All News: Gale Force Racing

Commodore’s Garage #34 – Truck Project: Auto Club Speedway

January 13th, 2018 by Matt Holden

  Somebody needs to mark the calendar because a sign of End Times arrived last night after our Truck race:  Somebody was happy with the way Jeff Parker raced him. All jokes aside, it’s safe to say that our race at Auto Club Speedway was a one-and-done situation because it’s highly unlikely that we’ll be … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #27 – Related Adjustments

July 28th, 2017 by Matt Holden

In the last article we looked at the process for initial chassis setup.  To recap, we’re trying to replicate what a real-world team would do on a pull-down rig in the shop to get the car essentially race-ready by the time it arrives at the track.  This involves cycling through various spring options to find … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #26 – Let’s Get Started

July 7th, 2017 by Matt Holden

  After twenty five articles covering the major concepts and options in our sim-racing garage, it’s time to actually start applying all of what we’ve learned to build a setup from scratch.  Some of you may be thinking, “Finally…it’s been over a year!”, while others may be thinking about what a daunting task it is … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #25 – Bumpstop Contact in Telemetry

June 16th, 2017 by Matt Holden

Last week’s build release put a stop to the coil-binding trend in the Class B series that had become widespread across the front-running cars.  Eliminating all front springs below 500 lb/in took us away from binding by simply eliminating the springs that could bind under normal conditions, placing everyone firmly into the bump spring setup … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #26 – Pre-Build Prep, Post-Season Tests

June 2nd, 2017 by Matt Holden

Believe it or not, the grand event known as Week 13 is upon us yet again and with that comes a new build.  By now, you’ve most likely run your final race of the 12-week season and it’s simply a matter of waiting just over a week until you can race again.  There’s a lot … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #21 – Telemetry

March 3rd, 2017 by Matt Holden

  The most valuable thing to tuning a car is data.  Whether it’s tire temperatures, pressures, wind tunnel, or telemetry data, anything that can tell you what the car is doing at any given moment can be worth its weight in gold.  Despite a visual simplicity, telemetry data is a rabbit-hole of complexity with almost … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #20 – Bumpstops and Crossweight

February 17th, 2017 by Matt Holden

  Following our look at the details pertaining to crossweight last week, we’ll now turn our focus to a situation unique to cars with bump stop suspension systems.  This is the first concept we’ll look at that will not apply to every car in some way, but while your interests may not fall into a … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #19 – Crossweight

February 10th, 2017 by Matt Holden

  Last week we looked at bump stops, but this week we’re going to cover weight distribution, specifically crossweight.  Why would we move straight from springs to crossweight?  When we dive deeper into bump stops (specifically shims, gap, and contact timing), preloads, and shocks, crossweight is going to come into play a lot.  And I … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #18 – Implementing Bump Stops

January 27th, 2017 by Matt Holden

  Of all the things available to us in the sim-racing garage, the most confusing thing is typically the simplest component on the car:  The bump stop.  Ironically, the bump stop is just a tiny version of the one thing that almost everyone understands:  springs.  The confusion doesn’t come from its characteristics, but instead from … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #15 – Starting Spring Package

December 9th, 2016 by Matt Holden

  We now know the basic ins-and-outs of the spring components in our race car, but we need to apply that to the car and get started with our race setup.  “Where do I start?” is probably the most common question asked, and in almost every case, the answer is the spring package.  We have … Read the Rest »