It reads your suspension. It finds the compromise.

What the engine reads

A mechanical engineer doesn't watch the car — they read the suspension. SimRace.app does the same, per wheel, at around 60 Hz, corner by corner. From the raw channels the sim exposes it derives the numbers a setup is actually built on:

• Damper shaft velocity — bump and rebound, low-speed versus high-speed. The rate of change of suspension travel, not the car's speed.
• Ride height & rake — front and rear, and the rear-minus-front difference that sets the platform's attitude.
• Per-wheel load — how the weight sits across the four corners, and how it transfers through each phase of a corner.
• Bottoming — when the platform runs out of travel and hits its stops, the moment the suspension stops being a suspension.

The compromise problem

Mechanical setup is hard for one reason: it's a web of trade-offs. Stiffen the front bar to sharpen turn-in and you cost yourself mid-corner front grip. Soften the rear to settle the platform and you slow the response. Almost every lever you pull undoes something another lever just did. A good setup isn't the sum of a dozen changes — it's the one balance point where they integrate. Integration, not accumulation.

And there's a trap that makes feel unreliable: the same symptom has a different cause depending on speed. A car that washes out at the front is a mechanical problem in a slow corner — springs, bars, geometry — and an aero problem in a fast one — ride height, rake, wing. Same complaint from the seat, same words on the radio, but the fix is opposite. You feel one symptom; the car has two diseases.

What the engine gives you

The new pit-wall mechanical view turns all of that reading into three things you can act on:

• The damper-velocity histogram — the distribution of how long each damper spends at each shaft speed, the one thing you genuinely can't feel from the seat. A healthy shape is a smooth, continuous hill; a lopsided lump or a sharp spike is a damper doing too much of one kind of work.
• The platform read — rake, heave, where and when the car bottoms, and the rate weight transfers through a corner. The state of the chassis, in numbers instead of guesses.
• A setup note, per corner — the layer (mechanical or aero), the lever and which way to move it, why, the trade-off it will cost you, and a confidence. Not a magic number — a decision, framed the way an engineer frames it.

No magic numbers, and the recipe stays inside the plugin — you get the call and the reasoning behind it, framed corner by corner.

Where to go deeper

Every lever the mechanical view names has its own page — the textbook concept, in plain language:

• Springs & wheel rate
• Dampers: bump & rebound
• Bump stops & packers
• Ride height & rake
• Anti-roll bars
• Camber, toe & caster
• Mechanical balance
• The full setup guide →

And because the same symptom is mechanical when it's slow and aero when it's fast, the mechanical view lives right next to its aerodynamic twin: Balance, CoG & CoP and how the center of pressure is computed.

FAQ