Customizable suspensions

what are racing suspensions

Racing suspensions are built to do two things: keep the tires in contact with the road over bumps / undulations / etc, and control the center of gravity as G-forces seek to move it from its natural resting place. A street car’s suspension also serves to prevent bumps and other impulses from making the ride uncomfortable.

It’s beneficial to let the center of gravity move around somewhat as you drive…when you’re turning in, it’s a good thing to have some extra oomph up front [but not too much or it won’t want to rotate], when you’re putting the power down, it’s nice to have some extra in the back [but not too much or the front won’t have any grip]. However, if you let it move too far, the tires won’t be able to handle it and you’ll start skidding. If you let it move too fast, the same thing happens: think about trying to accelerate in a car with loads of power…if you apply the throttle gently, it goes like stink; stomp on the pedal, and your hopes of going fast will go in up a cloud of tire smoke.

That’s where suspension tuning comes in: allowing you to customize how the car behaves, to an extent…as you can’t make a car forget its identity, only nudge it towards the characteristics you want it to have.

Springs control how much force it takes to make the tires move up and down in the wheel well…or in other words to make the car dip, and by how much. For example, putting an extra 1,000lbs of force on a pair of 500 inch-pound springs will case that side/end of the car to dip by exactly 1". [Why? Remember each ‘side’ of the car, front/back/left/right is 2 springs]. Springs work both ways from neutral [where they are ‘at rest’]…it takes just as much force to stretch them as to compress them. Take 1,000lbs off those 500 inch-pound springs, and that part of the car will lift by an inch. Complicating matters, springs also determine how much force is required to keep the force there…on those 500 inch-pound springs, the car will start to pitch back to neutral as soon as there’s less than 500lbs of force on them…if the sudden movement [turning in] is enough to squash 'em, but the steady cornering isn’t enough to keep them squashed, the car will start to stand up as you’re turning and you’ll find your grip going away mid-corner!

The two problems with springs are that they aren’t very smart, and that they ‘snap back’. By not very smart, I mean that you can’t control how much they compress separately from how much they stretch…they’ll have the same ‘rating’ in both directions no matter what. In addition, when a spring is stretched or compressed, they store energy…and release that energy when they return to their resting position…this is why as you go back and forth in a slalom, the car gets more and more unsettled…the extra force of the springs snapping back is added to the G-forces…the same reason a diving board throws you further than you could’ve jumped.

That’s where shocks [dampers] come in. They control the speed at which the springs move. The stiffer they are, the longer it takes for the springs to ‘settle in’ or ‘rebound’…but too stiff and the weight won’t be able to shift around freely, ‘trapping’ it someplace in the car where it’s not very helpful…or worse, bleeding it straight to the tires and overloading them… Thankfully, you can control the compression [squat] and extension [stand] rates differently, so if the car needed it you could make it shift quickly, and return to rest slowly.

Sway / Roll Bars work like springs, in a way. They resist side-to-side motion similarly to how springs resist up and down motion, giving you a way to control side-to-side motion independently of forward-and-back motion…which is important, as the way the car behaves under acceleration and braking might not be the way you want it to behave when going through a slalom. They’re also notoriously difficult to get right, since any change to the sway bars will affect how much spring is ‘too much’ for side to side motion…but softening them to compensate can lead to a ‘not enough’ situation for front-to-back.

This kind of trade-off is what makes tuning so difficult…every change has the ability to make the car better in one area, and worse in another.

Meanwhile, the poor tires are just along for the ride. The basic rule of tires is this: the bigger your contact patch [the bit of tire actually touching the road], the more grip it can provide. Tires pressures are measured in pounds per square inch [at least in the US; under the metric system, it’s most likely grams/kilograms per square centimeter]…since that doesn’t change as the car moves around, squashing them makes the patch bigger, while giving them a break makes the patch smaller.

Complicating matters, as you turn, the force wants to make the tires tilt. That’s where alignment comes in. Alignment is actually 3 different settings…camber, caster, and toe…and all of them work together to affect the tire as it moves up and down with the suspension. or twists with the steering wheel. It’s also one of the more complicated aspects of a setup in a real car, since not only do you need a basic understanding of physics, you need a solid understanding of 3D geometry.

If you’re looking at a tire from the front, camber makes it angle like this: / / or \ \ . When the car takes side-to-side forces, the natural tendency of the tire is to tilt, like so:

No Camber:
| | [CAR] | | Going Straight
\ \ [CAR] \ \ Turning Right.
As you can see, that’s not what you want…the tire has the most grip when it’s straight up and down. That’s where camber comes in.

Camber:
/ / [CAR] \ \ Going Straight
| | [CAR] \ \ Turning Right
With Camber, the outside tire [the left side when you’re turning right] is straight up and down, providing maximum grip. The inside tire isn’t doing much to help, but it doesn’t have to…a lot of the force is on the outside, and with proper spring / damper / sway / camber settings, what’s left will be enough.

The angle at which the tires are turned relative to the direction of the car [called their ‘deflection’] also affects the camber…this is why you’ll see a car running a lot more on the front than on the rear, since the rear wheels aren’t used for steering.

Toe is the same thing, but viewed from the top. I can never remember which is which, so tend not to screw with it, but one way will make the car more responsive, while the other will make it more stable, and you can set the front/back independently for, say, a pointy front end and a stable rear end. Be careful, though: Too far in either direction will chew up tires, as any amount of toe means that they’re trying to go diagonally, scrubbing extra rubber.

Caster changes what the tire rotates around. Think of it this way: hold your arm with your elbow and hand straight out in a ‘karate chop’ position, and then turn your wrist. Then do the same thing, with your elbow bent and fingers pointed straight up. Notice how your hand rotates differently? That’s caster.

In a car, caster controls how much a tire deflects, and how much it tilts, when you turn the wheel. Straight up and down is bad…it means a tire that’ll twist and flop like a sloppy wheel on a grocery cart. Pure tilt is also bad…it means the car will never turn, only shift side to side like a motorcycle changing lanes. However, a mix of the two will let you have more “dynamic camber”…camber changes from tire movement…allowing you to run less static [base] camber, giving you more grip in straight-line driving, without sacrificing grip in the turns. The ‘penalty’, however…remember that everything is a trade-off…is that the more caster you run the harder it will be to turn the wheel…and the further you’ll have to turn the wheel to get the same amount of deflection.

How rally suspension works

still searching for it

6 Likes

cough cough adjustable suspension

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yes

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yeah especially trucks imo
they need lift kits and stuff, or just suspension dampening upgrades or something

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@Mandar_Fahrren i really wanted a drift trucc so i want camber, low height, and drift tyres on it.
And i want my drift trucc 1,014 hp
It is actually a C10 Stepside

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I like the idea
If suspension tuning and such are added though, in-game pickup trucks could probably become a “rally” truck

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Y e a

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if we get suspensions when i will dump car and it will literally scrape the ground

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why this will not work

get rickrolled
and it will work

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Rickroll x2

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bruh

1 Like

bruh

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really need that

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