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GP3 - Super Setups


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#1 castle

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Posted 17 August 2001 - 19:01

My only weakness at GP3 is getting the right setup. In the end i settle for whatever the computer gives me and so that can seriously hamper my performance. Have you found the perfect setup, qualifying or race, for any of the 1998 circuits. If you have then share the wealth, i could do with it, thanxs for the help!

RC

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#2 daz

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Posted 18 August 2001 - 02:17

what track are you after ?

#3 confucius

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Posted 18 August 2001 - 06:12

If its any help, there are plenty of sites where u can D/L other ppl's "ultimate" setups, although obviously it may suit one person and not another. Therefore, I D/L these setups and tweak them to my liking, so that at least I have a foundation to start from. Otherwise I wouldn't have a clue how to setup a car!

#4 castle

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Posted 18 August 2001 - 15:37

Im having trouble with Hockenheim at the moment. I can get the car to 218mph on the straights easy. But taking off the wing means that the car handles like a truck in the chicanes and stadium section. I go for a midpoint and become superfast in the corners, but have the straight line speed of a Prost. Either way I lose serious time and am in danger of crashing out or being slipstreamed. This usually places me 12th on the grid [Ace Mode] and thats roughly where I stay for the duration of the race.

Other corners I hate are at Barcelona and Magny - Cours. Barcelona turn 3, and France turn 2/3. Both are similar, they are long medium corners, taken in about 3rd gear. I always seem too lose time in the middle by not carrying enough speed or I tough the grass and spin on the exit. Your probably thinking its my bad driving thats the problem. I can take these corners with ease but am so slow that its not even worth trying. These are vital corners as they lead into areas where it is very easy to overtake or be passed.

Any Tips?

#5 Gemini

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Posted 22 August 2001 - 12:35

there is a guy called Riccardo Turla, months ago he posted on vasioues websites setups for many tracks. I always found his setups very drivable in race conditions ( of course I always had to change few things to suite my driving style)

here is example of the "reade.me" file attached to his Barcelona setup

you can give me your email so I will try to send you his works that I downloaded few months ago, after that I found it much more fun to develop the setups by myself
read through this and good luck on the track :up:... and in the garage
----------------------------------------------------------------******************** F1-GRANDprix3.net GP3FORM.TXT ********************
(http://www.f1-grandprix3.net)
Date: 4 dec 2000 Version: 1.0
=======================================================================

Title : Barcelona Setups and Demonstration Qualifying Hotlap
Filenames : barcelonaq.cse, barcelonaq-wet.cse, barcelonar.cse,
barcelonar-wet.cse, barc19989.hle
Author : Riccardo Turla
Email Address : tur@freesurf.ch
Homepage : --
Description : Setups for the Imola track
Author Info : I drive nothing except Ace level and 100% race length
with a Sidewinder Precision Pro joystick (by now)
Other Works : more and more wonderful setups

=======================================================================

* Construction *

Base : none
Editor(s) used : GP3
Known Bugs : --
Build Time : 3 weeks

Technical help : Rob Doe
Play Testing : Gabor Botzheim (steering wheel), Rob Doe (Joystick)
Sharath Bharadwaj (joyst.), Cheng-Hung Shen (joyst.)
Apurva Mehta (keyboard), Leo Alli (keyboard, although
he plays guitar...) and Jan Zatko.

* Installation *

Extract the file into your GPSaves directory.
Then start the game and load the setups or the hotlap as descripted in
the manual.

* Other Information *

IMPORTANT:
The four setups can be distinguished by the letters q, q-wet, r, r-wet in the names of the files. "q" means qualifying setup, "r" means race setup, "wet" means wet weather setup.

The qualifying setups are made for not more than two fast laps. If you persist racing on a qualifying setup, you will probably damage the lower side of the car.

The race setups are useful for at least 35% race length, but they are fit for racing at full length.

Note that you have to use the same tyres in qualifying and race sessions. So, pay attention to the tyres of the race and qualifying setups. If you do not race more than 50% race length, you should probably always use soft tyres.

WET SETUP

Do not use the wet-race setup for a race that's half wet and half dry. The wet-race setup is intended to be used on 100% wet races. If it might be clear for some minutes, try the dry-race setup.

All in all, many different tracks have a nearly identical wet setup at heavy rain. This is not so far from the other rain setups. Tests gave a pole position for the qualifying setup with more than one second of advance to Mika. Just drive carefully when in 2nd and 3rd gear. Do NOT use the 1st at all when it is raining, and the 2nd only underpower (i.e. slower than 125 kph / 80 mph).

A GUIDE THROUGH THE MAKING OF THIS SETUP

When I make a setup, I always proceed in this way. Basically, it's five steps to get a very good setup, and each and every step could take five minutes, but it could force you to invest many a day the same.

1. Looking for the basis setup (wings and ride height)

I always start the same: I watch the opponents how fast they drive to see what rear wing angle they are driving. At Barcelona, it looked like they had medium-high downforce, so I had the first try with a rear wing at 15 and medium suspensions, the rest more or less based upon my Imola setup.

