Good morning, afternoon or whatever time it is when you are reading, today I will be presenting a small collection of knowledge for basic car tuning in BeamNG.Drive. If you may recall from the tuning menu, there are quite a few options available to tinker around with, and you probably don't know what alot of them do to your cars handling. *Disclaimer* I am not a professional car tuner in any way, all this knowledge comes from testing and some research on the web. +If needed, I can make a small video explaining everything in the future.+ +I might also code a small CMD program to help you tune your cars.+ Lets start with some easy stuff then: Spoiler: Tyres If you didn´t know, the tires are the only thing that touch the road on your car (hopefully) In order to provide decent grip, those tires should have as much rubber touching the road as possible at all times. Tire Pressure: Tyre pressure effects the rubber itself. Less pressure means the contact patch gets bigger, but you also loose precision in steering movements and also gain friction, so you might have less top-speed, since the rubber is more "sluggish" and moves around more. With proper tyre temperature simulation it would also mean more wear and higher temperature on the actual tyre. Usually for street tyres 21PSI is ok, maybe go lower on race tyres, but not below 16-ish. (Do to a bug in the game these values are surprisingly low, Thanks to @MarkosRuiz for pointing it out!) On RWD cars, have a lower pressure than in the front, to gain more traction, around 1 or 1.5 PSI less than up front should be good. Track Offset: Offset is quite obvious what it does, it tucks the wheels either out or in. A wider track means more stability, since your car's "effective area" is larger, a slimer track width makes your car more agile, but also more prone to over or understeering. From my experience it dosen't affect handling all too much, so just set it so your wheels don't poke out the fenders half a meter on each side. Spoiler: Brakes Your brakes (not breaks) stop your car. They shouldn't be overlooked, especially in tuned vehicles. #Requirement: Race brake discs# Brake Bias: The brake bias determines how much brake force is delivered to the front or rear of your car. Normally, a car has a weight distribution of around 55-45 or 50-50 in a perfect car. Since, under braking, you are experiencing something called "weight transfer"or "weight-shift", more weight from the car goes to the front, under heavy braking that might be 75% of the cars total mass. But, before you go set your brake bias to 75%, you may want to consider lock ups. When the front wheels lock up under braking, you can't steer at all, when the rear locks up, it basically acts like a makeshift handbrake.. (under the assumtion you don't have ABS) In an ideal case, you want all 4 wheels to lock up at the same time. Find a straight stretch of road, and test this. Usually a value of 67-70% is fine in a front engine-rear wheel drive car. Brake force: The brake force determines how much overall brake force you get. If you have control in your right foot, you should be able to leave it on 100%, so no need to touch it. Spoiler: Transmission/Differential/Engine General info: I´ll put this into the same category, since it's pretty easy to understand Engine: #Requirements: Adjustable ECu and or Stage 3 Turbocharger# RPM Limiter: This is basically just the time it takes for the car to "accept" throttle input after hitting redline, higher values mean it takes longer, lower values mean it bounces off the rev-limiter faster. RPM-limit: This should be self explaining. Keep your engine block in mind while tweaking this. The Heavy / Ultra-Heavy duty blocks can't take as many revs as the Performance engine blocks. Boost pressure: Same as the RPM limit. Keep in mind what engine block you have. Performance blocks "break" faster with more boost pressure while Heavy duty blocks can take more boost. It obviously also effects your cars performance. Transmission: #Requirements: Race Transmission# The transmission lets you adjust your gear ratios. What's that? Well, each gear has a different gear ratio to allow smoother and more efficient acceleration. Simply put. A higher value gives you shorter gears, but better acceleration (not if you have a 1000hp car and put first gear to 5:1) A lower value gives you a higher top speed for that gear in turn for some acceleartion loss. Why? The ratio basically means: X amount of roations on the engine crankshaft to turn the gear in the transmission once. Say, 4:1 gear 1 ratio. 