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

Increase the stiffness of the springs to ensure that there will always be some spring movement left, you say? Well, you'd have to make the springs so stiff that in reality you'd be transferring the energy from the bumps in the road directly in to the chassis which is not a good strategy. These settings are closely related to the dampers, bump rubbers as well as ride-height and you can loose all your hair trying to figure out how they interact, which ones to change, by how much and in which direction. Taking settings to extremes may help in finding out what the consequences of each change is.

Dampers; bump and rebound: Dampers will stop the oscillations caused by bump and rebound conditions. Bump is the state where the wheel is forced upwards when hitting a bump in the road. Rebound is the state where the wheel is forced back by the dissipating energy in the shocks to the road after being bumped up.

Without dampers, your wheels would take a long time to recover from bumping up and down.

We can even make the suspension differentiate between bumps in the road that generate fast or slow bumps and rebound conditions. "Fast" would best be described as high frequency oscillations in the suspension. "Slow" would then be conditions that make the suspension respond with lower frequency oscillations.

In order to let the rear suspension help me turn or rotate the car on corner exit, I increase the settings for fast and slow bump at the rear. The theory being that when I'm accelerating, the rear will gradually slide itself in place allowing me to get early on the throttle:

"Fast" bump go from 1750 N/m/s to 2000.

"Slow" bump go from 2750 N/m/s to 3000.

Pit work.

I tried changing the rebound, thinking that stiffer would help press the rear-wheels to the track surface, but I felt that this did not help the car handling. The default settings are as stiff as you can go on this track.

Bump rubbers / packers: This is really fine-tuning the suspension. Add bump rubber if you want to avoid minor bottoming-out issues, but do not use the bump rubbers if your real problem is the ride-height being too low, or you feel any suspension settings might be off.

The 3rd bump / rebound settings is yet another example of fine-tuning your suspension. With these it is possible to add or remove bump or rebound in very small increments. For my setup I have chosen not to change anything here.

Ride-height: As low as you can go without bottoming out on the road surface.

Gearing: To be perfectly honest, I very rarely adjust the gearing in a default setup unless I feel that the gearing is totally off.

Highest gear should take you to the maximum sustainable engine rpm's at the end of the longest straight. Remember that a low fuel load and a draft in a race will give you more rpm's, so when choosing your gears, take into consideration if you're making a hot-lap setup or a race setup. First gear should get you quickly off the start line, but you might want to use first gear out of a hairpin too. So you must find the compromise that suits you. I'd probably try to use first only as a take-off gear and then use second out of hairpins, excepting really hairy hairpins like the ones at Monaco.

The rest of the gears should in theory be spaced evenly, but each and every track is different and is you hit a fast corner in say fifth at maximum revs, either make that gear a bit longer, or change to sixth and adjust that gear to give good acceleration rather than a long range.

Through Prost corner.

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