u/Ihateniceegirls

I made some tuning experiments to find out why my 787b seems to have a really low top speed. I dont have the exact values for my normal tune, but important values were the typical 1 65 arb, softer front springs than rear, 6 front 12 rear for rebound 3 front 6 rear for bump damping. The only variable here is the spring stiffness and ride height.

For some reason, when i set the front springs to be stiffer, the top speed increases up until max spring stiffness. The same goes with front ride height, where higher means faster.

For the rear, it was the complete opposite. The softer and lower i go, the faster the top speed was.

These extreme values added roughly more than 10kmh in my top speed. No aero difference, just purely adjusting the springs.

I thought it was a bug and the simulations in the tuning menu was just presenting inaccurate numbers, so i tested it out, and it was accurate. I had a 10kmh additional top speed when i was using the stiff and high front and soft and low rear setup. The turning characteristics changed, but was not exactly bad. In fact, the turning radius was almost unchanged, and surprisingly, I experienced almost no excess understeer at all. The car still rotated properly, and was actually more responsive, at least that’s how it felt for me.

I want to know why this happens. It seems like it’s not a bottoming out issue with normal suspension set ups because 1. Telemetry doesnt show bottoming out when I tested the normal setup, and 2. If it was really the problem, the extreme setup should have extreme bottoming out of the rear.

This was also not exclusive to the 787b. I tested the setup with my sesto. Same results. I even got better lap times, even being 1 second faster in some tracks. I got consistent 1:00s in legend island circuit when getting below 1:01 was very rare in my past setups. Same with ito sprint where i got a 1:57 when i was only able to get 1:58s before.

TLDR: Stiff and high front springs and Soft and low rear springs significantly increase top speed. I want to know why.

It doesn’t make sense that a car in the same class be 2-5 seconds faster in circuits but 5-10 seconds slower on sprints. The exige WTAC in R class for example is like a class above R in circuits like shimanoyama, shirakawa, soni, daikoku, and hokubu; while being a class below R on sprints like satta, shikisai, and coastline.

I get that some cars are speed or handling biased, but the WTAC cars in my opinion are too extremely biased on handling which makes them overpowered on circuits but underpowered on sprints. Feeling like being one class above or below while being in the same PI shouldn’t really happen right?

I heard somewhere that PI is calculated by using AI to set lap times on all races. WTAC class and PI could be differentiated by making the AI only count circuit races. That, or make downforce PI cost more detailed in some way.

It isn’t really fun seeing the same 1 car used when there are 2 or more tight circuits. Additionally, the sense of achievement in rivals by setting a perfect lap on a normal competitive car, just to be beaten by a mediocre driver by a second, is greatly diminished. Not to mention that when I switched to a WTAC car, i easily beat them on my 3rd lap.

I find it hard to accept that this is simply a skill issue when I have multiple top 100s on rival leaderboards on normal cars, and can set lap times faster when driving a WTAC car.