Poor-sha

Earlier this week I had a chance to try out the new DSC Sport RTx shocks with their controller. For those of you that want to lower your car this is definitely the hot ticket as it gives you more shock travel along with better control of the chassis than the stock shocks.

What was really cool though was that this turned in to an opportunity to use the DSC controllers ability to modify the suspension behavior based on PTM sub mode to really dial in the balance of my car.

For background, my car is running 305/660-18 front and 315/680-18 rear slicks. Those tires are a bit taller than the OEM sizes, have a lot more grip, and as you can see the fronts are much wider and rears much skinnier. I ran this setup towards the end of last year with the RT shocks and was happy with it though.

With the extra travel of the RTx shocks and the taller tires I started having issues with the tires getting in the wheel wells. I spoke to Mike and decided to play with stiffening up the suspension a bit to try and alleviate the rub. This is where it gets really cool.

For reference, remember this screen from the DSC Sport software that only comes up when you've selected the track map.




As you can see we have a block for each of the PTM modes and seeing 50/50/50/50 means there are no changes to the default shock curve for track mode. My next run out I just changed Sport 1 so 60/60/60/60 effectively making the shocks 10% stiffer. The car felt much better and the rub was gone so we propogated this change to the shock curve by changing the ma values there and reset the Sport 1 to 50/50/50/50.

Then I got thinking, the car is pretty loose with the current car setup. You can still drive it fast but with very cool ambient temps I'd like to be able to trail brake the car more. So went back to the PTM table and did this:

PTM Mode: LF/RF/LR/RR
Sport 1: 55/55/50/50 (stiffen up the front a little)
Sport 2: 60/60/50/50 (stiffen up the front more)
Race: 60/60/55/55 (stiffen up both a little and the front more)

Then I head out on track. During my session I could flip back and forth between these settings by just turning the PTM **** and in real time see what effect it had on the handling. It was like having cockpit adjustable sway bars in the car but all done through the shocks electronically.

I decided that I liked what was in Sport 2 so I ended up settings all the modes to that. There's lots of other applications for this.

- If I change to a different size tire
- I decide that I want to induce more understeer when I have less PTM intervention
- Maybe the front tires always get greasy in a session and I want more front grip halfway through.

I can do all of that by setting up the PTM modes in the software.

For those of you that don't want to tune or mess with the software, please don't feel like you need to learn how to do all this. The settings the controller ships with are fantastic for a car with stock tires. I'm running some different setups and really trying to push the capabilities of the car. Luckily I get great support from Mike and the rest of the guys at DSC Sport.