In his review of my car for CSR26, @abg7 made a number of criticisms that I’m keen to deal with:
The car in question was the Erin Scarlet, which is supposed to be my company’s best car, however after reading this, I don’t think it’s as good as it could be.
So, I need some other opinions and tips on what to do.
The Scarlet is meant to be the ultimate driver’s car. It is supposed to be as good on a track as it is on the road, and should be absolutely brilliant to drive. While it’s not an out-and-out track machine, it should be sporty and competitive. But at the same time, it needs to retain ease of use and drivability.
How then would you improve it to fit this bill, and how would you deal with the points made in the review above?
Well I can’t download it right now, but what were you exactly trying to make? A full on sports car (or muscle however you look at it) like a Corvette C7, or a GT like the Aston Martin DB11? @Razyx gave me some tips on building a GT car a while ago and you know how good he is a building cars ;).
Nah… Ferrari make V8’s that rev to 8500rpm so what’s the big issue with another 1000rpm? Non-issue IMO.
Put a 7 speed gearbox in, widen the ratio’s slightly, BAM!!! You might reduce wheelspin a bit! Maybe you could widen the rear tyres a bit but the tyre width is kinda wide for RL cars…
He’s never drive a car before so he doesn’t yet realise that when you want to go fast, a fiddly stereo just gets in the way! Standard stereos do exactly what’s needed; higher level stuff adds more speakers/woofers and allows for more fine-tuning, that’s it.
Raise the car or stiffen the springs until there is no bottoming out. This is an easy fix and the original problem could have been caused by a export glitch!
Understeer keeps the driver alive! As per my prior comment, this reveals abg7’s lack of driving knowledge. Push too hard you get understeer, drive on the street you WANT understeer! A car that oversteers all the time is a death-trap!
This is purely subjective but has a basis in truth. A Ferrari 488 Italia isn’t a supercar; it’s a top shelf sports car. It’s insanely fast but it lacks the nebulous last degree of exclusivity that defines a super or hypercar from their lesser brethren. Think Gallardo vs. Murcielago…
IMO, your car is fine apart from perhaps some suspension fine-tuning and I wouldn’t worry so much!
PM sent. I didn’t go into too much detail about it, didn’t really finetune the thing, I also did not touch the quality sliders (except lowering quality on some).
Now on to the things I’d change for a better review
507 hp was not enough (Never is). I lowered the fuel consumption and added a bit power by remapping the thing. Also the exhaust system got reworked to save about 5kg worth of weight.
Dual clutch is too heavy, I’d go with a manual, but I went with just single clutch not to deviate from the set vision of the car
The tires are a problem, the flared arches helped, but still the rear is good enough while the front is awfully skinny. I also did not go with the slicks, but did go with CF wheels. There’s nothing you can do to fix this unless you go skinny rear tires, and that will destroy grip and you’ll end up losing performance
I’ve reworked the brakes to be as efficient as need be with the new car weight. I also switched to carbon rotors for best weight savings
Infotainment and interior are too heavy. I did not change the type of the interior, since it’s a GT, not a racecar, but I did remove all the + from it’s quality. I also did the same with the safety equipment.
The active-adaptive-wank-o-matic-festive suspensions are the cancer of modern cars if you’re looking for honest sporty behaviour, so we’ve cut that stuff out aswell, going for a simpler setup which will be just as effective and much lighter. I’ve also given the suspension a more aggressive setup, since the car still isn’t a featherweight, and needs to be composed.
There was no real benefit from the active cooling, so we lost that too. To save even more weight.
All in all, I’d say you’re starting with the wrong body if you’re looking for supercar experience, but as a GT this should do.
I did some changes to it and now it’s a bit better. I think i shaved off 4 seconds on the test track time
It’s a nice car, but i changed some sliders around, mostly lowered some, but upped the slider for the tires, made the front tires wider, and tuned the suspension and the aero. And i did a small checkup on the engine too, and found some more horses under the hood, and a smoother torque-curve.
