Tuning for different tire hardness

  • Thread starter Thread starter luv2drive
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luv2drive

luv2drive

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OK here's a question for all you tuning experts out there.

Let's say I have an excellent tune for a car that works great if the car is running SS tires (thanks praiano!), but the car skids all over the place and oversteers like crazy with SH tires.

I'm wondering what kind of tweaks I would look to make to tune the car to behave better on SH tires.

Are the things to look at basically the same for all cars, or does it depend (I presume) on things like drivetrain type and other factors? Are some cars just never going to run well on hard tires?

I'm a novice at tuning, but I'm familiar with the basic terminology and concepts and eager to learn.

I thought this might be a good practical exercise so any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!
 
I'll try and help with your question but it is too broad to cover everything without going into alot of detail. First the drivetrain means everything as far as how to go about setting the car up. If its a rear drive going by your description I would try raising the rear spring rate, lower the accel. number and raising the decel numbel on the lsd. Also try a lower front ride height and a higher rear toe setting all of these will help reduce oversteer and sliding and if all else fails try a rear wing. Some cars (ex. Shelby 350GT) just don't have the traction to ever work well on harder tires. Hope this helps -AC
 
I think you will find that the harder tires have just exposed a weakness in the tune that is being masked by the softer rubber. I believe that the LSD is everything. Start there. In my signature below is a link to the LSD guide summaries from most of the tuners on this site. You only need to read the opening post.

When you get a car working on harder compounds of tires, when you put the softer stuff back on, the car will still work great.
 
In the real world changing tire compounds changes how the tire reacts to vertical load, lateral load and longitudinal load. It seems to me that in GT the only thing to change between tire compounds is grip and life. Because of this I always tune on hard compound tires. I have spent an extensive amount of time applying vehicle dynamics equations to GT and often find myself needing more info about the tires.
 
Motor City Hami
I think you will find that the harder tires have just exposed a weakness in the tune that is being masked by the softer rubber. I believe that the LSD is everything. Start there. In my signature below is a link to the LSD guide summaries from most of the tuners on this site. You only need to read the opening post.

When you get a car working on harder compounds of tires, when you put the softer stuff back on, the car will still work great.
Click to expand...


Agree with this. If you change from Sports Soft to Sports Hard and suddenly the car becomes undriveable - then the setup is unbalanced in some way and the softer tyres are covering up the issue.

A balanced / good setup will work (to a certain extent) with different tyres, a car tuned for sports tyre should be driveable with all sports tyres.

Also, you have to remember many tuners on here tune offline, where's there's huge amounts of grip (compared to online race). This also helps to "hide" problems with setups or make an unbalanced setup feel "OK".

I'd go 1 step further than Motor City - the LSD is very powerful within a "setup". but a good LSD setting can still be ruined if you reallly **** up the rest of the setup and make it totally unbalanced.

A good setup will have everything working together, good tyre heat / wear and this will reflect in the car's handling, stability and the versatility of it i.e. use online AND offfline, different tyres etc etc...
 
I disagree with the Limited Slip Differential being a super tune, because race engineers try to setup a car as best they can to make a L.S.D. unnecessary. however when nothing else works a little L.S.D. can go a long way.
 
Chalk me up on the LSD > All side of the board.
LSD > Aero > Ride Height > Springs > Toe > Everything else.
 
Poontanir
I disagree with the Limited Slip Differential being a super tune, because race engineers try to setup a car as best they can to make a L.S.D. unnecessary. however when nothing else works a little L.S.D. can go a long way.
Click to expand...

We're not talking real life here... we're talking within the game.

Plus, if we were talking real world, I don't think I've ever heard of trying to eliminate the need for the LSD. Not sure where you're getting that.
 
Changing from SS to SH equals less grip and decreased tyre life. You can't expect the same amount of grip to be there and drive as hard as you did on SS you have to adjust your driving to suit brake a tad earlier, don't hammer the throttle out of a corner.

Or if you think a setup is the way forward set it up on harder tyres, from there softs will only make the car better for grip!

My car outside is on eagle F1 GSD3 if I were to put some R888 on let's say, the car corners faster breaks later an pulls harder, it's all about the traction
 
The basic rule of thumb I follow is that the less grip your tires have, the more downforce comes into play. Having sticky tires seems to cancel out the need for downforce. For example, on R/S tires I find race cars just aren't fast enough to compete with road cars until you reach a high enough PP level for downforce to come back into play (roughly 600-650pp and up.)
 

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