Hello I'm a new face in this wonderful forum of infinite F1 wisdom, and very happy to be here. I thought to ask few questions that might help us in our project of recreating the F1 of this era in rFactor simulation.

Q1)
What was the reason for almost 0 degrees of camber in the cars at that time. It puzzles me that while the cars are cornering they have load of positive camber on the outside tire. Why wasn't this taken in account while making the setups or were the tires so soft that negative camber wouldn't have helped?

Q2)
Does anyone have information about the suspension geometry of that time. What were the main priciples on designing one (bump camber, bump steer and caster wise)?

Q3)
No one wouldn't happen to have information about the dampers of this era? How much was there room for setting them up and especially was there a possibility to tune the fast bump and rebound individually from the slow bump and rebound? I have read somewhere that Koni had some great leap forward in dampers during the 70's but haven't found any info about it.

Q4)
Is there setup information from the 74 - 76 F1 cars floating around anywhere? that would help us alot to tune the chassis to work according to them. We have got the setups that were for 1973 BRM but if there is more or newer we would be very happy to receive them.

Q5)
Would someone have info on the engines of the time? weights, powercurves, torques, differencies in the DFV's of different teams?

Q6)
Suspension pictures from the cars of 74 -76 (other than those in the two picture threads we have feasted on ) we can promise to keep the to ourselves if needed to

Q7)
General information about the main updates (that affected performance significantly) for teams during these years. Like the McLaren had basically 3 different suspensions during 74 - 75 (first the inverted lower rear A-arm, then the normal lower rear arm and then the change in the front upper arm from A-arm to fabricated one) That type of stuff

Thank you in advance from any tidbits there might result from this one

Juha Mikkola

email: juha@ipaco.fi

Crossply tyres.

Regards, Ian

Is there some basic guidelines what kind of cambers were used or was the aim to leave it to zero? If there was too much camber what harm did it do?

I guess the cars went slower??

Seriously, if you want to model those cars realistically in a sim you'll need some suitable tyre data. I've no idea where you might find that, but I'd caution against 'fudging' any radial tyre data. Also don't forget the 'crinkly' sidewalls used to get a good corner exit...

Regards, Ian

Well we do have a contact in GY, but he also mentioned that tire testing was very poor at the time. There is also some limitations in the sim engine to produce wrinkle walls and stuff so we have to aim for a realistic looking and feeling behaviour (luckily there is quite alot of good videos...)

The main idea is to get it as close as possible and we have got already really nicely handling tire which is forgiving to a point while sliding but need lots of careful driving so you don't get yourself into trouble (rear is more loose as the sidewall flex is alot larger than in the fronts) as you might throw yourself off balance with too twitchy maneuvers

But the tiremodel is hard to get perfect, but if we get all the other stuff properly ingame then we can't be that much off with that either.

Suspension and shocks information is vital and also the differential setting used. Any info on them?

By digging the internet i found out the dampers used until ground effect cars (loads way higher than before) Koni 8211 and in the 1970's 8212 (steel -> aluminium body) was used. The next generation 3011 was introduced in 1983. Here's a link for anyone who is interested

The damper is 2-way adjust able with 12 clicks on both bump and rebound sides.

Any idea of the valvings used and how to converting them to meters/sec? (or what is the correct one...)

Check this thread in the Nostalgia forum. It includes a complete setup for Regazzoni's car from 1973.

http://forums.autosport.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32899