All News: Gale Force Suspension

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 #24 – Camber

April 14th, 2017 by Matt Holden

  If you own a car, you’ve experienced the pain of having a wheel go out-of-alignment and probably noticed the car didn’t quite behave in the same way it used to.  On a street car this pull is an annoyance, but in racing it’s an advantage!  In all forms of motorsport from karting to Formula … 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 #17 – 2017 is here!!

January 20th, 2017 by Matt Holden

  Happy New Year!  I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and, hopefully, everyone has been able to take what we looked at in 2016 and apply it to their sim-racing experience.  Before we dive into the more complex components of the cars such as bumpstops, shocks, and alignments, let’s take a final look … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #16 – Adjusting the Spring Package

December 24th, 2016 by Matt Holden

  As we approach the holidays and the close of 2016, instead of putting more information out there, I’d like to send everyone on a mission.  It’s pretty simple, and the few weeks we’ll have should be plenty of time:  Get your spring package right!  In previous racing sims, that was pretty simple, right?  iRacing’s … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #14 – Ride Heights, Perches, and Deflections

December 2nd, 2016 by Matt Holden

  The last major piece of the puzzle we need to look at before diving into building a setup are the three simplest things in the garage:  ride heights.  Older (and even some newer racing games) have a “Ride Height” adjustment in their setup garages, completely independent of the rest of the car.  Anyone who’s … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #12 – Tire Data

November 4th, 2016 by Matt Holden

Whenever we put a race car on track, be it real or virtual, we have two things that can give feedback on how the car is performing:  The driver, and the tires. Drivers are usually very literal when they communicate what the car is doing. If it’s starting to spin, they’ll say it’s loose or … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #11 – Sway/Anti-Roll Bars

October 21st, 2016 by Matt Holden

  I had a professor in college say, “Springs for speed, bars for handling”.  It’s a short, but interesting statement, and it’s a concept that’s easy to forget and go about things in the other way when tuning a race car, be it real or virtual.  Modern race cars, oval cars especially, have seen huge … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #9 – Bump Springs

September 30th, 2016 by Matt Holden

So far we’ve gone over how the main springs work on the car, but we still need to cover secondary springs, or “bump stops”.  iRacing has recently overhauled the Gen 6 Cup cars and the Xfinity cars to use bump springs, but those still fall under the category of bump stops.  To understand why the … Read the Rest »

Commodore’s Garage #8 – Coil Binding

September 23rd, 2016 by Matt Holden

Last week I went over the various thing that can influence your spring choices for a given track.  How much banking, amount of bumps, and even the weight of the car can drastically alter what you need in your race car, but can those rules be broken?  Of course they can, and it’s not uncommon … Read the Rest »