Front Engine Car Preset Explained
Save time using presets (ACC)
You can use this for your own cars and start changing your car setup from this preset.
My interpretation of front-engined car setup:
Minimum front ride height of 50 mm and 75 mm on the back, with max wing setting.
The front grip line is divided by anti-roll bar + bump stop range + wheel rates and bump stop rates (rubbers).
The 60% anti-roll bar stiffness is hopefully still firm enough to keep the aerodynamic strength stable while we have body roll.
The 60% bump stop ranges give us a lot of travel and will make sure the aerodynamic strength moves forward as we are driving at higher speeds and also allows for more grip efficiency on the front.
The soft bump stop rates will give us tire efficiency when the springs are compressed under load, tending towards having more grip efficiency on the front.
On the back, we have the opposite.
25% of the rear anti-roll bar makes sure we have a lot of body roll on the back, making the rear tires have more contact with the road surface.
With low bump stop ranges, we don’t invite a lot of aerodynamic force on the back of the car when speed increases. With the short ranges, we also overload the tires, making them less efficient.
50% bump stop rates also make sure we overload the rear tires to create rotation when on throttle and at high speeds.
These settings are something I would go for if my front-engined car has an understeering nature.
To explain further, what we are achieving here is a front end of the car that really promotes grip while the back of the car is overloaded and stiff. This creates rotation. A front-engined car is light on the back, so if it starts to oversteer, we can very quickly do some counter-steering to keep the car in check.
The most important reason I prefer front-engined cars still.
In the coming weeks, I'm going to try to come up with the same kind of explanations for mid-engined cars.
Again, learning this in public. You might want to watch the video that I shared last week; it goes more into how aero takes over the mechanical grip settings when we hit certain speeds.
Cheers,
Arnout