12/24/2009

F1SR F1 91 HISTORIC EDITION PHYSICS GUIDE

Physics Guide | Duke Essington

F1-S-R F1-1991 Historic Edition physics guide By Duke Essington

Thank you for downloading the F1SR F1-1991 mod Historic Edition for rFactor. This document will help you understand our physics models, and give you some hints for how to set up the cars. Introduction The Historic Edition physics models have been in development on and off for over two years. The physics started as an experiment of a few ideas I had to improve a few key aspects of rFactor open-wheel physics in ways that had not been attempted before. Tired of waiting for the ever upcoming F1 1991 mod, I threw together one of my own just to tinker with. Once I joined F1-S-R late last year, they had already taken over the 1991 mod and had some decent graphics and sound put together. Then I refined the physics models over several evolutions, and with hundreds of hours of research and help from our test drivers, we have incorporated it into this full-featured mod. The physics have been built from scratch with the goal of maximum realism always in mind. With a commitment to brutal realism, early Alpha versions of the mod were extremely difficult to drive, but as more research was done and more accurate details were incorporated into the physics, drivability gradually improved. 1991 is one of my favorite F1 seasons, and apart from a few tedious tasks, it has been a joy developing these cars in as much detail as possible. With 18 different teams, there was a fantastic variety of engines and chassis during the season, and an interesting tire war between Goodyear and Pirelli. The performance of the cars was astounding, and produced, very nearly, the very best road-course performance ever seen in all of motorsport, up to and including present-day. And yet, it was not until just after the 1991 season, that driver aids and active suspension really began to take over and change the driver-skill aspect of the sport into something fundamentally different from what it had been all through the 70s and 80s.

I hope you will enjoy driving and racing these cars as much as I do, and I hope you will appreciate some of the key details that make our physics different, and hopefully, better than what has been seen in other open-wheel mods for rFactor. Some important tips We recommend you install the RealFeel plugin for this mod, as it has been developed with RealFeel in mind. My RealFeel settings are as follows: RealFeelIsOn=True ConsoleEnabled=False ConsoleRepeatDelay=0.100000 SpeechEnabled=False KeyRepeatDelay=0.100000 SteerForceInputMax=11500.000000 MinSpeed=10.000000 LogEnabled=False DefaultMaxForceAtSteeringRack=260.000000 DefaultSteeringDamper=600.000000 DefaultSmoothingLevel=3 Be sure to set the force feedback strength in rFactor to +100, not -100 as many mods developed with CarFactory require. This does affect the force feedback whether you use RealFeel or not. We recommend turning off autoblip for this mod, particularly if you run a server. It has been replaced with a vehicle upgrade that gives you a semi-automatic transmission that comes with a performance penalty due to its lack of realism. The exceptions to this are Williams and Ferrari, which actually had semi-automatic transmissions in 1991, so there is no performance penalty for those cars. Engine and drive train Engine torque curves have been carefully estimated, and our approach was well validated late in development when we got our hands on a real dyno plot for a 1992 Lamborghini F1 engine. The 3.5 liter engines of this era were notably more torquey than the much smaller, and higher revving F1 engines of present-day. Rather than keeping the revs high and riding the rev-limiter exiting corners, you may have to adopt a different driving style than what you may be accustomed to from present-day F1 mods. The manualtransmission cars will tend to reward you more for selecting a higher gear and relying on the out-of-tune range of the torque curve to pull you through the corner. Gear changes will cost you much more time, so they are something to be avoided, unless you are driving the Ferrari or Williams, which have semi-automatic transmissions. With a manual transmission you will also have to blip or breathe the throttle when shifting.

We have used the rFactor boost control to simulate what is purely a fuel mixture control, a pair of dials (one for each cylinder bank) that would have been on the cars dashboard. This controls how lean or rich the engine runs. At the minimum boost setting the engine will run at optimum fuel economy. At the maximum boost setting, you will have 14% more power, but with 28% more fuel consumption. The boost control will not significantly damage your engine, since it does not change the rev-limit, ignition timing, or anything else besides fuel mixture. Managing fuel mixture was very important during the 1991 season because refueling was not allowed. Suffice it to say, you will not have enough fuel to run full rich in a full-length race at some tracks. The high-revving V-12 engines are particularly thirsty. Sennas V-12 Honda ran out of fuel twice during the 1991 season. The Yamaha V-12 in the Brabham is the least efficient of all.

