SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Ralph Hummerich 2004 Season: A Few Words on Setups

When developing a new setup it is usually very wise to change only one thing at a time, test it and then move on to the next item only once you're satisfied with the first change.

Coming from Grand Prix Legends, I like to get a few things sorted first. And they are not aero-related!

Toe: Negative toe means that the right front wheel points slightly to the right and the left one slightly to the left when the steering wheel in the neutral position. Positive toe means that the front wheels point towards another.

I like a bit of negative toe which will help during turn-in. Most setups are not too far off here. The default setup toe is set at - 0.35 which I'll keep for now.

Brake Balance: With the brake balance far to the front, you get longer braking distances but a more stable car under braking.

Usually I have to move this quite a bit to the back. The default setup is at 62:38 (!) so I'll move the balance to the rear to something like 38:62.

Anti roll-bars: Anti roll-bars prevent sideways chassis motion when the car changes direction. If the roll bars are too soft, the chassis will roll towards the right if you turned the wheel left and to the left if you turned the wheel to the right.

This can become a problem if the rolling is not controlled. Imagine a left-right section, where the chassis will first roll to the right as you take the left part of the section, but then it will keep rolling to the right, even when you want to turn the car through the right hand part of the section. In this instance the chassis will not have finished rolling to one side, before it is required that it should start rolling towards the other side.

If the bars are too stiff, we loose driveability, so a happy compromise must be reached.

I like doing some changes with the anti roll-bars as most setups that I've seen favor quite stiff roll-bars at the front, softer at the back. I tend to like them closer together, thus resulting in the chassis to be more towards neutral or oversteery handling, rather than understeery.

I'll lower the front roll bar a bit which will allow a bit more sideways motion in the chassis when cornering and this gives me more feel in terms of when the front starts loosing it's grip.

At the rear I stiffen the bars a bit, which will make the rear of the car more unstable, especially under acceleration. I'm hoping this will help in rotating the car out of corners like Prost; the crucial right hander before the start / finish straight, but really exiting most corners.

The rotation should be controllable under braking and acceleration though. Too much rotation will spin you out.

So, I'll change from the 220:70 in the default setup to 200:140.

Finally the steering ratio. I like to use as little steering input as I can get away with. This means I will have to turn the steering wheel less when turning the car.

It goes from 14 to 15 degrees. Caution must be advised though: reducing the steering input needed to turn the wheels also makes the car more twitchy and going too far with this setting can very well lead to the car becoming undriveable.

Note that the default setup will generate a lot of radio calls from your pits concerning engine overheating. If you change the radiator size from 2 to 3, you'll hear less about that on the radio. Another benefit is that you can rev the engine a lot more without fear of blowing the engine.

Back on Track

It's time to head back onto the track to see if the changes work as I think they should. The most noticeable changes are the brake-balance and the steering ratio. Both helped me a lot to feel more comfortable when pointing the car for the corners. I was a bit surprised that I could actually get away with such a horrendously big change in the brake balance. Merely changing it to 50:50 didn't quite produce the result I wished for, so I went for the extreme. I'll probably pay for it if it rains.

Apexing

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