What Sim Racers Don't Understand About Weight Transfer 

How do I transfer the weight from my belly into the front left tyre going into turn 1 of Barcelona?

the "aha" moment when you explained how the traction circle thingie works was absolutely mind blowing lol

That traction circle changed my life. You literally explained it so fucking good!!

We asked for it, Overtake and Em delivered. Really useful and fun video. 10/10 MS paint skills yet again. Next I want to see an MS paint backed video on how the irating and SR algorithm in iRacing works. 😂

You're too modest Emily, you're brilliant and fun to watch. I understood most things about weight transfer but you've made me look at it differently and pointed out some areas I've overlooked, which is probably were I'm losing time. I've been trail braking for years, but I feel I probably need to improve that as well, so I'll be looking for your video on the subject. I always enjoy your videos and look forward to seeing more. Cheers Emily! 🍻

Nice one,this should help me visualise what's happening with weight transfer.

Just found your channel, that was great stuff! I recall older Forza games depicted a traction circle for each individual tire. It is a great way of showing the effects of weight transfer on over and understeer, as well as dynamic transfers like the Scandi flick

Great video again Ems. Christal clear explanations with good examples. Thank you so much. (Watching your video about trail braking did indeed let me improve my laptimes.)

Emily, really good tips and well explained and delivered

Thanks for the video. Really helpful!

"Friction is gud." Michael Scott - "that's what she said!"

Regarding engine layouts, you missed a fundamental aspect that affects weight transfer too: whether the engine is longitudinally or transversally mounted (something that is modelled only in a handful of sims, like the original Dirt Rally or AMS 1 and 2 and iRacing I believe, maybe Beamng too). The former revolve around the x axis, which means that under acceleration they roll (try blipping the throttle while the car is stationary and in neutral to see it happen) and this makes them less prone to corner but stabler on a straight line. The latter revolve around the Z axis, which means that under acceleration they pitch and so they like direction changes more but are generally unstable. Also, engine layout, longitudinal or transverse, affects wheel base length, which also affects weight transfer, with shorter wheelbases cornering more while longer ones being more stable on a straight line but less prone to cornering. A brief summary? All of the above is why rally cars have almost always transversally mounted engines and short wheelbases, while F1 have almost always had longitudinally mounted engines and a longer wheelbase. The former go way slower and have to negotiate slow corners and hairpins, while the latter go faster and aero works only past 150 kph so fast corners are where their game is at.

Great video, thank you very much!

Ready Amazing how you explained that ! Trank you

The understeer is not what's making the tyre heat up realling quickly. It's just the fact that the tyre is being put into a large slip angle, causing maximum stretching of the tyre wall which is what is generating the heat in the tyre. The understeer is just a by-product of going into a large slip angle without first having built up yaw rate in the car and it's a desirable one here because the driver isn't trying to turn the car when doing this on the straights, he's just trying to get heat into the tyre. There would be just as much heat put into the tyre with such a slip angle IF the car were not understeering and in a turn. It's just that if they only did that to get heat into their tyres on the warm up lap, then they're wouldn't be nearly as much warm up occurring due to the large amounts of straights that would otherwise go unused to warm up the tyres.

Great video but surprised there isn't another 20 minutes detailing why your Porsche is trying to kill you.

Well done Emily. Brilliant explanation.

I just wanna say that this channel is dope. That's it. Thank you!

Fantastic explanation. I'm not mechanical engineer, I'm an electrical one and studying aeronautics but I think your equation explanation was very very good!

You missed one crucial point: under all weight transfers the sum of car weight and downforce doesn't change, so when say left tires increase their grip right tires loose. And there is a crucial point there - due to nonliniarity of actual physics this gain / loss is not equal, you instead loose more (you can describe it as grip coeff being not constant but dependant on normal forse when you come close to grip limits). So you need smooth movements to minimize weight transfer so that cars mass moment doesn't add a lot to the transfer induced by acceleration of the center of mass. Also that's why constructors of sport cars are so obsessed with lowering the center of mass - it reduces weight transfer. And one more thing: on say RWD car you actually don't need 50/50 weight distribution, you are ok when driving wheels carry more than 50% of weight (most mid-engined cars have 55 to 60% of weight on rear wheels). That's why Porsche is actually a successful concept. (And that rear-engined FWD car is not).

Fantastic video! Thank you 🏎🚙

Weight transfer is something that is best to learn early to get the most out of it whie learning everything else around it. A good car to learn this is the Renault Clio Williams Kit Car mod for AC, it's as fun as a FWD car gets (personally i despise most of them) while still requiring precise enough input to learn stuff.

One thing that'll help understand this: weight and load is good, mass and inertia is bad. We can't move mass around, but we can move what path that mass's weight takes through the suspension.

I must say being very nerdy about cars, racing and of course sim racing as well. The explanations in this video were very nice for people who are just getting into this hobby.

Good info, well explained

The reason why rear engine FWD cars don't exist is exactly for weight transfer. FWD cars have not good traction during acceleration because weight shift toward the back, losing grip on the front wheels. Putting the engine in the rear makes this problem even worse, so every FWD car has front engine to keep the weight on the driving wheels as much as possible (sorry for bad english)

Thanks for the great video! - Quick OT question, if I may: You have a Discord link on the Overtake website. It doesn't seem to work. Is the server still active and open?

The thing is that I have a big ass head…..when the cars weight goes right my head goes left and I could feel it canceling out. Wtf…

I get that you're not a mathematician but I feel like you should remove the static friction equation as the description here isn't great (and tbh its not necessary). The circle of grip and dynamic weight transfer explanations are much better.

I can't seem to connect / find the video you were referring to that you mentioned about trail braking... you pointed to the top corner of the video and the link isn't working for me. 😳

The issues with games is that they seem to incorporate a car model that is there only for the animation and eye candy, so far when I play these sims I just get fed up that even my cad software from late 90s early 2000 actually used the models you created as physical models but modern games seems to rely on unseen boxes that simply slides upon the floor(track) so when we look at the suspension/tires it is just eye candy as it is very little to do with the physics so to speak. Would be awesome if a game actually would model a proper car with all the body flex, and fluids and electrical working like irl :P would kill the cpus with 24+ on track but whole moly :D

Glad to see few rally clips here and there :D To my sadness, You didn't talk much about AWD and rally.

just for curiosity, is a square rotated 45 degrees more correct than a circle for rappresenting accurately how much you can steer and break simultaneously? Because I think that those are inversly proportional but I'm not sure

💯💯

More grip, more speed, more fun, got it ;)

I am not sure if she was joking or was serious about it ;)

isn't the idea of 50/50 weight distribution being ideal a myth or just marketing? I forget where I heard this so take with a grain of salt 😅

0:40: “I’m not a physicist or a mathematician or smart at all”. Proceeds to show an equation I have never seen in my fucking life and that I’ll never understand 😂 By the way, as a spanish guy I loved the intro with “El risitas” 😂 May those two legends rest in peace.

A woman driver talking about science? OMG, i'm love hahahaha

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This is so painful to listen to…