All right, I was curious what people would think of this thing… now that the Automation Rallycross League challenge kicked off and it’s too late for revisions I wanted to share this
ARXL - mekilljoydammit - PepperBOMB XT.car (19.3 KB)
This is… probably about the most power capable within the rule set, and I spent a lot of time tuning the suspension on Circuit Trois-Rivieres. At the same time, I have no earthly clue why it works; it’s completely counterintuitive and weird but for some reason tuning it to ridiculously soft in the front gained massive lap time.
1 Like
hot
wait revisions were allowed? I was down about 200 hp because I used a tiny four banger and I could’ve changed that… q_q
I should have phrased differently… other challenges I’ve done with MrChips had mid-season revisions. This one doesn’t - so since things started, it’s too late for people to just copy stuff from it.
Yeah, turns out the challenge wasn’t exactly perfectly balanced - I spent about three days tuning my car, and had to add weight to meet minimum regulations but the engine was a 1.6 and only made 500 hp. I could have made 700 without the fuel restrictions but I was limited. I think 510 is as much as I could have gotten out of the engine, but I stuck with it thinking it was somewhat balanced.
Well, what’s “perfectly balanced”? Every rule set there’s always going to be some things that work better than others. Within the rules here you basically can’t make a competitive engine with more than 6 cylinders either, and competitive power without turbos isn’t possible either. Another strong contender I had was an all-iron 2.1L V6 which got me more resources to spend beefing up various technical aspects… but I got the light 2.8L V6 in the final version to make more power at the same weight despite taking QP away from fuel system and stuff.
V6 or flat 6s got a boost as far as I’m concerned due to how Automation does turbo sizing; believe it or not peaky powerbands with late boost help the efficiency calculation. I had a big I3 in the first rules revision before the boost limits per cylinder size calculation came in and had test engines at every configuration of less than 8 cylinders afterwards.
I made test I4, I6s, and V8s and the 4 cylinder was not the most powerful, but was better than the V8 and much lighter than the cast I6, while making ~20 less hp. Never tried flat- or V6 engines.
Yeah; I6s, because Automation forces them to use one turbo, end up with nice broad powerbands. The efficiency calculation uses the whole rev range, so I was deliberately trying to narrow the powerband as much as possible - I forget exactly but the turbos aren’t really doing much until 5-6k RPM. Combined with VVL… it looks like a nice boring economy V6 until suddenly it gets into boost, and the gearing is narrow enough that it stays above something like 7k RPM the whole time on track.
That’s exactly how my 4 banger is engineered, but it’s only a 1.6 or 1.7 liter. It’s got a relatively flat torque curve up to about 7k RPM, and then I think it keeps going up until 11k. Flat curve in the powerband, or flat-ish, and during testing it never left the powerband - but still, 200 horsepower gap is 200 horsepower gap so I really don’t think my car will do too well.
good cars sir!
also feel free to modify any of my cars from my junkyard