I might have assumed we were supposed to build to carry max weight, which seems to not be the case. I struggle with vehicles that don’t exist stateside. Instead, all these Amazon and other big courier vans. Meh
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I think with ABS involved it should not matter. Automation needs more than it has for slider control on brake force, especially the rear.
I always try to eliminate all warnings on any road car I submit to a competition, and when when I’ve hosted I’ve looked at what warnings are lit on the cars I’ve received. You never know what a host will throw mud at you for. Plus I always test my cars in Beam to make sure they drive properly, and excessive rear brake bias will spin you under trail braking even with ABS.
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Thank you to @mart1n2005 for hosting this fun and refreshing round. I have a few ideas in my mind and a new round should be ready around tomorrow or so.
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Damn you speak the truth!!
It all depends on the host at the end of the day. You sit there and rack your brain trying to get rid of warnings, trying to raise stats here and there…ask questions here or on discord and you MIGHT get an answer…turn in your car and depending on the host, get shitted on for unrealistic choices…say something about it and your salty 
@Lanson im with you on the payload thing. I designed mine with payload in mind…albeit FWD. Id love to see the stats for all these vans. I want to see how horrible i really did.
To anyone reading this, I am NOT salty…I just wanna see some stats dammit lol.
Seconded on this, a spreadsheet would be cool
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I abandoned the spreadsheet tracker I was making because that new software exporter basically does the job. The only thing I could improve on would be to add slicers and color-code some things, very minor stuff.
Also I’m not salty either, in fact I thought this was a great challenge. I just wish I would place higher by knowing what the heck people really wanted. I lose hard on the econo-box car challenges, especially the euro-themed ones. The MPG thing is whack, and I’ve never owned a car (out of 27) that had under 140ish HP so I don’t really understand IRL slow-boxes. That, and comfort. Comfortable cars tend to drive like dump trucks in Beam, lol.
Good fun.
new round is up!
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Your immediate error here is zero ignition timing. Pretty much no engine without turbochargers benefits from going below 50, so you’ve left a lot of power and efficiency on the table. Even the 0.4 RON you have left in the engine could’ve been used to get a little bit of ignition timing and improve efficiency. The other question I have is how heavy your van is, as that’ll affect fuel economy too.
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Thats one thing I personally dont understand is ignition timing. Are there any guidelines to this that I can reference?
Timing and compression (and a few other factors) affect resistance to knock. In general, n/a engines work best with the timing up quite a bit. Turbo engines retard a few points along with dropping compression, due to propensity to knock, and the fact that turbo engines are already compressing the air/fuel mix.
If you are after max performance, you’ll find that your cam profile, fuel used, etc are all going to have a “sweet spot” for ignition timing. Its usually in the 60-70’s range for N/A, and 50-65’ish range turbo. Just watch the HP/TQ, and RON markers (for knock) as you adjust.
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Thankyou for that info, Ill definitely take heed.
How about getting good mpg numbers? Besides lowering cams, leaning the fuel mixture…does timing play a vital role?
A shame! 
The injection timer shouldn’t be like this! Lanson will trying to figure out in this problem, thus you might orinting on him, at least.
Timing, high compression, low friction pistons, VVT / VVL, gearing (to a point), aerodynamic choices, and (detrimentally to being truly accurate and thus frequently abused) wheel diameter as well as overall tire diameter, in addition to tire type and quality.
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Man I appreciate that.
About a month ago i was wanting some engine tuning help, so I thought id play some of those engine scenarios…
Yep, that was a negative. Needless to say, I cant wait for those to come back.
Thanks that makes sense. Making the fuel mixture more rich increases power by a lot. Just advancing ignition timing though makes the engine knock. The reason I have fuel mixture and ignition timing so low is because of fuel efficiency. I have 29.2 mpg with the current set up, but increasing fuel mixture and ignition timing makes mpg absolutely plummet, and I really didn’t want that.
1,536.9 kg is the total weight of the van.
- Don’t increase fuel mixture, drop compression instead
- 1537kg is indeed quite heavy for this class of van
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This is actually another characteristic difference between real world and Automation world. The AFR of real cars averages 12-14:1 or so. You’ll find that Automation does best with eco cars near the bottom in the 14-15 range, and turbo you can kick that up to 13-14ish, and see the fuel economy not really shift too much. So it’s not really a match to real life.
Best example is in a previous QFC I judged, I did it almost completely objectively with a massive spreadsheet and slicers,etc. In that, there were several turbo SUV’s running 15.0-1 AFR or close. In real life, the engine would detonate in seconds. Also, Automation assumes a very lean car produces less emissions, but the truth is it would produce an excess of NOx, where a stoichiometric setting of 14.7:1 would theoretically be most efficient. Not in Automation!