For the second update of Project Ashgate we’re going to go through the setup plans to hopefully find a winning formula. We'll go from a base setup I would start with (for any car), then the slight changes I would make to that for the M08.
For me the setup is all about finding a balance between the front and the rear of the car. You want the car to stay tight round the corners without losing the rear and spinning off. A very important point to add is that maintenance should always be focused on before making changes to setup, you can drive around an understeering car but not something like a loose servo saver or failing ball race. We'll go through maintenance in a later update.
So when I set up a car initially, I always try to make the setup even all around. From there I can hopefully see which end of the car is not working and make small adjustments to correct it.
General Base Setup
For new cars I always go for a setup that’s as soft as possible and neutral. From there I try adjusting the springs before fine tuning other areas of the chassis. I class the following as neutral settings that will work on most cars.
- Camber: -2 degrees (Front & Rear)
- Ride height: 5mm (slightly higher at the rear)
- Droop: 2mm change (slightly more on the rear)
- Springs: Same spring rate, oil and piston holes in the shocks (as soft as the chassis weight will allow)
- Steering toe: 0 degrees of toe at the front
- Rear toe: -3 degrees of toe at the rear
- Ackerman & roll centre: Standard settings from the manual
As this is a very unique RWD chassis I'm going to try and adjust these startup setting slightly. I plan to make the following initial changes:
Slightly thicker shock oil at the rear as recommended by everyone. This makes sense to me as all the power is being transferred to the rear tyres. Adding thicker oil should help soften the response of that power.
Only 1.5 degrees of camber because the chassis is narrow and Eckington track is slow and tight. For bigger/faster tracks I would push the camber to -2 degrees as the car will end up leaning more onto the tyres. I only ever use -1.5 or -2 degrees of camber.
Testing
My one and only test was on 17 July. The initial set up was surprisingly good. I was expecting the rear of the car to be very aggressive and snappy but it ended up the complete opposite. The rear was almost too grippy causing the car to understeer. It felt like I was losing a lot of time in corner entry as I had to really slow the car down. Corner exit and tight hairpins felt great, they really seem to suit the RWD. I felt one of the main problems was the diff, the loose setup (thin oil) looked to be sapping a lot of the acceleration. But this wasn't a change I had time to correct at the race meeting. The final thing to note was that there was zero change in the cars handling throughout the meeting. I was about 0.5 seconds off the best lap time in every round. The car was extremely consistent and I made very little mistakes across the whole meeting.
The only change I'm going to make for round 1 is to double the thickness of the diff oil. The chassis will be running a different body shell which could potentially fix the understeering problem. If there are no improvements after the first round then I might try a softer compound front tyre. My hopes a very high with this chassis, the initial pace feels a lot higher than I expected and I still have a lot to experiment with.
The Next update will be how I got on at Round 1 of the Clubman 3 series. If you have any questions about setups for Eckington please speak to Steve Baggley in the SRC team.
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