Lausitzring GP Track/Setup Guide by Omer Kinay

The EuroSpeedway Lausitz, a.k.a. Lausitzring, is located in northeast Germany, funnily enough only 343km away from Tor Poznań, so logistics will not be a big issue between venues this week. It is also very closely located to the Czech Republic border so maybe some Škoda officials will watch the fun races of the fellow SRS drivers.

GP layout of this track has many technical sections, two main straights that aid tyre management and lots of bumps!

Below, I present you a decent hotlap I managed to do at a 28 celcius track:

Sector 1: 40.791
Sector 2: 49.868
Sector 3: 31.793
Lap Time: 2.02.452

Setup Tips:

In my opinion, the most important components of a good setup here is a well-behaved combination of wheel alignment, dampers, front ARB and ride height.

Tyre Pressures: Being a FWD vehicle, Octavia cooks the front tyres which causes increased tyre pressures. 22psi on the fronts (cold) and 24psi on the rears (cold) work well for me. If you are driving too aggressively and letting the car roll to much, you will run all four tyres hotter. In this case, you should probably go for even lower pressures.

Wheel Alignment: As in almost every FWD car, it’s a good practice to set aggressive rear negative cambers. Note that the lower the rear ride height, the more negative camber you’re gonna get so if you don’t think that you have enough midturn lateral grip, try lowering your car more. Setting front cambers with a FWD car is just about finding the sweet spot between a decent acceleration out of corner exits and midturn lateral grip. Less negative front camber will also improve braking effectiveness so I suggest a setting between [-3, -2.6] degrees (never look at the setup value, always and always check car status) based on your driving style. Make sure that your camber setting evenly distributes the heat on I-M-O of the front tyres for a better grip and longer lifespan. Setting up toe is much trickier with Octavia. I like my FWD cars with faster turn-in so using aggressive negative toe values, especially on the front, works better for me. I almost never set a positive toe to either end, unless the car is struggling big time under braking. Very important note: positive toe clicks for rear tyres gives more negative rear toe to Octavia, but it is the other way around for the fronts. Keep an eye on “Car Status” while playing with the toe clicks.

Dampers: Very tricky to find a good combination for a track like Lausitzring GP. It has lots of bumps, so having stiffer fast bump (>14) and fast rebound (>20) should theoretically work well. I also use stiffer front slow bump but, awkwardly, a relatively lower slow rebound is aiding the traction (reducing the understeer) on the slow sections of the track. Make sure that your front slow bump is not excessively stiff (an indication is too fast weight transfer in those S-sections which results in loss of grip). I set the rear slow bump to be more or less the same as the rear bump but the rear slow rebound is set much stiffer to prevent loss of grip on the bumpy sections (T3, T4 and mostly T8) and provide agility particularly at T5, T10 and T13.

Suspension and Ride Height: Octavia has softer springs at the rear so I choose the stiffest available option there. As for the fronts, I use a relatively stiffer setting. My car is set up low but almost level in terms of ride height. With Octavia, AC lets us to change only the front ARB. If you feel like the car is bottoming out too much (the best corner to evaluate this is T9), use the soft front ARB option that would let the front end roll more. This is the case for me so I set it to zero.

Coast: Depends very much on your driving style. I like to make a difference on slow sections and not a fan of understeer so I’m using a very low front differential coast.

Brake Bias and Power: If you have a load-cell pedals, you’ll get the most out of braking obviously at 100% brake power. But with my good old Logitech Driving Force GT, I have no option to drive with around 90% brake power to prevent lock-ups at all costs. I use dynamic brake balance so don’t have a single “good” value for that. If you want to prevent understeer/lock-ups during trail braking, go for a bias <70%.

May the downforce be with you!