After a few laps, I modified the dampers and the braking balance according to the car's behaviour on some parts of the circuit. There was some oversteering when hitting some curb, there was some oversteering while entering the corners. While the fast dampers act on the curbs, the slow dampers act in the corners. Watch the manual.

The goal of this first step is to get a basis where you can find out the ride height. For that purpose you need two things: both good wing and suspension settings. The dampers are irrelevant for that purpose, but a good dampers setup would allow better testing. At first, just watch that they have more or less equal values between front and rear. If you do not find the correct wings or suspensions, you will find them out later. Just start with something.

I had soon found proved that medium downforce was best. With low downforce, I could not drive very quickly through the fast right-hand corners. There, I lost a lot of time, so I fixed the possible rear wing angle range between 13 and 15, typically medium downforce. To have a better performance, I had a much higher front wing angle than it is normal. For a rear wing angle of 14, the usual front wing angle is at 16, this because the balance is best. I set it between 18 and 20, basically five points higher than the rear wing.

2. The first setup: main issues (wings and suspension)

At the beginning, I felt uneasy in finding out what suspensions would do better. I excluded a hard setting, Barcelona is bumpy. The manual text about the track reads 'neutral setting', so I started with it. Soon I had a setup. I made a second setup with softer suspensions. These were my first two setups, just rough drafts, that had to be tested. The testers (mentioned at the top) showed differing results. For my further research, I first sort of tried for the middle.

I tried with wing at 19 on 13 first, then lowered it to 18 to see if I lost grip. I did not. The same, I tried to find out whether a slightly harder suspension affected the lap times. It did not. If you have two setups, of which one is hard and one soft, and both allow the exactly same lap times, take the harder one. It is easier to drive. (Later, this proved to be the wrong choice: softer setups would have done better.)

3. The second setup: getting closer to the track's morphology

Barcelona is a very peculiar track: it has four very fast right-hand corners. This meant that I had to experiment with a new sort of setup. Barcelona, in a way, reminds of oval tracks. Take Estoril: that track was as good as an oval.

For ovals, the car has to virtually hang towards the inside: the left suspensions are about 4 mm higher than the right ones in order to prevent the car from running onto the packers in those fast corners. If it wasn't for that, the car's behaviour could change in the middle of these fast corners: the car would alternate between oversteering and understeering.

While balancing the ride heights (front left has to accord with rear left, the same do the suspensions on the right side), I found the front left suspension still slightly working on the packers in the fast corner before the Renault; to prevent this too, I had to rise the value of the slow damper on this suspension: it does not affect the balance that much, but it makes the suspension slightly harder against bumps. The left front suspension, at Barcelona, is all decisive for the performance.

4. The third setup: improving balance and speed

In fact, it was a big struggle with the qualifying setup. After some testings, I had the left front wheel at a ride height 30.5 mm, while the right front wheel was as low as 23 mm! So I stiffened the left suspension, tested, removed a packer, tested, removed some more, tested, lowered the left suspensions (both front and rear) until I had the lowest value possible. The laptimes got better at the same time, which indicated how important it was to lower the car as much as possible. At last, I got the ride height at 27 mm, which proved to be very close to the utterst limit. From that point, I tried to improve the balance with the shockers and dampers settings. Further on, slight improvements made the car have a very good balance. Anyway, I still was not a lot better than the opponents.

5. The last setup: last experiments

After the third setup, I watched the computer cars again to see where they went faster. I saw them easily drifting through the corner with a speed I could not compete. On the other hand, they drove very slowly on the straight. This was the key: I enforced the aerodynamical downforce by raising the wings' angle by 2 each front and rear. Of course I had to counter the higher downforce on behalf of the ride height. I raised the car by a millimetre. Then I saw myself getting faster by a few tenths. The last improvement was to try a softer suspension. Well done: again I went even faster.

Small note: The right suspensions are travelling most of the time on the packers. In the only parts (the left-hand corners) that they must not, they do not. It is just as simple as that. Therefore, the right suspensions have a lot more packers to allow a deeper ride height in order to get the car as close to the ground as possible.

Without a high left side, the tyres will have a much higher consumption: when the car runs on the packers, the consumption is highest (it is as if you had no suspensions at all). If this happens on the straight, as it is common, it does not matter, but if this happens in the corner, it can heavily weigh on your race performance. On the Melbourne track, for instance, there was one only corner where this happened, so this did not influence the performance much. In Barcelona, I used to find myself struggling with the tyres when I drove the race some months ago. Not now anymore.

Rob Doe sent me a very good setup that was easier to drive than mine, but it could only be used in qualifying because the left side suspensions were too low and the car lay on the packers. It would not have been enough to rise the ride height for 3 mm: the car would still have travelled onto the packers in all of the four fast corners. The times were great, but with a simple adaptation his setup could not be used for a race. It would have to be risen by something like 7 mm instead of the usual 2 or 2.5.

6. The race setup

The race setup is usually easy to find. You just take the qual setup, raise the car by 2 - 2.5 mm, then raise the packers value by 2 mm. That is what I did, but found out that the car had a lot of understeering with heavy load of fuel, while it behaved well with an empty fill. This was why I had to correct the balance, which took some more time than expected because the car did not want to have a constant handling. It sometimes tended to understeer while completing many laps, sometimes it started to oversteer.