The rev-limiter is also adjustable via the setup screen. Maximum rev-limit is intended only for qualifying, and will probably not last a full race. For a full-length race, you will probably need to lower the rev-limit a click or two. Drivers who do not breathe the throttle properly when up shifting will probably need to run the rev-limiter lower than drivers with a more gentle technique in order to sustain engine life. But most importantly, remember, if you downshift too early, the rev-limiter cannot prevent you from over-revving! That is probably the easiest way to blow your engine. Oil and water temperatures can be managed with radiator size alone. All the cars have identical radiators, and you will find that the higher revving engines require much more cooling than the lower revving ones. And at slow tracks you will need more cooling than at fast ones. In race configuration, you will want to keep water temperature below 90 degrees Celsius, in order to ensure that the car will not overheat during a pit stop or a spin. For qualifying you can let it get as high as 100 degrees, but be aware that the engine will die almost instantly when the oil temperature gets above 130. Our mod makes use of the ram-air effects implemented in the latest version of rFactor. At top speed, you will experience increased torque and power at somewhere around 3 or 4%. This is a fraction of the theoretical maximum of around 6% predicted by Bernoullis equation, but still more than enough to noticeably increase top-speed.

Chassis and aerodynamics One aspect that really sets our mod apart from the rest is our treatment of the chassis undertray. Before 1994, F1 cars did not have any regulation skid-blocks to force them to run higher from the ground, so we use a friction coefficient of 0.5, instead of the very popular 5.0, in order to realistically simulate the friction produced by titanium skid plates. For this reason, when the chassis bottoms out, you will noticeably lose grip at that corner of the car, instead of gaining friction and merely losing directional integrity as you would experience with the 5.0 coefficient. However, you will still experience increased aero drag if you run the car too low. A fully open-wheeled car, not having any fenders to mask the wheels from the air stream, will generate more aerodynamic drag at lower ride heights, as it has to pull the car through a boundary layer of air close to the road surface. You may also experience diffuser stall, and a sudden decrease in downforce if you run too low, as the airflow is cut off from the diffuser. On the other hand, if you run the car too high, the car will not generate as much downforce from ground-effects, so you have to find a good compromise, just as you do with other mods. But on the whole, the car should work much better at a lower ride height than what you may have used in other F1 sims. Expect to see lots of sparks. These cars have full-width diffusers, so they are very dependent on aerodynamic ground-effects compared to todays F1 cars. You may experience weird aerodynamic oscillations, such as porpoising where the car bounces back and forth like a see-saw. Or just straight up and down bouncing. A stiff suspension with lots of damping can help reduce this. Setting up the car for the ideal ride height is always a compromise. Set it up to be quick in the fast corners, and you will generally lose grip in the slow corners and vice-versa. Active suspension and heave springs were developed to manage this sort of problem, but this was not available in 1991.

Many of the cars of this era were above or near the minimum weight required by the rules, and so did not carry any ballast. However, a few of them did, and their weight distribution is adjustable. Generally, you will want to carry the weight as far forward as possible, to make maximum use of the front wing, which is much more efficient than the rear. Numerous variables including actual engine weights and lengths and heights and carefully estimated gearbox weights and dimensions have been used when calculating each cars weight distribution, amount of ballast and rotational inertias, so that each has its own personality. Wing adjustments are purely linear in terms of downforce. Setting a wing to 50 generates exactly twice as much wing downforce as a setting of 25. However, the drag increase does have a realistic second-order component so that the lower wing settings are much more efficient then the higher ones. You will probably never want to set the wings lower than about 20, for a road course. Although, the lower wing ranges are available with the philosophy in mind that a real F1 team would be able to construct super-speedway style wings, or even run with no wings if they wanted to! You may find this very beneficial and enjoyable at a track like Brianza full. One very noticible problem with these cars is caused by the very large fuel cells they carried. 220 liters of fuel not only adds a lot of weight, it also takes up a large volume, which means the fuel cell has to be placed far from the cars center of gravity. This means the balance of the car will change dramatically as your fuel burns off and you will probably have to adjust the brake balance frequently during the race. It also means that a qualifying setup will have to be very different from a race setup. This is more of a concern with the long V-12 engines rather than the shorter V-8s. Suspension The suspensions are customized for each car based on its dimensions and careful photo analysis. They have been constructed by hand to give us maximum control over handling characteristics, although CarFactory was used to validate our designs. In order to make setups easier to develop, the suspension has been designed so that the available bump travel is always equal to the ride height. Although, not strictly realistic, it will have no noticeable effect other than to simplify setup calculations. The third spring implemented in rFactor did not appear in F1 until around the year 1999, so we have omitted this from our mod. Four-way adjustable dampers had just appeared during the 1990 season, so we treat this as a new technology, and therefore only the top scoring teams from the 1990 season have them. The rest have to make due with only one adjustment each for bump and rebound.

