Could use help tuning my 280ZX

Alright! So I took the newly restyled car file (which includes oppositelock’s GSI Tune) and lowered it to it’s lowest ride height (~200mm) and exported it to BeamNG.

This car is an absolute blast to drive now. Just the right amount of power, handles pretty well (will handle better with practice) and looks amazing in motion. Still noticeable body roll/bounce, but I wonder if that has more to do with BeamNG physics than the car itself.

The car will still spin itself around if you don’t enter a corner properly and you try to correct but if you drive based on the following steps the car responds predictably.
Step 1: BRAKE coming up to the turn and for the love of sheet metal DO NOT give the car any steering input while braking!
Step 2: Enter the turn at a responsible entry speed giving no brake input and little to no accelerator.
Step 3: Give it the gas coming out of the corner with minimal corrective steering and it tracks nicely.

To anyone who tries driving this car in BeamNG, remember that you do NOT have ABS or Traction control, so DON’T mash the gas to the floor from a dead stop because it will spin the tires (more sound and smoke than forward progress) and DON’T slam the brake pedal, the brakes WILL lock up!

But in the course of a few days, you guys have turned my mediocre attempt at a 280ZX into something that looks beautiful and is really fun to drive. I think it handles far better than pretty much all the stock cars in BeamNG.

One other thing to note. For those drivers that are inclined to drift, it is really easy to get this car sideways going into a corner and I’ve managed to pull off a couple of drifts by total accident (I was learning to corner).

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Figured I should take some game recording of me driving the car around a track in BeamNG.

Enjoy!

Glad you’re enjoying the tune! I know it could still use some improvement, I put it together in only a couple of hours. Plus, it was only intended to emulate the stock vehicle rather than optimize performance. I toyed around with the car a bit more and came up with a setting for a dual purpose street and track type coilover setup. Puts it around 1.8 hertz front and 2.0 rear with a damping ratio of roughly 0.40, a little bit closer to your initial tune. Automation camber settings don’t translate directly into Beam, but this should bump the front from 1.0 degrees to 1.5 for a little more front end grip and keep the rear at 2.0. Plus, I realized the brakes are still too rear biased, decreasing the rear rotor size from 275 mm to 250 mm seems to help stability under braking, but you can tweak that to your own preference.

GSI%20280ZX%20V2

I advise against lowering the car too much, however. With the car slammed all the way down you have less than two inches of suspension travel, which might work on smooth racetracks but bottoms out too much on rough roads for my liking. I raised it up a bit to give you at least two and a half inches, personally I’d prefer three inches or more except it would make the car look like it’s on stilts.

Nice video, looks like you use keyboard controls, I never could get the hang of it. I drive using a DualShock controller, makes smooth inputs sooooo much easier.

Nice video, looks like you use keyboard controls, I never could get the hang of it. I drive using a DualShock controller, makes smooth inputs sooooo much easier.

I actually use an Xbox 360 style controller for driving, I can’t drive in any game on a keyboard (except for War Thunder, but that’s slow tanks and the game plays more like a first person shooter).

I will have a play with your suggested street/track setup and see what I can make of it.

Well, seeing that list of “characteristics”, I challenge you to a hot lap in this:

VW_Brasilia_-_Marcus_gt500.car (167.5 KB)

Besides the tires having a little less grip than the real ones, it drives pretty realistic. It just gonna try to understeer and then oversteer on all turns, like a Porsche, but with 1/10th of the power.

Wow, just ran the car around the track for 4-5 laps and it can be very touchy. Makes a great noise though, but boxer engines tend to do that.

I will have to practice more with the car and I’ll try to get a recording of it lapping the track.

If I keep this up I might have to invest in a USB steering wheel and pedals, but I feel like I have other uses for that $120 right now.

Borrowed your car, sorry about the dents.

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Eh, those dents will buff out.

That looked like a really good run, how did the car feel to you though?

I think it feels about as good as I can make it. The 58/42 weight distribution is a pretty big handicap (the real car is close to 50/50) but you can’t really tell by driving it. I’m quite satisfied with the handling balance with the revised suspension and brake bias. It’s stable enough to be docile with a controller, but doesn’t understeer excessively and will easily drift all day long if you want, even with an open differential. The reduced body roll also pretty much negates the trailing arm behavior that make the stock tune a handful at the limit. The only thing I still wish were better, as previously mentioned, is the limited suspension travel. I would say I’m done tweaking the car at this point, any gains left to be had are probably very minimal.

If you have the patience to make a youtube channel, it’s a great motivation. Doesn’t need to be a good one with lots of gear to make the videos, I have a cheap lapel mic and some free software and that’s it, decent enough videos. I’ll go back to make more after the update, time permitting.

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Did you tweak anymore suspension settings since the last changes you posted about?

If so, would you mind posting up the changes here so I can update my car?

So I do have my own youtube channel (although I don’t have much on it right now).

For gear I have a headset using an AntLion ModMic (never had complaints about audio quality).

For recording software I currently use D3DGear via STEAM and I also have Movavi Video Editor Plus 2020 but I haven’t messed with that yet.

I’m still using the last settings I posted. I should mention I’m using the original car file without cosmetic modifications. If the updated car has functional aero fixtures installed, that may effect the handling somewhat.

High praise indeed. Although the 240Z body also suffers from a high drag coefficient, that alone didn’t stop you (or anyone else, for that matter) from having fun with the build you came up with.

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