Springs and anti-roll bars do not appear to work properly

The only time i feel the descriptions are backwards is when i'm working with mid or rear engine cars. Besides that to get the roll bars to do what i want i've been moving them in huge increments. Springs seem to be exactly as EddyMaroon described them, i think i should be setting them stiffer but thats not the case.
 
I have only saw the backwards thing that was clear in two cases both were the Honda Indy car, one with the front ARB causing oversteer when set high and the other with soft rear springs causing oversteer. In both cases understeer would be the expected result.

I've now did additional testing with the Lotus ths time starting with the front ARB at 20 and trying various settings on the rear 20,30,40, 1 no difference worthy of mention with any of those settings. I then went extreme 1/40 then 40/1 Still very little difference. The only thing I could say is that the car did feel a little more stable when the rear started to get loose when at 40/1 than at 1/40 but even that was a very minor difference.

It seems that no matter what I set them to I could not get the car to go much either way in terms of over or understeer.

The bottom line after all this testing on the Lotus is that the ARBs do almost nothing at all on this car no matter what they are set to it felt similar and my lap times were about the same in it in every case.

I can't say that they felt like they were working in the right or wrong direction just not really working at all.

So unless this is different on other cars it means that the ARB is pretty useless in FM6 for tuning out over/understeer, which is a shame because that is usually the first thing one would do to tune out general over/under steer on a car.

Guess I will have to try a couple of more cars to be sure and then move on to the springs. Thus far the results have been disappointing to say the least. Worked better in FM 2,3 and 4


Edit: I went back out one more time turned the steering to normal and started running the car harder into the corners especially turn 1. It seemed like there was a small amount of difference when using 40/1 and 1/40 but not very much. It seemed that if I hit turn 1 hard and just threw the car into it when set at 1/40 I get the rear to rotate a little and when at 40/1 I could not but the difference between the two was much smaller than it would be on any other game I have tried. seems like the entire 1/40 range in FM 6 might fall between the range of 20 and 21 in FM4 surely not more than what 20-25 would have been it really seems that it is closer to just 1 full point from what it was in the older games.

In FM 2,3,4 driving at 40/1 and then 1/40 would be a dramatic difference on any car with any tire. Not the case in FM6 though apparently.
 
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The issue I had with the springs on the Indy car seems to have been just an oversight on my part. It seems that I had dropped them just below the point where they needed to be at that ride height, all was well until the car got up to speed and then it seems that the downforce pressed the springs to the point they bottomed out and then became very stiff and caused the car to spin out.
 
So Downforce is programmed that well? That's great! I found that Downforce is basically the easiest way to change how your car behaves. It has a great effect on how you set up the car. You can basically decide on how you want your car to drive; should it be a speed build or a cornering build? It can effectively be used to balance the oversteer vs understeer, too. I haven't noticed any tendencies to bottom out due to a large amount of downforce, because I've mainly ran quite low settings to keep up with other cars in the racing series in a straight line.

It feels like we solved this "issue" by now, so now it's just experimenting with tunes to find a great setup.
 
I will be doing some tuning in the coming days and I'm interested to see if the roll bars seem to work as they should after reading through this. One thing to keep in mind though is there could be a tire type dependence on things. In the real world, roll bar/spring tuning works the way it does because of the non-linearity in a tire that shows up as variations in its coeff of friction vs. the weight on it. The shape of the coeff of friction vs. weight graph will be different for different tires. So if you change tire compounds, you will often need to adjust roll bar setting to remain at the same desired balance. Its possible these differences exist between compounds in FM6 also, so tire compounds may effect the amount of rollbar/spring change needed to cause the desired balance change.
 
The main cars I use through the game are Early GTs, the Austin Cooper, retro cars(pre-'94) non-exotic cars and V8 Supercars.

During this past Bathurst 1000, Mark Skaife gave a brief tip about how the racers should set the cars up for the wet qualifying. He said let's pick a spring rate for normal use, say 1000kg. For this wet session, he would use a 700kg or 600kg spring and soften the ARBs then added, basically disconnect the ARBs for the best traction. I tried it in the game and it worked straightaway.

The default ARBs are way too stiff for me. I'm always correcting the steering midcorner.
I usually run all my cars with soft springs bar the M1. Street circuits I tighten the suspension. Soft ARBs help me "feel" connected to the tarmac and I can sense "grip" and loss of traction better. Works for me best at short circuits like Lime Rock, Brands Hatch and all wet circuits.

I find the suspension works best with retro cars than modern cars.
 

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