4 rotarions on the engine crankshaft = 1 rotation for first gear in the transmission. We have succesfully quadtrupled our torque. Tuning advice? Leave it as it is, and tune the diffential final drive, it's alot easier. Tho, if you want to do drag racing, tuning each gear to be more effective is curcial. Make sure every gear shift is in the "ideal zone", meaning at the peak performance of your engines toruqe curve. You can use the in-game torque curve to check this. Differentials: Diffs. are a fun topic. I'll split between AWD and RWD cars for now, FWD and RWD are similar, tho require different tuning. RWD: #Requirements: Race Adjustable Diff and Adjustable Final Drive (in differential submenu)# On a RWD (Rear wheel drive) car, you only have 1 differential for the 2 rear wheels. It basically "splits" the power coming from the transmission to both wheels. Final drive: This is basically a very simplified version of the transmission gearing. Lower values mean more speed, lower values more acceleration and shorter gears. For street use, values between 4.1 and 3.8 are just fine. For top speed runs, I would advice tuning the transmission gearing. Power and Coast Lock: The lock rate determines how much power difference there can be between the wheels: 0% aka. "Open Diff." basically means, 1 wheel can turn at light speed, the other one could spin in reverse and nobody would care. Not good for cornering since you are loosing valueable power and increase tyre wear. 100% or "Welded Diff." Both wheels MUST spin at the same speed, no matter what. This is good for drifting, but not for circuit or street racing. You might want some speed difference between inside and outside wheel to allow good cornering. Power lock rate = When you are on throttle Coast lock rate = When you are coasting / braking What does that mean for tuning then? Well, you need to find a happy medium. Too much lock, and the inside wheel spins too fast and adds friction and also making the car unstable. Too little lock and the inside wheel wastes power by doing "one tyre fire" all the way. Around 40-50% is fine for most applications Go for around 85% on drift builds. AWD: Most settings here actually do the same as for the RWD cars. Only you got Front, Rear and Center Diffs now. Front Diff: Set it so the power lock rate is slightly lower then the rear. If the car has problems with understeer, try to increase or lower the value for front diffs. This may be tuned for FWD cars aswell. If your cars dosen't turn efficiently, increase the lock rate, if it is terminally understeering, try to reduce engine power or lock rate, around 40-60% on FWD cars is ok good # Center Diff: Now it gets interesting. The center diff determines how much power each axle recieves Base Torque Split: How much power should go to the rear wheels. Usually a value between 55% and 65% is ok. If your car is understeering, try to increase the base torque, if there is too much oversteer, put that value more towards 50%. Power and Coast Lock: It really is just the same as for front and rear diffs. this time only for the entire axle. So, 100% basically means, that the axels always recieve that 50-50 or 60-40 power split. 0% means, the power is looking for the easiest way to "fly away" Power and Coast are the same as for rear and front diff. As for tuning, a 40% split may work, if you have too much understeer, try to decrease that value a bit. Spoiler: Suspension setup Now there will be some math and logcial thinking and quantum mecha... Just kidding, this is quite easy, just sit tight and let me explain. #Requirements: Race Suspension and Race Sway bars# Even tho the Suspension tab looks mean and complex, it really isnt. Spring Height: The height determines how you car is sitting on the road. No, you shouldn't slam it to the ground as it actually effects your driving. Bottoming out or not having enough suspension travel due to lowered suspension can have rather negative effect on the cars performance and cornering ability. Try to keep that in mind, usually -0.025 as a "maximum" lowering value is good. ARB Spring Rate: ARBs or, your Anti Roll Bars determine how much or how little body roll your car has, more body roll means more weight shifting around in corners. But they also serve the purpose of giving you a little more corner grip, due to that roll. Wheel Camber and ARB stiffness need to be adjusted basically together. Oversteering: If you car is oversteering in high speed or even low speed corners, try to decrease the rear ARB stiffness a bit. For drift builds, increase it to make your rear end more lively Understeering: Same here, only for the front ARBs, try and soften them a bit and or increase rear ARB stiffness. Spring Rate / Stiffness: The spring stiffness determines how stiff or soft your suspension setup is. Softer springs of course make it more comfortable but also more prone to body roll and loss of control, due to that weight transfering. On the other hand, making it too stiff makes your car react crazy on bumps or pot-holes. So try and find something suitable for the road you are driving on. Generally the stock setting is ok for now. Tho a more stiff setup is ok for smooth roads or race tracks to take advantage of wheel camber. Rebound Damping: This setting is the one where math is involved. This