Tires

A particularly great deal of attention has been paid to the tire model. Load sensitivity and slip ratio ranges are largely based on real data from Goodyear and Avon tires. We have made an effort to fully simulate the differing volumes of air in the front and rear tires, something which I have not yet seen fully implemented in other mods. This is important because of the large amount of aerodynamic downforce these cars generate combined with their 40/60 weight distribution. Open wheel cars have differently sized front and rear tires for a reason! If you have 60% of the weight and downforce at the rear of the car, then for optimal handling, you really need 60% of the tire contact to be at the rear tires, and 60% of the load sensitivity to be at the front tires. With a 50/50 tire model, you would constantly need to have some extra downforce at the rear of the car, which can create inconsistent handling that varies greatly with speed. The car would tend to oversteer in slow corners and understeer in fast corners. With our mod, you should enjoy a much better ability to make a setup that is neutral-handling across the full range of driving speeds. This forgiving tire model has allowed us to emulate some very extreme aero instability effects without the car becoming undrivable. The Pirellis have been simulated as having better rubber compounds than the Goodyears, while the Goodyears have better construction. This means the Pirellis will grip better at low loads. Slow corners with little downforce. The Goodyears work better in fast or banked corners and have less rolling resistance. The Goodyears also have better cornering stiffness, generating smaller slip angles and providing more steering response. Because of this, you will notice that the Pirelli shod cars have force-feedback effects that feel much more vague and mushy. The Pirellis also suffer a more dramatic loss of grip due to wear. There is a broad range of tire compounds to be selected from, ranging from R for one quick qualifying lap, to AA, which may very well last for an entire race (if you drive very carefully, and dont spin or slide much). This huge range in endurance comes with a huge range in performance, so dont expect the car to corner or handle very well on AA tires! The Cars McLaren Honda MP4/6

The Honda V-12 was not rated highly by Senna or Berger in testing. It is long and heavy, and lacks low-end torque. It would have benefited greatly from a semi-automatic gearbox, but McLaren had not yet adopted this technology. Perhaps the biggest story of 1991 was Hondas relentless development of the V-12 engine, which gave them the most power by far at the end of the season. The McLaren is great fun to throw around, but it is not a tidy-handling car, and you may be tempted to overdrive it and cook your rear tires. Heavy fuel consumption will have you dialing towards the lean side of the fuel-mixture knob in a full-length race. Tyrrell-Honda 020 Tyrrell was the pioneer of high-nose aerodynamics, which greatly reduced aerodynamic instability. And with an upgraded version of the world championship winning Honda V10 of 1990, and grippy Pirelli tires, the Tyrrell can be competitive at a wide variety of circuits. Modena's second place qualification at Monaco is testimony of its excellence at low-speed cornering. However, its overweight chassis results in poor acceleration. Williams Renault FW-14 This is certainly the quickest car of 1991, although there were problems with reliability early in the season. In terms of performance, it does everything well. I'm always surprised by how smooth and tidy the handling is. The power from the Renault V-10 comes on smoothly and just when you need it, and with pneumatic valve actuation, the power curve increases all the way to the rev limit, instead of tapering off from valvefloat. Williams did not have their active-suspension system race-ready until the final race at Adelaide, so we have not attempted to simulate its performance at this time. Brabham Yamaha BT60Y The Brabham may look promising with its futuristic-looking aerodynamics and plenty of power, but it is held back by being overweight and excessive fuel consumption from the high-revving Yamaha. In fact, Brabham was relegated to pre-qualifying for the second half of the 1991 season. Brabham Yamaha BT59Y Early season car with a short wheelbase and less sophisticated aerodynamics. It was described as an overweight disaster. Footwork Porsche FA12 Porsche were perhaps too cocky re-entering F1 for their first time since the turbo-era. The Porsche V-12 architecture was based on two turbo-era TAG V-6 engines stuck endto-end, which results in a very long engine block and a great deal of excess weight. It is very powerful, but sorely lacking in low-end torque. The Footwork chassis is nothing special either. This is possibly the worst car in the field, although the team did show immediate improvement once they switched to a Hart-tuned customer Cosworth engine mid-season as soon as Porsche withdrew from F1. Footwork Porsche FA11C Early season car with a shorter wheelbase and less sophisticated aerodynamics.

