Hey guys, just a quick update. Portimao was not good (not like tragic, but not good relative to what my goals in the championship are), but that's irrelevant.
We played with the setup quite a bit and F3 is a "normal" (meaning "proper"
) car in terms of how it reacts to setup changes, so there are 2 things that are in fact relevant to the topic that I was able to feel on this car (not for the first time obviously, but first time in F3). This is my first year in F3, and with this particular engineer too (who's BTW awesome), so trying setups and adjusting to the car is still work in progress. Anyhow:
1) I did get a feeling with one of the setups that I was able to "steer with the rear" (or whatever it's called) in hairpins. It's quite hard to describe actually, but it's when you rotate the car with a rear end "sliding" (note the quotes) relative to the front... errr... So you go into the corner, you turn in as normal, as you release brakes and increase steering lock, at some point at the apex the car falls into this rotating phase, when it sort of rotates itself round some central point... if anything, you decrease steering lock at this point as if you were to correct for oversteeer, however this is not really a slide to correct yet, it's just rear feeling very light relative to the front and kind of sliding, but not as much as you would correct for... dude this is seriously hard to describe
But racing engineers should understand what I mean.
The "pro" is that it allows you to rotate the car very quickly, or even "shortly" in a sense of time spent for the rotation the car, but the "con" is that it's actually very hard to do consistently because this window when car does rotation, but does not OS on you, is very narrow. It's extremely easy to overcook and put car into a massive slide screwing up your exist and it's also very hard to compensate for tire wear to consistently use this effect without sliding during the race.
For me personally, I don't like this. I like the car more-or-less planted to the ground a more progressive/reliable during cornering phase. This effect though is a lot like you managing a snap oversteer mid-corner, which you never allow to actually snap... I mean the car is so on the edge, that it feels like a bug committing suicide over my visor is gonna f*ck up my exit
2) Another effect kinda relative to this, and also on the topic of a torque twist (or not, I still don't fully understand what this term means exactly) is when [on different car setup], as you go on power, the car "twists" itself round some central point and you can control that twist with the amount of throttle you put. Again this is not an oversteer nor it's a slide, it literally feels like you're twisting a piece of elastic bar made of rubber with your hands, only the "bar" is the car and "hands" throttle pedal... and once again I'm struggling to describe this... The way you can use it to your benefit is that you do less turning with actual turning of the steering wheel at the apex, but you rather leave some of the rotation to be done during acceleration phase because you know the car's gonna "twist" when you apply power. It's kinda allows you to have higher minimum due to less lock at the apex, but does not allow you to use throttle as an on/off switch thus sacrifices your exit and the following straight to some degree. The other problem is that as tires wear you have to manage throttle application more and more carefully, so the whole technique is sort of managing snap oversteer on exist rather than mid corner in case 1)
Not ideal for me either, however I can drive both 1 and 2 quite effectively as these are both cases of an actually driveable car. What I want ideally though is stable rear on entry (both 1 and 2 provide this, however 1 tends to get snappy) because it allows me to brake very deep into the corner, then balanced car at the apex meaning I don't have to use "cheats" like lack of rear grip relative to front to actually rotate the damn thing (I'm OK with short rolling phase to allow the the car do it's thing), then once again stable rear on exit allowing me to go full throttle asap, may be some tendency to OS here so I can finish my rotation using this "twist" effect while releasing steering lock. Maybe some of these contradict each other, but that's for the engineer to figure out
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Anyway, sorry for many words again, but I felt like these things might be relevant to what Rob was saying about torque twist or whatever it's called, thus interesting to the community.
And just as disclaimer, all of this really IS a feng shui stuff so if any of you guys want to go racing single-seaters, do NOT focus on the things I wrote as you start. I can give a lot more "basic" advises of how to be quick maximizing what you have under you, e.g. how to use brakes, wings, curbs, learn tracks efficiently, warm tires, drive in wet etc. etc. without falling into "torque twisting" the car
