I have been working on some cars recently and would like to understand a bit better how you can improve cornering of a car without relying on downforce too much (wings and lips).
I know that you can work with springs, camber and tyres, but if someone knows of a comprehensive guide or can explain it to me for the game, that would be fantastic. I just cannot get grip on getting the best cornering behaviour for my cars.
Sometimes you need you car to weigh MORE, when the weight to shifts forwards under braking into a corner it can let the fronts grip a bit better, one car I had went from 0.87G to 0.91G with an additional 50lbs of entertainment weight. Also try to set your tire offset as wide as possible, that gives your car a wider stance and helps it grip the road better. As for a guide I would love to see an updated version of this viewtopic.php?f=13&t=3446 since there has been a lot added to the game since this was posted last.
Thanks for explaining a bit. I also read that guide, but I feel it is more focussed on improving confort ratings than helping me understand how to improve cornering. Btw does anyone know whether modifying the shape of the car body could have an impact on cornering? F/R weight ratio for instance.
I am not 100% sure, but I do think that making the back longer is going the back heavier, helping with weight distribution.
A quick list of everything that appears to directly influence cornering (but not in a consistent fashion, all factors interact):
[ul]]Overall weight of the car/:m]
]Weight distribution of the car/:m]
]Suspension type/:m]
]Wheel width and profile (this is one of the biggest factors because this determines the balance of friction and slip, but best balance is highly dependent on weight distribution, suspension setup and drivetrain type)/:m]
]Obviously, downforce, and…/:m]
]Obviously, suspension setup/:m][/ul]
Everything else affects cornering essentially by affecting the first two factors.
It’s possible to make a 2 ton bus that can exert 1.7+ G of cornering at full speed, because the bus morphs to allow ridiculously wide tyres. That said, it’s also possible to use ridiculously wide tyres to make an FF hatch that can do more than 2.3g at speed 
Eh… who needs a fighter jet to paste your brains on a window? Just do what Strop says.
My school buses where never that fun :C
Your school buses probably also never cost a billion dollars to engineer, did a quarter mile in 8 seconds flat, stop faster than a hypercar, or fractured your vertebrae whenever it rolled over a pothole xD
…well, no. Depending on where you sit and the design of the particular bus, this can still happen far more frequently than children, seniors, and pregnant women would prefer in an unmodified bus.
Just to be sure. I guess more weight to the front means better cornering, whereas more to the rear means faster straight out speed (if rear wheel driven)?
From what I can understand - and bear in mind that I don’t know what I’m talking about - the ideal weight distribution would put approximately the same weight on all four wheels, with a little bit (~1-10%) extra on either the rear wheels (in a rear- or all-wheel-drive car) or the front wheels (in a front-wheel-drive car). The idea is to make each of the wheels take as large a share of the total work that needs to be done moving the car around the track as it can, so that you get as much grip as possible out of the entire system.
That said, the biggest effect weight distribution has is how you tune your suspension. If you have more weight in the front, you need more spring and damper in the front to deal with that.