Sidekick & tyre wear: yeah, for me I see softs starting at 67 (!!) and med/hard both start at 92. What they do
after that is odd, for sure. I think the name “wear” is a pretty poor one (but it’s also called that in the AC docs, so not the Sidekick dev’s fault). One thing is for certain: the grip level doesn’t vary by anything like as much as the wear figure! (Recall how much slower you feel when the track grip level is as low as 97%...)
I have yet to truly convince myself that I’m faster at low temps because of the tyres themselves. One odd thing I noticed when I tested at 10°C and then 33°C today was that the car was noticeably quicker in a straight line at low temp. The air density is higher at low temps, so the engine power and the drag both go up. I expected those effects to cancel, but perhaps not. IIRC, this difference was worth well over 2 tenths on the main straight alone.
I experimented with various wing and ARB settings. Still not sure what is best, but I found 13/6 20/0 quick and very dangerous. (That’s F/R wing, F/R ARB.) I then found 11/6 25/1 very driveable and basically around the same speed, for me.
I suspect I might be just as fast with 10/6 25/0?[d'oh! I think I meant to type 10/6 25/2 !!] Just guesswork really. My rationale for changing from 13/6+20/0 to 11/6+25/1 was because the rear end was too loose with the former. So in my head, raising the ARBs makes both ends less grippy
and then lowering the front wing makes the rear effectively more grippy in relative terms. tl;dr – it worked for me anyway cos my crashing-out rate dropped a LOT after that change.
Btw, turns out I lied earlier when I said my best time at high track temp was with mediums. In fact it was on the hards, but there was only a couple of tenths in it. I also didn’t reoptimise the pressures for mediums so it wasn’t really fair – shuda dropped them by about 2 psi I think, at least on the left. That would probably have put them outside the optimum temperature window, but it seems that this is a smaller penalty than having them a couple of psi too high.
Pressures were F16/17, R15/15, and were optimised for hards at 31°C with an earlier version of the set. Probably still about right though.
I’ve attached the base set below (ignore the time in the name – I improved since I created it). I think the only other item to mention is the brake power – I actually left it at 100% (!!) despite me being the guy who always complains about his crappy brake pot. I don’t know why, but I was able to control the locking adequately well...
Maybe at some point I’ll play with the brake balance too.
Times: at 10°C with mediums substituted into the set below, I can manage high 46s (with at least a few tenths worth of mistakes) without taking too many risks (and more or less adhering to the RD white-lines rules
).
At 33°C on medium I’m basically a whole second slower, while on hards I can do a mid 47. Oh, I used 10 litres of fuel for all of the “qually” type runs, and generally found my best times were on lap 2 or 3, mainly because the tyres start out a bit slippery as mentioned above.
