tracks
The ONLY gauge of a good setup is the stopwatch. If the stopwatch says it's slow (compared to where you want) then you ask the driver and look at the data what is wrong........
The reason I asked the question the way I did was to gain an understanding of what you want the car to do. As a example, you are loose going out of a turn when applying l throttle. This means the weight is moving to the back of the car (acceleration) and to the outside of the car (the rotation of the curve). Since the car is loose, it seems you don't want so much of the weight going to the back outside of the car, so where do you want it to go? That is basically what determines the changes you make right?
In that case, you cant avoid the weight going to the rear outside wheel. But you CAN control how FAST it goes there. If you can make it go to the rear-outside a bit slower, it takes more time for that tyre to get too much load and start sliding.
Hence, if you have the rear slipping out when you are accelerating out of turns, if you make the rear suspension/anti-rollbar SOFTER, it reduces oversteer.
Because this makes the rear springs compress more, thus absorbing more weight, thus making the load on the tire take longer.
OR make the front stiffer, which has the same effect.
How to choose between softer rear or stiffer front?
If the track is bumpy, you'll want soft-ish suspension, so you dont bounce off the track. That means a stiffer front might not be a good idea.
On the other hand, your rear might already be VERY soft. in that case.. making it even softer is not a good idea.
HOWEVER, for you, I know what your problem is jarmenia.
OWRL + FOX + Blackwood.
Try changing your driving. Put the foot down a tad more slowly (respectfully, as if you were stepping on a lady's foot), AND (and this is quite an important bit) REMOVE STEERING LOCK.
Meaning as you press the accelerator, straighten your wheel.
Your rear will tend to slid out, but you straighten your wheel and it balances itself out. Ideally, you'd be making the turns with the wheel perfectly straight on the exits, and playing the rear sliding do the turn for you.
Do try it. Go to blackwood, drive the fox down the backstraight, then on the turn at the end of the backstraight, enter in 3rd@ 120kph, and just before the apex, (gently) accelerate till your foot is down. Foot should be down just as you touch the apex. as you put your foot down, swallow a brave pill and slowly straighten your wheel. When you have your foot down, your wheel shouldnt be more than a couple degrees to the right.
I'm not actually loose as blackwood (actually tight, but I'm working through a setup guide so its getting better. What I gave was just a example I was using to try to illustrate what I wanted to know. You did answer my question though I think. Its not that you don't want the weight to transfer but want to control how fast it transfers.
You cannot change how much weight moves around for a given combined acceleration (throttle and turning). That is a function of CoG height, vehicle track/wheelbase and acceleration.
However, you can alter the cars trajectory - later apex perhaps, so the car is straighter when you apply the throttle, and as such the rear tyres will have mhore longitudinal capacity for torque.
But you can alter the front/rear ratio of weight transfer by altering the rolling resistance of the chassis front and rear - either with springs or ARBs (tends towards steady state) or dampers (transient - i.e. the rate at which load transfers). In this case softening the rear (or stiffening the front) will tend to cause more weight transfer at the front rather than the back, giving you less oversteer due to tyre load sensitivity.
Or it might be because you have too much (or not enough) body roll to give your loaded tyre the right amount of camber for the loads you are applying, in which case the roll resistance needs to be adjusted a bit to give that (or the static camber, or the camber curves if your car can be adjusted [which it can't in LFS]).
Perhaps you have insufficient rear downforce (depending on the speed of the corner, and the amount of spare torque in the engine at that moment). Changing wing angles, rake angles or ride height might help this instance.
But doing any (or all!) of these might make the car REALLY good in one corner, but really CRAP everywhere else - not a good thing. Working out which corners are critical (the faster ones generally, or the ones preceding the longest straight(s)) and getting the setup balanced for those is more important than having to struggle a bit in a relatively pointless (to lap time) twisty bit. Then again, it might not, and the only way to know is to try it for yourself.
Setting up a car is fun for this reason - it can never be 'right', and it's a case of optimising the hundreds of compromises to give the lowest lap time. Usually the driver is the biggest compromise, because we ALL drive differently, which is why some prefer Biggie's WR setups, others prefer Biohazard's setups, and some simply HAVE to make their own.
I'd thought about it and decided 0 track made more sense. Track aids rolling resistance, but if the CoG is 0, then there's no roll torque anyway. In addition, you can't get a car with infinite track around a course because it simply wouldn't fit. Likewise, in order for the car to rotate at any kind of reasonable rotational velocity, the speed of the wheels would need to be approaching infinity.
