Setup Development Tool

About the tool
The purpose of this setup developer tool is to help you develop your setup over a period of time. It is not a "quick fix" or "cheat sheet". It will require an investment of time and effort, requiring you to navigate back and forth between sections continuously. You may want to focus on specific items each time you sit down to develop your setup. Do not overwhelm yourself by trying to work through this tool all in one session. Each section in the development tool correlates to a setup development article for you to better understand what changes are being applied to your car.

The one item that will benefit your setup time greater than any other item is the one sitting behind the steering wheel: You. If you do not know the track or the proper racing line, no setup changes will help you. You must take the time to adjust "you" before adjusting your car. Only when you can do multiple consistent laps should you begin to alter your setup.

As for the setup changes, you know the rule: Only make one change at a time! Trying to "shortcut" the setup process will not work. Take your time and allow your setup to evolve over time, possibly over an entire season of racing in your favorite league. Practice, setup development and testing can easily add up to 10 times the length of the race itself.


Current version; Jan 17, 2008 - v1.2
Download Setup Development Tool
(Requires Microsoft Excel)
Will also work using OpenOffice

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How to use the Setup Developer Tool
The use of this tool is fairly straightforward and simple. You can treat it as a crew chief or engineer who will inform you on what you might want to do to better your setup. Simply answer the questions and your "engineer" will provide you the feedback.

The tool is presented in a specific sequence of steps that I recommend following when developing a new setup from scratch. However, if you already have certain items finalized there is nothing preventing you from skipping sections or doing them out of order.

Included in each section are "pop-up" text boxes (noted by the red markings) that will give you further information about the changes you are about to make. They are only brief comments, but you can find more information on each item by reading the Setup Development Articles at Race2Play.com

Some of the answers provided will be displayed from a top-down view of your car. Each corner of your car is represented with multiple suggestions being displayed for each corner of the car. Pay attention to which suggestion you may want to try first. Others are supplied for further refinement of your setup.

Questions, suggestions, corrections and additions are always welcome. Visit the High Performance Driver Tutoring forum at Race2Play for discussions regarding this tool.

Good luck in your setup development

Update to version 1.2

- Added Pit Strategy worksheet (pictures below)
- Added some car graphics
- Corrected some spelling mistakes
- Removed all macros for compatibility

Basic questions related to car and track

Enter your pit strategy

See how it compares to others

About the author
I have spent my fair share of time researching the dynamics of a race car setup over the almost two decades of my simulated racing career. While my knowledge should not be taken as 'set in stone rule', it is my hope that some of my knowledge can be used by the less experienced racers in their setup development processes.

My setups have rarely been designed to 'hot-lap'. While they can be hot-lapped when needed, I have found stability will result in a much better finishing position over barely-controlled speed. The longer the race, the greater the demand for a stable and comfortable setup. Every spin or off track excursion you have during a race due to a difficult setup is equal to adding a quarter-second per lap, every lap, over the course of a race. Have a couple spins and you may as well have not bothered showing up to the race at all. Prevent those spins and you will finish higher up in the order, it's that simple.

Something that I have done for many years is to not develop setups to infinity. I use the same setup per car at nearly every track. They all require some minor changes, of course, but the baseline setups stay the same and evolve slowly over the course of many races. The benefit to this is that your setup and car react the same at every track. This cuts down the development time significantly as you already know the main characteristics of the car. You have a new track to learn, or relearn, and overcomplicating it with a new setup only makes things harder and more time-consuming. As-is, that one setup may not be 'best' for any individual track, but it will be stable and predictable over the distance of any race and get you to the checkered flag, which is the 'best' way to finish.

Tim McArthur