Learning more and more about this game, 1.6 improved the car handling a lot and last week patch corrected further modern GT cars. Which is amazing and I can be grateful enough for what Reiza accomplished so far. But some talks about "PCars2 Meta" got me curious to test things out a bit with different cars. So far I am a bit shaken by the result I found. Going full neg on the rear toe and less camber at the front than the rear makes the car more stable, less drifty, more safe and overall as a result easier to push i.e. faster. The value you see in the screenshot below should realisticly make any car very hard to drive, let alone "safer". This was used on the Chevy Z06 GT3, but also a similar approach in regards to camber and toe was tested and used on the 720S Evo and the SC63, feel free to test them : Is there any potential issue in the engine that maybe just reverse values in the background ? Are front and rear somehow also switch behind the scene ? Positive toe at the rear and negative toe at the front (like in most default setup) just make the car more oversteery and twitchy, which is exaclty the opposite of what happen with the setup I tested (it also magically reduce further the risk of spin when touching grass or kerbs as the rear as so much more grip). Similarly, more negative toe at the rear should not produce better lap time and safer behavior. Note that all cars where I could go into negative rear toe had similar result. P.S. please let's keep this civilized, 1.6 brought a lot of new folks that are digging deep into the game engine, including esport pro that are specialist at finding "exploit". The game will be challenged more than ever in regards to its physics and potential quirks, folks might state their feelings and sensations that will most likely not aligned with your own opinion of the game.
What I wonder is if it’s actually a meta which makes anything automatically quicker and is needed to be the quickest or if it’s just some “hack” which makes the car better, but not the best possible
Define "better lap times". How much better? Did you test this over the course of a full fuel run? Any adverse effects on tire temps/pressures/wear over the course of many laps? Interesting to see if consistently better lap times can be had over the course of a race. I would think that setup should be melting the rears with a significant number of laps on them.
Althought the front and rear toe and camber can be independantly adjusted, it does not mean that unstable driving characteristics are automatic. By adjusting camber and toe you are altering the grip and sensitivity characteristics at each end of the car, but they must be viewed in relationship to the other. Here, the front end grip characteristics are so significantly altered to introduce understeer that even aggressively incongruent alterations to the rear cannot overcome it. In other words, the front is literally skating, and because the rear has limited traction, the car is continues to push. The question of stability being faster in your hands is completley subjective. This may be the case, however there are better ways to introduce stability than to hinder front end grip and rear forward traction in such a way to consider this somehow universally faster. It's just a wonky incongruent setup that just so happens to be more stable. Put normal cambering and toe on the front, giving the car more optimal front grip and I imagine the car would be unstable again and very difficult to get the power down in any competitive sense. (beside the long term heat and wear imbalances this probably yields.)
Got about 2 tenths on my previous pb at Imola (I am top Chevy there on time trial to put it in perspective, nothing spectacular but still) and Daytona when I tried ealier today (both in about 3 laps, which is not really pushing). Also I just ran a quick and dirty test, but I have to drop it now, guests are coming in soon. This is how tyres look after 35 minutes of racing the AI at 110 going from P29 to P6 (no other safety car than the one on screen right now, which is also why I take the opportunity to stop my test here for now) : Rears have less wear or very close to the fronts with the setup posted above, not really the result I would expect after 35 minutes... In terms of lap time, I was about 1s of my pb with that very same setup, hovering between 34'7 and 35's, but well I had to fight 22 cars in those 35 minutes and also more fuel than in quali mode... Sure, it is Oulton Park, temps were around 25°C ambient, but I just used a racing scenario I had ready from a previous session with GrA cars. I will do more extensive tests accross the holiday season, possibly including some LFM as well.
That's the thing though, I do understand setups pretty well and of course it will not work with proper values at the front, that would be completly broken if it was the case. It should not be able to challenge those more realistic values though, which as I stated instil more instability and less confidence in the car. Yes, it might be due to my driving style maybe, but as I got this from other places and just gave it a try, to see how it feels, I don't think this is by chance just better for "me" only especially when folks call it specifically the meta in older version of the game engine (just talking about front end here, not the negative toe at the rear, this is definitely something I tried on my own). I also invite you to try that in any other sim, I don't feel it will pass the first corner... And I am not trying to dispute any real world physic behavior, but to figure out what are the limit of the game engine and how to extract the most performance out of the car in-game, while identifying faults for the dev to potentially look at.
Yeah, sorry, I still don't see any faults. You prefer a more stable car through the corners, as do I to be fair, and speaking of front camber in isolation, reducing camber is certainly a setup option that will achieve that. The min is -2.0, which is still some camber. Furthermore, reducing front toe to neutral, is a viable method to reduce initial turn in reactiveness. It should be important to note however, that other drivers might prefer a more responsive front and more front end cornering rotation, and something like this might feel limiting. Not to mention that reducing front camber simply serves to reduce front grip, which is problematic from an optimization standpoint. Putting the whole "meta" discussion into context, this term has become popularized more as of late as some people with PC2 experience have used it as some sort of critique of the engine that has transferred to AMS2, specifically from the perspective of TT specific setups. The goal with TT setups is to reduce drag as much as possible and allow cornering rotation to be induced by inputs so that power can be applied sooner. A car with minimal RW will be inherintly unstable and one way (of several) to keep this instability under control is to fine tune front end grip by reducing front camber . This leads to the conclusion that reducing front camber to the minimum as "faster". It is not. It is simply a way to offset inherint instabilities introduced by lack of rear downforce.
You keep focusing on TT and try to school me on how real physics work, but I clearly showed above that there was no issue on longer period in-game, so it is not just a "TT meta" thing. Anyway I feel discussion will go nowhere as any divergent opinion and feedback on the game engine is just shutdown immediately with real life analogy (on almost any topic really), as if the game engine is just a perfect representation of real life, which is just sad to see, even when some real world drivers give their feedback.
@shadow82 does bring up an interesting point that I have noticed on German Classic Group A cars. I've been using the telemetry/tire screen to tune and dail in the camber on the cars. Common tuning concepts says you should try to get the tire temps closer to even across the inside/middle/outside of the tires as you try to dail in your camber and toe. However I find myself greatly reducing the front and rear camber on both the BMW and Merc to trying to get the temps more even. As of right now I've dropped the front/rears to the lowest values the cars allow and the insides are still much higher than the outsides. I've tuned the cars to have a more neutral balance, even leaning toward a hint of mid corner oversteer. Is this normal? Could this be a bug in the way tire temps across the carcass are displayed? Knowing little about these cars in rear life, is lower camber the setup these cars normally race with? I assume the DTM BMW E30 has a McPhereson strut design in the front which means it probably has to run with a lot of static camber. I've tuned a lot of McPhereson strut cars in real life. But in game I find myself reducing the camber on the E30 to try to get even temps across the carcass. Dropping the camber doesn't seem to have a noticeable change in laptimes during my testing. If for example, going higher on -ve camber gives the fastest lap time, should we just ignore the tire temp data?
