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Old 04-18-2017, 09:30 AM   #13
Biggins
Crotchety
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Carmudgeonly Ride: 22 Tiguan, 11 328i
Posts: 912
I had a lot of time to play with some settings and get some seat time on a couple decent but not great courses at Saturday’s BMW test-n-tune. I’m not sure I’d call my testing process scientific, but I think I learned a few things. It was super dusty and pollen was flying everywhere.

The big takeaways:
1. I seem to be taking sweeping turns too wide. Once I started cutting the wheel more on entry and staying tighter, I dropped 0.5-0.7 seconds.
2. I played with shock settings. I went down ¾ turn in the front from stiff vs. my usual ½ turn from stiff with the ½ turn from soft in the rear and it produced my best times consistently by 0.2-0.4 seconds. I tried even less rebound in the front, but the car got a little wonky. I also tried more rebound in the rear, but that did not solve anything and made things worse. I plan to play with shock settings a little more at future events, though I’ll start ¾ turn from stiff front and ½ turn from soft rear.
3. The car was still not fully confidence inspiring in slaloms. This could be from the nearly corded 192 run Bridgestone tires from 2015, but my quickest runs needed a tap of the brake on slalom entry to stabilize and point the car in the right direction… others didn’t need that. I’ll be on newer tires at the next events, but I think I’ll have to go with a bigger front bar soon enough.
4. I worked hard on rolling steadily onto the throttle mid-corner to exit instead of just mashing the gas, and it’s something I need to remember to keep improving. This might be part of my problem.

Thanks again for all the suggestions, I’m going to keep working on set-up this year to get it to work with how I drive.
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