I've been running F1 and taking some data from sessions at Sepang. I wanted to see if I'm bottoming out and if I should make changes accordingly. I scanned through laps and looked in the Suspension section (6th in the dropdown) and the 1st worksheet Susp Positions. At the bottom I have a line chart of each corner's suspension position in mm through the lap. In two places, one or two of the shocks is going into negative numbers. I assume that means that I've bottomed out the suspension, but how can it not just stop at 0? Does the additional travel below 0 simply indicate the downward pressure with no actual movement?

Also, if this just means that I'm slamming the suspension down, is there a separate way to see if the car itself is bottoming onto the track surface?

Is there anything that shows actual ground clearance?

In my old F1 Challenge '99-'02 days, the telemetry would show a graph of the cars ground clearance around the track. Running the cursor across the graph would show you in numbers what the clearance was at any point on the track. Bottoming would show up as "0.000"!

Very easy and simple, maybe you have something similar with the MoTeC software.

Dan

Motec has a Ride Height channel for each corner. Just map them out and if it reaches 0.0 you are hitting the track. If you talk to Tim about the F1 cars, do not raise the ride height go with stiffer springs until you stop hitting.

Also you can actually see the car lowering on long straights because of the aero package so watch for this also.

Edit: this refers to suspension bottoming out, not car.

Suspension position in MoTeC shows the amount the spring has compressed from it's normal state sitting outside the car - you'll see even if the car is stationary there will be a +ve compression, and on a long straight as downforce compresses the springs, that the ride height graphs will go down but the suspension plots will go up.

Which means the only way to know how much travel you have is too look for flat peaks (set packers 0 BTW).

Have a look at this image from a suspension travel test I did once: (ETCS BMW M3 car from memory)

You can see that the front/rear suspension bottoms out at 600mm/550mm respectively, so I put permanent lines here for this mod.

However.... many times the garage doesn't allow you to set the suspension soft enough to make full bottoming out easy to do (or even possible), so I edit the allowable values in the hdv file for this once-per-mod test.

I don't know how you're getting -ve values - are the suspension positions coming straight from rfactor or is your worksheet instead showing maths channel derived from them?

Ride heights are used for seeing if the car is bottoming out but are insufficient to see if your suspension is bottoming out. Two different evils.

If you are looking for a way to tell if you are bottoming out the use Ride Height. It still might show small negative numbers due to car position prediction calculations inherent in simulators, but it will give you the telemetry that you are looking for.

Jonty, can i spend some time with you on MSM or email to ask you some questions regarding your post with ride height and suspension. Check your race2play mail inbox.

Thanks

Phil

How do you fix suspension bottoming out. Raise the car? or Stiffen the springs?

Stiffening the springs. Raising the car doesn't stop the suspension from bottoming out, it just stops the car from bottoming out.

This works better:
http://race2play.com/homepage/show_posts/7371