Key changes:
Slightly lowered compression, increased ignition timing
Lowered cam profile for better economy & drivability
Muffler bypass with dual reverse flow, so you can be loud when you want it and quiet when you need it
Lowered gear spacing for less wheelspin
245 tires all around for more oversteer and lower costs, bigger rims for better handling and bigger brakes
Rebalanced brakes (stronger in front)
Overhauled suspension (stiffer springs, more oversteer)
I didn’t mess with aero but you can probably get a few more points out of that too
Wow guys! Thank you for the response. Won’t be able to look at the improved cars you’ve sent me until later but I’ll certainly be looking at all of them
Probably ought to have made it clearer that this actually isn’t meant to be a supercar, I just entered into a supercar competition Speaking of which…
@Speedemon Defitnetley more sports car. Think Jaguar F-Type but larger and more powerful. And I’ll ask Razyx if I ever need help with a GT car
@HighOctaneLove Thanks for the feedback, I think I need to look at some real-world ride heights for sports cars. I’ve always built them thinking that they need to be that low in game in order to be realistic.
@squidhead Excellent, thank you very much! Might have to add a few more trim levels to account for not having the active suspension/different gearboxes etc.
@gridghost Thank-yee, never been sure about putting too much quality on tires as it usually ends up costing more to service. But I guess that’s something to be expected on this sort of car
@phale Very nice, thanks! Question (anyone can answer this), do any of you judge how hard a car to drive is based on the ratio of Drivability to Sportiness, or is that just me? When I was building the car, I did end up with a few setups where I had a higher sportiness than drivability and felt that that would make it harder to drive, so I went against it.
Okay so. I didn’t expect to do much but then I pretty much reengineered the whole car.
I halved the cost to make the thing by reducing the quality tab. Minimum reliability loss and goes round Automation track very nearly as quickly. While also putting on a couple of turbochargers.
Look at it for yourself. I don’t want to explain much.
No, drivability is drivability and sportiness is sportiness. They are both graded on completely arbitrary scales, so their relative ratio is also totally arbitrary. Before the last update the ratio would have been different.
@phale I’ll treat those as such from now on then, makes a bit more sense!
Think I’ve settled on an improvement. I’ve sacrificed on lap times a bit, it’ll now only do a 2:07.70 round the ATT, but this version doesn’t need to be a track beast. Rather, I’ll release a super lightweight version similar to @squidhead’s KHT tuned version in the future, and in the mean time this can be the more laid back everyday sports car.
Changes:
Engine reworked with lower cam profile, lower compression and higher ignition timing. Now produces 519 hp.
7 Speed SCT gearbox, with 18.6% wheelspin, 0-60 in 3.8 seconds and a top speed of 220mph.
245/265 F/R 18" wheels with slightly thinner tires.
Large and more aggresive front brakes
Re-worked aero
No quality sliders on interior, driver assistance or safety to save ~40 kg
Standard springs with semi-active dampers and active sway bars, re tuned so that there is no bottom out at all.
All in all, I think the change has worked, plus it’s almost £10k cheaper now with the same profit percentage.
Relatively speaking, i’m an amateur, but if there’s one thing I can say… avoid all active suspension components like the plague. It just adds cost and weight for little to no return. Do correct me if I’m wrong.
Active is pushing the limits - so as all such things it is not very profitable, but in some cases there is no better choice Although I use it in most cases (Zavir) because of the lore. But in Hypera it really added speed. Or, maybe I could achieve the same same with a different tuning and less active components, but in Niddhogg there is really not much space left for suspension tuning.
And you reveal the silver lining to the cloud of abg7’s controversy; you learnt how to tune cars better!!!
Plus savvy readers of this thread can learn some important points as well (although not from my post as much; I was very mad at abg7’s poor reviewing style…).
My only suggestion if you didn’t already is to stroke the engine out until just before it affects reliability, then shrink the bore down if you still want a 3.8 liter, it makes for a lighter engine overall though it might raise the peak power’s rpm a bit.
Thanks for the tip, I may have a play around with that, though I do like the very high redline (which surely would be impact by reducing how over-square it is?)
I played around a bit last night. With the quality in your bottom end you can stroke it to 74 mm(I think) safely, combined with a larger single exhaust pipe and dual baffled mufflers you can shave 8-10 kilos, free up some octane( from the smaller bore), and save money.
Speaking of which…
