Damping Ratio

Dampers are used to help control the spring frequency. during and after bump. A damper is measured as a resistive force which can aid you in knowing how to change the Damping Ratio %. Compression % is the amount of force used in slowing a spring's motion during a bump, back to a steady state. Expansion % is the amount of force used in slowing a spring's motion after a bump, back to a steady state.

With the recent ability to collect lap data with the MoTeC i2 software, you are able to collect the damper plots of your vehicle. This is what a perfect example of how a damper histogram should look.

How to collect Gran Turismo data with MoTeC i2.

Since the geniuses of the hacking community have made MoTeC compatible with Gran Turismo 7 you will be able to see the full motion of the damper per lap. The example is laid out so that all 4 corners of the vehicle are shown. From left to right, top to down, front left (red), front right (blue), rear left (magenta), rear right (cyan). As you can see in comparison to the stock damper histogram and what the histogram is supposed to look like, the stock damper settings are not optimised at all.

You will not be able to make adjustments for corner to corner damping, so you will have to compromise damping as you will be adjusting the front or rear only. With using the front dampers as an example, there is not enough overall front damping as there is not enough high speed damping. This applies to both front and rear damping.

This is roughly what you should expect for the damper histogram once you properly setup all dampers. From this point you will decipher whether or not the setup changing or if you prefer to drive with this type of setup.

Using the front damper histogram as an example, this is how to check if there is a sufficient damping ratio between Bump (Compression) green boxes and Rebound (Expansion) % red boxes. In comparison Rebound % is slightly higher than the Bump %. This shows the Expansion settings are slightly higher than the Compression settings. For efficient damping you may want to increase Compression to match the Expansion %. However if you understeer from the end on corner exit, you might not want to adjust the damping settings.

The rear dampers as displayed above, do not have a large peak in the centre of the graph. At lower speed, bumps and undulations will make the suspension feel softer than usual. This can aid in low speed rear grip if rear responsiveness isn't a factor.

• To check if there is a sufficient damping ratio between Bump (Compression) and Rebound (Expansion) % we can look at both sets of red boxes. Both sets of data are all within 1% which is ideal.

• The data marked in the green boxes is the peak damping force. Again, you would want to have the percentages even for the best damping performance. The peak damping percentage can be upwards of 40%+.

I have 4 go to damper setups I use to maximise the handling characteristics of any vehicle. The following of setups are at either minimum or maximum settings to get the best visual representation of the 2 damper concepts I use.