Lotus Judd 102B The Lotus chassis has poor aerodynamics, and the end of the turbo-era has forced them to abandon active suspension for the time being, lacking the power to drive the hydraulics. However the conventional design and the torquey Judd V-8 make the Lotus very easy to drive. An excellent choice for a beginner. Fondmetal Hart Fomet-1 A very poor car all around, that often failed to pre-qualify. Although Grouillard made surprisingly good use of it at the Italian GP. Fondmetal Hart FA1ME Early season chassis (a modified Osella from 1990). Shorter wheelbase and less sophisticated aerodynamics. This car has more weight on the rear tires than any other, so at least you may be able to use it to leapfrog a few positions at the start of the race. Leyton House Ilmor CG911 The Ilmor V-10 is an excellent engine with plenty of torque that does go some way to make up for the mediocre performance of the March chassis, with March having lost their star designer, Adrian Newey to the Williams organization. This car was reputed to suffer from excessive ride height sensitivity. AGS Cosworth JH25 The AGS benefits from being light-weight, but it is very inefficient aerodynamically. I would only recommend this car to an alien who wants a challenge. AGS Cosworth JH25B JH25 with modified bodywork. The radiator exits were repositioned to provide cleaner airflow to the rear wing. Benetton Ford B191 Benetton perfected the high-nose aero design pioneered by the Tyrrell team giving this car reduced pitch sensitivity. It benefits from the latest evolution of the Ford factory HB spec engine, which was compact and light weight, and it uses Mobil fuel which was reputed to be very powerful. Benetton Ford B190B Early season car with a short wheelbase and less sophisticated aerodynamics. It has a peculiarity in its suspension design that was noticed when studying photos. The rear mounts for the front lower wishbones are higher than the front mounts, which produces some weird handling characteristics. It starts the season with the most powerful engine on the grid in the Ford HB5. Dallara Judd BMS191 Dallara employed Judd's V10 for 1991. This is an all-around solid, mid-pack car that can easily score points in the hands of a good driver.

Minardi Ferrari M191 1991 was Minardi's most successful F1 season. They benefited from Ferrari's 1990 V-12 engine which is not only powerful, but also has plenty of low-end torque as far as V-12's go. The chassis is somewhat overweight and also features a long wheelbase which combine to make it remarkably stable. Unfortunately it suffers from some aero instability problems that were not corrected until the French GP. Ligier Lamborghini JS35B A very poor package this year for the otherwise well-respected Ligier team. The Lamborghini engine provides excellent power delivery, but it badly consumes oil and has to carry around an oversized oil reservoir. Aerodynamics are also poor. Ligier Lamborghini JS35 Early season version with poor aerodynamics. It also had an inadequate airbox intake and so suffers from reduced ram-air effect, which was corrected with the JS35/2 bodywork. Ferrari 643 The car that Alain Prost infamously described as a truck. The aerodynamics are not as sophisticated as the Williams or McLaren, but it is still certainly one of the best chassis. It benefits greatly from the awesome Ferrari semi-automatic 7-speed gearbox mounted to the powerful V-12 engine, which probably gives it the best acceleration in the F1 field, in spite of being some 30 HP down on the Honda V-12 for much of the season. Ferrari 642 Early season car with less sophisticated aerodynamics. This car was based on the 1990 car, the 641, sort of shoehorned into the new regulations for 1991. This meant they were not able to position the suspension mounts ideally for controlling roll-center migration. It also suffered from some aero instability until the 642/2 was introduced. Larrousse Hart L91 The Hart-tuned customer Cosworth is a notch above the other Cosworth customer engines, but this pretty little car lacks aerodynamic sophistication and its short wheelbase may tend to make it twitchy and difficult to drive. Coloni Cosworth C4 Along with the Footwork-Porsche, this is possibly the worst car on the grid, although probably not as bad as their highly regarded, but very inexperienced driver, Pedro Chaves made it appear. Mader engine tuning for the customer Cosworth is not considered to be any better than the in-house tuning employed by other teams. Jordan Ford 191 Jordan benefited from the same factory Ford HB engines that Benetton used, but one evolution behind. It features excellent aerodynamics and a raised nose to reduce pitch sensitivity.

Lamborghini L291 The Modena Lamborghini works team. This adorable car had unusual side pods with a triangular cross-section, that didn't benefit the aerodynamics at all as far as we can tell. The excellent power delivery of the Lambo engine probably will not make up for the poor aerodynamics and overweight chassis.