Jersey Tom wrote:gixxer_drew wrote:Holding to symmetry seemed like it would just leave something on the table.
As a race engineer, you are always going to leave things on the table. That's a reality of life. Once that's accepted, the logical thing is to sort out what are the things to chase that are going to give you the most gain.
Maybe dicking around with some asymmetric setup option is the hot ticket at a given track. Maybe you'd be better off putting that aside and working on more conventional, symmetric setup choices.
Could make the argument.. why focus on something that just makes you turn better to the right at expense of left, when you can make changes to improve both left AND right handers.
just to be clear I'm not saying i like to run non symmetrical or that I dont prefer to have it symmetrical. I'm just saying that everything has been on the table for me, and I have had to pull that out of the box at times. You guys are obviously way more experienced than I am and I bow to that for sure... though I'm just trying to poke at this a little so I can learn something here.
To answer the question about why be better at left than right, my reasoning was because the car can be better at left than right or because at a place like Infineon if you have a lot of downforce you can have a car that reacts in a weird way to that and you find yourself in a pinch with a car that has different behaviors in turning either way and not enough time to figure it out.
The top reason I ever ran asymmetrical (besides oval), was really that it often came down to a "whatever works" in that one test session we have left.
But I have done it intentionally, let me explain the situation details.
If you are corner balancing for offset weight, that has aero consequences. I first learned this on a pikes peak car in a full scale tunnel. It opened my eyes to doing roll sweeps. They wanted a setup for a road course, set the car low, they corner balanced it and we rolled it into the tunnel as it was run. It read almost 20% higher on one side. After scratching my head and recalibrating the load cells three times I walked out there to have a look and realized how much lower one side was than the other.
Aero wise.... Some cars can be so sensitive to ride height and roll that corner balancing can bias your forces big time to one side. I design GT cars so that front diffuser can be adjusted so that its entirety is at the rules height, but the rules flat bottom cannot be adjusted, neither can the rear diffuser. On some of the unlimited class time trials type of cars or pikes peak like I listed above. They will have more downforce than F1 but it will be non adjustable because it was produced on an extremely tight budget. So i think about the dynamic situation. If at speed that side of the car is going to get significantly lower from aero, I find myself in a non symmetrical condition anyway. Even a mid downforce like a SuperGT GT500 the effect is real and you get it in the driver feedback. 15% can be a really big value in terms of raw forces. How would you deal with that? Or would you?
