Micro machine challenge! The Results Are In!

Well now, I’m late to this party but some quick testing shows me that the specific dimensions of this engine actually restricts certain positions and formats for the bodies used. That’s a bit of a shame, as it could have opened up the competition slightly, but hey, there’s no knowing these things unless you extensively playtest the rules first.

Of those available, one combination in particular reigns supreme. I think a couple of you have found parts of it, one of you has found most of it, but none of you have squeezed out as much as you can get out of it. This may be where I come in hohoho :imp:

p.s. due to the incomplete way the simulation processes handling characteristics i.e. no dynamic acceleration in cornering, the best combination is also a slightly unrealistic one, but hey, work in progress.

so FF?

First Order Automotive would like to present the Imp.

It’s small…it’s green (in colour only)…and it’s got massively wide rear rims…

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Nope, while FF is currently overpowered due to lack of power understeer character, it’s not that. FF cars just won’t get from 0-100 in under 3s. Mine does 2.8.

How does it fell knowing that every time you show up to one of my challenges, you smear the floor with the other entries…

Some still have nightmares about @strop during the AMWEC '15

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That’s patently not true :stuck_out_tongue: if I recall correctly niall beat me overall in your FF challenge.

That said I’m fairly confident I’ve found the maximum performance that can be wrung out of your engine. It’s not much more than the others I’ve seen. Just curious, why aluminium block and head though? In 2016 everybody’s already moving to AlSi.

hmmm and here I thought I may be in with a chance, saying that this engine is now my WRC engine and she performs quite well

This is Basilisk. It’s small, but mighty.

It is also full of sharp pointy bits and the singularly most uncomfortable ride in the history of the automobile. I feel that it will take a lot more than bribes with sexy hypercars and sessions in poorly lit massage parlours to get our driver to agree to race it…

Pretty much letting the cat out of the bag early with this one. It’s got all the tricks I care to use from my old arsenal. The question is, will it be enough? I mean, the game is still changing and I’m pretty sure there are things I missed, or habits that are outdated…

…but if you do want to beat it around the track, you’ll want to be doing well under 1:09 on Airfield.

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The restrictions are in place so I could get a feel for the interest in this challenge. Since its been well received, I’ll open it up further.

Okay, I’m more than just a little worried here.

I thought I had a strong contender, but apparently you’ve managed to cut the weight out of that thing better than I’ve done.

I’ll admit, tuning with VVL is not my strong-suit.

So, things I can tell about both cars here… You’ve got 4 horsepower over mine, we’re both RWD, though I’m concerned by the number of vents you’ve got on the tail of that poor thing that we’re running different versions of RWD. Same materials for construction (not surprising, really). You went for basic seats, I went for sport seats. By the weight of that thing, I’m suspecting some things went down to -15, notably seats and safety.

What I do know is that mine is going to probably be the slowest car here. VVL kills me every time, I can never manage a decent tune with it. That, and I feel I made a big mistake by not staying true to my usual strategy for some things, and being picky on others. I knew I should’ve stayed away from sport seats and standard safety.

eh. if it comforts you. i just started my car around 10 min ago, and im getting low 1:13 right now.
doubt i will get any lower than 1:10

I won’t lie, I like big bu-

let’s try that again

I won’t lie, since Vos wanted us to go all out with the tech, I went the whole hog and took everything out of the car there was to take out. You could say that of every choice we had free to us, I went for minimal weight, and nearly maximal drivability.

There are a few things about RR formats (see @AirJordan’s car, the frame peeking through the bodywork is a dead giveaway) that make them good for this kind of challenge. They’re lighter. Most of the weight goes over the driving wheels. The rear wheels are being driven. The lighter you make the front end, the faster you can make the front end pivot.

By the same token, they’re horrendously difficult to tune because they’re prone to ridiculous amounts of oversteer. You simply can’t tune them the same way as you tune FR or MR cars. It’s kind of almost the opposite of turning an FF car except it makes even less sense.

When it comes to VVT + VVL, the trick is… for racing purposes only the VVL profile matters. Who cares how much low end you have unless you’re concerned about economy? (On that note I’m working on hypercars that will do 400km/h, 6:40 around Green Hell and all on 9L/100km or less lol). I’ll wager that’s why @squidhead said the VVL bit was really weird: it adds a lot of weight to the car and for our purposes here all it does is kind of get in the way. I just set the cam profile to as low as it would let me without knocking when I’d maxxed out everything else, because when the cam profile is nearly as high as the VVL and the VVL is maxxed out for performance, that’ll infinitesimally broaden your powerband. That’s not how anybody in their right mind would tune a VVT-L engine at all in the real world, mind you.

Besides, with an NA engine, the lovely race exhaust and super expensive injection system and throttle bodies, the powerband and response is already lovely so all that remains is to find out the maximum performance index, and the method for that is pretty simple because it’s NA (much more difficult with turbos). Then after that, once you’ve optimised everything else, you just need to fiddle with the gear ratios because they don’t always follow reason. That’s the part I kind of skimped on because I couldn’t be bothered testing 30 ratios for probably 0.02s gain. And I’m not sure that my choice of aero tuning is the fastest possible either given we’re playing with a mere 250hp (or, to give it some perspective, 350-450hp:ton). But one of my weaknesses is insisting on cars with zero lift, so that’s what I did. That probably cost me a bit more time too.

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True, tuning is the real pain here.
I think a have a bit bigger rims than you and mybe wider front tyre. As far as I remember, mid1.10 was my time. I could get better with shorter ratio but since I did not know what will count I made a compromise. Also it was my first RR suspension tune and after some time cutting 0.0X seconds I simply called it.
I could get 1 extra HP (still one shirt I see) but curve was better that way and yield better times with gearing I had. As far as aero goes, I do believe I reduced rear lift a bit but more than that hurt my time.

Your rims are probably quite a bit larger than mine. They look like 15". Mine’s 12". You’d be quite right to think using profiles of 55 and above for front wheels is crazy talk, but apparently the weight I saved made up for it. Also with such a light front end, I suspect I don’t have to worry about sidewall shearing nearly as much.

With the saved weight and slightly improved contact patch due to more give in the tyre, I even shaved 0.1s off the 0-100 time :laughing:

well downforce actually helped me here. and a clue, both of my cam profile are only a couple points apart.

im getting 250hp @ 9700 and i can’t tweak anymore. and i can’t seem to find where to lose another 20kg compared to strop’s

now on the Rear/Mid engine config. i always end up in a dillemma. bigger front tires or less oversteer. sure i could alleviate some oversteer with camber, but it only goes so far, and beyond that makes more sense to make the tires thinner.

btw, the year is 2016 right?

15 yeah…I tried bigger but my logic was against smaller…

This is the question. I’ve found that eliminating all oversteer is not wise as you’ll end up on bicycle tyres and it hurts your braking and turn in. Based on my questionably realistic experience with old Porsches in simulators, if you lift off or brake, the rear end goes all kinds of squirrelly anyway.

The best balance I’ve found somewhere around (but not on) the mark where estimated drivability is maximised, which involves a ton of terminal oversteer. This is one situation where clever suspension tuning really pays dividends, I slashed over a second off my Airfield time with that.

yep. i can see that. just i dunno what im doing with the suspension setup. it’s my achilles heel

Because of the ultra fast pivoting, if set up correctly, RR cars in automation are capable of insane levels of cornering. Which makes them very handy on technical tracks. I can come pretty close to breaking the real world record on the Pikes Peak track (which may or may not need recalibration, since I wrote it ages ago) with one.