I hope this is the right area for this question, apologies if it isn't.

Lately, I've been getting more and more into setup development. I've found that as useful as Tim's Setup guide is, for whatever reason I end up getting better results when I take educated guesses at what's going on with the car and then adjust that with trial and error. One thing I have noticed though, is that whilst my setups become more and more comfortable for me to drive I tend to always go the same way with adjustments.

For instance, if ever I have a balance problem I always go to the end of the car that's having the problem and soften/loosen/lower a setting to stop it. Particularly in the stock-cars. I find this confusing however because race cars are supposed to be these super-stiff monsters that flick across the track in an instance.

Is this tendancy to soften stuff to do with driver ability not being able to control a stiffer car or not having the reactions for it? Is it ignorance on my part or is it plain and simply the way I go about setting up a car and this is all perfectly normal. Most of me wants to go with the third option, because it makes the most sense to me. I always make adjustments in small increments and usually read up on a setting before adjusting it to make sure I have my definitions correct.

The last part of me hopes it's the first answer and that as I develop as a driver, competitor and engineer I'll naturally start developing stiffer setups to suit.

Opinions/advice greatly welcomed.

I have been doing this for decades and still go "softer" as my route in setups too Jon. There are occasions that, once tested, a stiffer setup has proven better for me but they are rare. It will be up to each driver of course.

One problem when comparing to real-world race car setup is that RL cars have to deal with *all* the physics of a spring/damper/tire/etc. The sims we use only have to deal with the physics that have been programmed by the developers and rarely do they take everything into account.

That's an interesting take on it. I know that when I first got back into computer games when I got Forza 2 one of the reasons why I lost interest in it was the fact that the car settings invariably started losing touch with reality when people started messing around with physics flaws.

Sims thus far seem to largely avoid this pit fall.