sets how quickly your shock absorber reacts to sudden extension from e.g. driving over a bump. #A basic tune is as follows:# Take the Maximum value from the rebound damping, MINUS the Minimum setting. In the 200BXs case its "25000 minus 500" for the front and "20000 minus 500" for the rear Now, look up the weight distribution for the car, there is an App in game called "Weight distribution" Take the % for the FL and FR wheel, combine them. 27+26 is 53% Rear would be 47% then. Make sure your car is standing on a level surface for best resuslts! Now, take your previous calculations, and MULTIPLY them by that percentage. So Front: 24500 x 0.53 = 12985 Rear: 19500 x 0.47 = 9165 And now ADD the Minimum value (500) on top of that Front Rebound Damping: 13485 N/m/s Rear Rebound Damping: 9665 N/m/s Formula: (Max RD-Setting - Min RD Setting) x Weight% + Min RD Setting Remember: This is just a base line. You can change stuff around if you want, but I will explain this in more detail later. Bump Damping: This determines how quick your shock absorber compresses when driving over a bump. General rule of thumb: Take your Rebound damping results and multiply them by a value between 55 and 65% so 0.55 - 0.65 You can adjust it higher or lower depending on how bad your setup is. I usually go with 0.57 as a base. Spoiler: Allignment Wheel allignment is probably the most important thing. All these settings have a good amount of effect on handling, so handle them with care. Camber: You should be familiar with camber. No? Let me help: Camber helps the wheels to increase surface area of the rubber while being in a corner. Too much positive or negative camber is bad tho. Try to adjust front camber first, as it is more significant than rear camber. Try adding more slowly. When the car feels unstable or it starts to understeer, decrease the camber on your wheels. In case the car oversteers, try to reduce rear camber if you have added any. Usually you have a bit more camber up front than on the rear. A good baseline is either 0% or -5% in game for the front and 0% in the back. Caster: Caster describes the angle of you steering axis. More caster means, you have more "Active camber". This is usually something you want in a drift car as it gives you more play without adding massive camber settings" In Beam, 20% value is a good start, you can try to increase it if you have trouble with tighter corners and dont want to add more front camber. Toe: Toe is something you need to be careful with as it changes the cars characteristics quite alot. Toe In gives your car more stability under braking and on a straight line, tho reduces your turn-in speed and general cornering ability Toe Out increases your turn in speed up front, but makes your car more tail-happy when braking. It´s also useful for drifting because the outside tyre can get more steering angle during full countersteer. Good baseline again is to start at 0% and slowly adjust it. Spoiler: Problems with Handling? Look here! In case you are having problems with your handling, either oversteer or understeer: Oversteer: Decrease Rear ARB stiffness. Go in 2000 steps Add more Toe-In (Positive value) 2% steps, toe is quite sensitive Decrease Rear Rebound Damping Go in 500 steps More Forward torque on AWD cars Tweak Rear Diff power lock rate (Take away or add 5%) Understeer: Decrease Front ARB or Spring stiffness Increase Front Bump Damping Lower Front Rebound Lower Diff lock More torque split towards rear (AWD cars) Others: Adjust your Spring Stiffness (Try softer and stiffer settings, 5000 steps usually yield a result) Check Allignment (Maybe too much camber or toe) Adjust Rebound and Bump Damping Different Tyre widths or different tires I hope this thread was somewhat helpful, and understandable. If you have any reports to make, please be helpful and don't say stuff like "Uhg, you don't know sh*t about tuning, stfu"... I can't improve from flame storms... As said above, I might code a small CMD tuning program in the future and or make a video explaining everything with more details. Also keep in mind, these tuning settings won't make you 20 seconds faster. At the end of the day, it all depends on the driver. Without being able to drive fast naturally, good tuning won't help much. Thanks, Have a good day ~NistingurA.
Know that we have diesels I wish we could adjust the fuel and stuff like with a programmer and make them roll more coal plus I think a VGT turbo would be nice
The ability to roll coal would only satisfy a small niche. It’d take too much time to be reasonable- what’s the point if only a couple people want something?
This is really impressive work seriously we need more of this on the forums of people who sorta understand how to tune a car correctly!
Thanks mate, really appreciate your feedback on this. I will probably expand the first post in the future and add slight tuning tips for different builds (drift, grip, drag offroad etc.)
