The whole idea behind qualifying is to show your outright speed, get as far up the grid, all to make your race that much easier to [hopefully] win. Your qualifying lap(s) are likely the most important lap(s) of the race, not only due to a literal shorter race length but also the safety aspect of being up at the front of the pack during the most dangerous time of any race – the start. So how do you go about maximizing your setup to qualifying as high as possible? There is some vital info that has to be asked and answered before we can start; Is this an oval track or road course? Is the qualifying session open to all cars on track, or one at a time? Is the qualifying a single-lap or timed session? These all play a part in formulating your approach on altering your race setup into a good qualifying setup.
Oval Racing Qualifying
First, lets talk about a traditional NASCAR-style oval track qualifying session. You are out there on your own and only for a very short number of laps. For that reason you might want to make a few changes to your existing race setup to go faster over a single lap, and to get your car up to maximum grip level as soon as possible.
As everyone knows, you can gain speed by sacrificing long-run safety and wear. Specifically, the engine life as it is unimportant in the qualifying session. By altering your final gear ration to get up to top-speed faster, down the straights, you can gain some time without any real effort or negative effect on your chassis setup handling. Grille tape can be increased, and any other ducting can be closed up to make your car as slippery through the air as possible to provide even more speed down the straights as well as grip through the corners. These aero changes can alter how your car will handle in the corners, so may require some extra tuning to get the car back to the feel you want.
Let’s talk about the tires. You have worked hard on your race setup to equalize the temperatures using camber and tire pressures. Unfortunately, all of that hard work isn’t going to apply here as the single-lap qualifying session is too short to allow the tires to get to full tire pressure, so your temperatures (and grip levels) will be off. You may have to increase your tire pressures so they can get to their optimal tire pressures in that shorter time frame. It takes heat to build up your pressures, and if you only have a single lap to get the heat in the tires, you wont achieve your optimal pressures in time, so they need a head start of a little more pressure. How much additional pressure is what you need to find. Only testing and practice of qualifying runs will tell you. And to complicate it even further, an increase in tire pressure brings an increase to the spring rate of the chassis. This means you may need to compensate by reducing your springs (ever so slightly) to regain that feel that you worked so hard to get in previous testing and tuning.
Reducing weight will also make you go faster. Fuel load is pretty much the only way we have to reduce weight in our sim-cars. However, simply reducing the fuel without understanding of how it will change you car, cold do more harm than good. With a lighter fuel load in the car, you have less weight in the rear of the car (assuming the fuel tank is in the rear) which will cause it to tighten up in the corner. So you may want to tweak your setup to loosen the car up. Depending on the track type, you might do this with the springs, anti-roll bar, trackbar, etc.
Road Racing Qualifying
Everything from the above paragraphs still apply to a one-lap flier on a road course, but how about a longer timed session? First, let’s make a quick distinction. There are timed sessions in which the teams/drivers could simply treat them as multiple single-lap qualifying runs – such as what happens in Formula 1. Although the teams have 10+ minutes in each session, they rarely fuel up for any more than a single lap flier. And then there are the longer timed sessions on which teams go out to perform multiple laps, to get the tires and brakes up to full operating temperature before thee driver can set a proper qualifying lap. You can still go aggressive with the gearing, radiator opening, brake ducts, etc but not as much as if it were a single lap qualifying. Taking it too far can result in excessive heat buildup in the motor or brakes, both of which will cause lower performance.
Tire pressures may want to be left as they are on your race setup. In a longer timed session, you have the added time on track so you can build up the tire temperatures and pressures to their normal optimal grip levels. You would not want to add tire pressures only to find that your tires then fall outside their optimal after the warm-up laps. With more cars on track it may be more difficult to get a clean fast lap, so the longer you can stay out with your brakes and tires in their optimal ranges, the better chance you have of getting that clean track for an entire lap.
Of course, a lighter fuel load will gain you some time, but again – you may have to tweak your general setup to account for less weight in the rear of your car, shifting the grip balance towards the rear. A lighter fuel load also means you can adjust your ride height to lower the center of gravity for better cornering, and less aero drag on the straights. Be aware, some rear-engine cars have fuel tanks in the front which will cause the opposite effects.
In addition to the above changes, a road car has some additional options to tune such as the rev limiter and even engine modes or boost levels. Once again, you can sacrifice engine and brake life to gain another few tenths for a better position or two (or more).
Summary
In the end you want your qualifying setup to *feel* the same as your race setup over a short time frame. The alterations to your race setup change only how aggressively the car will attack the track. You can sacrifice some long-term wear (heat, brakes, engine) for more speed in the corners and straights, but you want to go out there with a setup you *know* and are comfortable with. Driver comfort plays a larger roll in lowering lap times than any setup changes. The more comfortable a driver is behind the wheel, the further he/she will drive into a corner under braking and the sooner he/she will get back on the throttle at corner exit.
Good luck, and happy pole hunting.
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Does any of your SOftware work with the new Next Gen nascar cars?
aboslutely