5.6 Setup the CarIntroductionIn this section we will set up the car bt 1 for the qualifying on g-track-3. The goal is that you get a feeling for the parameters you can change. I don't recommend you to put too much effort in car setups yet, because if you modify the driver or write one from scratch it will not need the same setups. We do the test runs in the practice mode, set laps to 2 and display to normal so that you can analyse the behaviour. You will need to edit the file "0/practice/g-track-3.xml" (relative to the bt directory). To deploy the changed setup you have to run "make install" from the directory "0/practice". Test Drive 1First we run a test without any changes. The lap time is 1:08:86.
You can see on picture 1 the heavy understeering of the car in this narrow turn. It
happens in
the acceleration part of it, so we can conclude that the "Limited Slip"
differential on the
driven rear wheels disallows us to pass the turn. So we will set the differential to
type "Free".
On picture 2 you can see the result of the understeering. The car leaves the track
and starts skidding.
Test Drive 2The resulting lap time is 1:07:85, that's 1.01 seconds faster than the previous result.
Like you can see on picture 5 we pass this turn now fine without any skidmarks or other trouble. But we face a new problem on the next turn like you can see on the pictures 6, 7 and 8. If you watch the practice session carefully you can observe that the reason for this are locking front wheels. We can conclude that we have to move the braking balance toward the rear wheels and to reduce the pressure.
Test Drive 3The resulting lap time is 1:07:03, that's 1.83 seconds faster than the first result. The car stays now quite good on the track so you can start the refinement of the setup. After I changed the gearbox, suspension, brake and rear wing settings I got finally a 1:05:95, that's 2.88 seconds faster than the default setup. Play now with different values to get a feeling for the settings. An approach to find the optimal values is:
You have also to keep an eye on the damage you get per lap. Because you drive just a few laps in the qualifying it doesn't matter if you get some damage. But for long races it can be a problem. Damage causes additional drag and if it reaches a certain limit your car is not able to drive further. DownloadsIn case you got lost, you can download my robot for TORCS 1.2.0 or later. FeedbackLet me know if you read this chapter and your thoughts about it. Please send me also spelling, grammar, math and code corrections. Thank you for the feedback. Summary
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