Some updates ago, in the tuning tab there was a tire pressure indicator in real time, the wiki says street tires should be at 32PSI. By default they are at 30PSI but at the tab they show 41PSI, so you needed to set the pressure at 21PSI for them to be at 32PSI in reality. This tab was removed because of a bug and now we can't see it, but I keep setting up the pressure at 23PSI, more or less the tab will be showing 34PSI Quote from the WIki: https://wiki.beamng.com/PressureWheels
I'd like to see snap oversteer addressed a little bit, namely what you can check/do to fix it. I've always had trouble with it, from what I gather it's got something to do with roll bars. Great guide thus far! I'll add if you tune the rear spring rate too stiff for the car, and/or the ratio with the front (out of balance) this will negatively affect braking a ton. If Rear damper rebound is softer than normal/required, braking can be tricky and finicky as the weight shifted immediately forward on hard braking, sometimes even the rear wheels can lift off the ground. This is bad because less friction of the rear wheels with the ground, and overloading the front = braking disaster waiting to happen on uneven surface/incline.
Thing. How to use the Thing (there are some very limited tips inside the thing too): Spoiler Copy pasta from one pm I sent. You enter corner weights in kg to cells A4 to A7, first fronts and then rears, you should then have proper weight balance laid out. Next unsprung mass for one wheel, I have been lazy for 18 years or so and still haven't made that for each corner or even to each end, so there is just one input like during last 18 years of life of this little spreadsheet. Another thing I have not got around is suspension frequency, still I need to input spring rates manually and see if I come up with proper frequency, while other way around would be better, but it has been like that for last 18 years, feel free to improve that for better quality of life. So motion ratio you need to figure out from the car, then you need to figure out if your dampers are going to work on same motion ratio as your springs, with coilovers that hopefully is the case, or one might have slight issue somewhere... Critical damping is then important bit, don't do dampers that are more damping than critical damping, most of the time. Usually 80% of critical has worked well for me, you can see those numbers 80 around the spreadsheet, change those to change that 80% of critical damping to something else if needed.
So.... anyone interested in doing a bit of research into why the eSBR 300 handles so much worse than the ICE SBR? I would guess it is a unhealthy combination of being an ICE car which an electric drivetrain attached to it. I estimate that center of mass is slightly higher. It probably doesnt help that it is a rear engine ICE car that is particularly ill suited for a conversion. Then there is the issue that the aft wheels are thicker than the front wheels. All of those issues combined lead to a notable worse cornering performance compared to the gasoline ones. Will play arround with the settings and trying to make it handle better.
Tire pressure, springs, dampers and ARB, just throw those of ICE version into eSBR and it starts to behave better. Open diff and lot of instant torque, with throttle giving loads of amps very easily is causing hammering the throttle effect when not intended, throttle is almost like on/off switch with electric one, I did end up setting very non linear throttle input curve. ESC is very bugged out with eSBR too, that is better kept off with ICE and eSBR variants. Also as suspension setup is super stiff with eSBR with very stiff ARB and there is open diff with lot of torque, that results inner tire loosing traction very easily. With SBR I prefer base model suspension setup even for sportier ones, I guess many SBR models are setup so stiff for them to feel more modern and sporty, but I like to tune them lot softer. Stiffer springs and stiffer ARB are usually always reducing grip, but give more instant control, there is always magical perfect compromise between control and grip, for me SBR works better when suspension is softened up considerably.
1. Motor controller problem, the torque is very high at low speeds regardless of throttle position 2. Laggy ESC/TC, this problem worsens ICE vehicles' handling too, and in an EV with instant torque, the jerkiness is further exaggerated. 3. Weight balance, the ICE SBR4 is tail heavy because of the rear mounted engine. In the eSBR, the battery in heavier than the motor so the eSBR 300 is less tail heavy, but still a rear-engined RWD car. The suspension needs to be retuned. 4. Open differential, in an open differentialed car, the cornering traction is capped by the inner wheel, which reduce handling and increase the odds of loss of control, especially when the inner wheel starts to slip and grip repeatedly.
Hi all. If anyone is interested, here is my config of a very fast K series(on sport tires) Config: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hMpbtikg_z2qSsYH9Hn7h21tkdIEbvGg It's good at 0-100 and 0-200 but after 350 the car loses acceleration and the maximum speed is only 409. My dream is to reach 450-500 and to improve acceleration from 350 to maximum speed. It easily makes it faster but it will start to leave endless tire marks on the asphalt((( The beauty of my configuration is that it leaves no traces with very fast acceleration))) Maybe someone wants to improve it?) I believe that this car can be made much better...