How can you improve this setup for yourself?

We had differing results amongst the test drivers. Some liked some other setup better. While some of them complained about oversteering, some others had understeering. One easily drove below times of 1:20 while I struggled to get below 1:21. This means that you have to find out what balance you have.

E.g. if you have too much oversteering in the left-hand corner in the middle of the track, you have to lower the rear right slow rebound dampers value, or raise the front right slow reb dampers value. If you have some understeering in the fast corners, lower the value of the front slow rebound dampers. If you have understeering in the slow corners, lower the value of the front roll bar. If you would like to do some work on it, try to stiffen the suspensions and lower the car, raise the wing angle etc. Do what you think it is worth trying. I did.

Personal note: HOW CAN I SEE THAT A SETUP OF SOMEBODY ELSE IS NOT VERY GOOD?

If a setup shows no use of packers, you can be fairly sure that it is not a very good setup. One of the most important things, maybe even more than the wings, is the ride height. If a setup shows no use of packers, then the ride height is probably far too high, or the suspension too far too hard.

#6 unrepentant lurker

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Posted 25 August 2001 - 01:01

Originally posted by castle
Other corners I hate are at Barcelona and Magny - Cours. Barcelona turn 3, and France turn 2/3. Both are similar, they are long medium corners, taken in about 3rd gear. I always seem too lose time in the middle by not carrying enough speed or I tough the grass and spin on the exit.


I have had the same problem in these corners also. This seems to be the kind of corner the computer does well. What worked for me was softening my front suspension a little. In particular, it was the spring setting and the fast bump/rebound settings. In general on my setups, they tend to be towards the right on the slidey bar, but for these tracks they are closer to the middle. I would also look at the suspension travel telemetry for a good lap. If the suspension is riding on the bump rubbers through these corners, then you are loosing grip and cant go as fast.

Softer front suspension also had the bonus side effect of shortening my braking distance a bit.

Im having trouble with Hockenheim at the moment. I can get the car to 218mph on the straights easy. But taking off the wing means that the car handles like a truck in the chicanes and stadium section. I go for a midpoint and become superfast in the corners, but have the straight line speed of a Prost.


For Hockenheim, I carry almost no wing, and I think I can get about 223 mph. I would soften the suspension all around to improve the handling in the slow sections. I don't know what it is about the third chicane, but the computer outbrakes me there all the time-but I usually repass easily on the next straight.

Also, look at the telemetry for the suspension travel going the the stadium section.

Also, for any track I find that two stops are always faster than one, and sometimes three are faster still. For a full race distance.

#7 Jordan fan

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Posted 28 August 2001 - 01:04

well, I have the same problems, the drivings good, the setting up isn't so good. I then downloaded a few different peoples setups and look at what they do, and they go very different ways.

I found a good set of setups made by this one guy, they are not perfectly suited to my driving style, but were relatively close to it.

I have a very attacking and way too aggressive driving style, so i tend to have to use a lot of wing, to keep me on the road, but also to take advantage where i drive hardest, in and out of corners. Then the straight line speed is a big problem, so you really have to rely on overtaking ability into and during corners, and also have to get a tow as much as possible.

I got this problem, that i have to run 20/20 win on just about all tracks, apart from monza and hockenheim, and spa as well.

This also makes me well set up for wet weather driving for some wierd reason i dont know, i seem to be a lot faster (comparatively) in the wet than in the dry.

#8 FNG

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Posted 29 August 2001 - 23:50

Can anyone post a couple links to sites that have setups for various tracks. Having a bit of a rough go with Spa right now. I can manage 1:47.3's but that's it. A few links to various track setups would be great. I am using GP3 with 2001 car sets and 2001 tire physics. Thanks

#9 Gemini

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Posted 30 August 2001 - 08:41

FNG,

try this, http://www.gpx.it/

#10 Wolbo

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Posted 30 August 2001 - 10:37

You guys should try a real sim : GPL :cool:

#11 Gemini

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Posted 30 August 2001 - 10:55

Originally posted by Wolbo
You guys should try a real sim : GPL :cool:


I did Wolbo, and I still do, it's great but it did not stop me to enjoy GP3:)

#12 FNG

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Posted 30 August 2001 - 19:15

Can I ask why a lot of you guys don't consider GP3 a good sim? Seems pretty realistic to me.

#13 Jordan fan

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Posted 31 August 2001 - 23:55

Yeah I agree with that Captain Cook, they would have been better off using the exact physics from GP2 if you ask me.

#14 TOLIN

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Posted 06 September 2001 - 07:18

Originally posted by Captain Cook
It looks like a cartoon (bad graphics and worse implementation)and the cars do somersaults for no apparent reason whatsoever (the physics are pants). I like it though. :p


Captain? Is it really that GP3 is the best software to try F1 racing. I am about to buy me one.!:confused:

#15 DAT

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Posted 14 September 2001 - 16:22

http://www.ferrari.c...1/COL02_780.jpg