Brake Bias in Sim Racing - How And Why You Should Use It (Especially If You're A Novice)

break bias is a term given to the proportion of breaking force that goes to the front and rear wheels and changing it can have dramatic effects on how you Chi behaves on most cars in iRacing and other sims you can adjust break bias where iced out on track anytime we like using controls that you've set to your wheel or your buttons learning to adjust your car's brake bias multiple times per lap to suit each corner type is an easy way to gain time and consistency however if you're thinking hang on a minute I'm barely able to string laps together without spinning or going off course let's get that sorted before throwing in things like brake bias then stop right there because incorrect bias could be causing you these problems and if you make the small effort to get comfy with changing brake bias it could really help you well before you can experiment with brake bias you'll need to ensure you have set your buttons for doing so in your options menu look for the button bindings to set button to increase bias and a button to decrease by us in iRacing you can see your current brake bias in the f8 black box represented by a percentage which will move up and down when you press your bias buttons it's also visible on some car dashboards in game or if your field of view cuts off the dashboard you could use a phone dashboard on your actual desk to display your brake bias while you drive whatever you use being able to see you brake bias will be important as you'll start to memorize your bias settings and if this is starting to sound like hard work then it is time for a little bit of a pep talk it's gonna take a bit of concentration at first but once you incorporate brake bias adjustments into every lap you won't be able to live without it adjust in bias per corner is such a performance enhancing tool but Renault f1 got into trouble for doing it automatically without driver input if I was to ban myself from touching brake bias for a whole race I'd struggle to set the same consistency all times where I can with it it's at your fingertips so why not use it let's dive in but as simply as possible adding brake bias makes for car easier to control when braking and turning but also makes it more likely to lock a front wheel in a hard braking zone and run white lowering brake bias gives the car more braking potential particularly in a straight line but it's harder to control if you try you're breaking into a corner and you may lose the back end this means if you come up to a given corner and you lock the front wheels every time try dialing the brake bias down a bit next time you go to that corner and if you find a particular corner or complex tricky because the back end keeps coming around and a break-in died of a brake bias up to help balance cell here's the track layout diagram of Monza it's got a good variety of corner types term one is a solution that has a heavy straight line braking zone just going into it the chicane it follows is similar but the entry speed is lower and it's not quite as tight so trail braking starts to come into play turn four and five are faster longer turns but knee trail braking in greater measure than the two she counts before it turns seven is a fast left-right-left chicane that needs a good entry and the last turn Parabolica is a very fast long corner with lots of trial break in Monza is a great example of how brake bias can make life much easier when you start using it as throughout the lap Monza's corner Styles seem to get faster and faster as the lap goes on I recently did a few races on Monza in the 488 GTE so I had enough time to figure out what my own break biased settings were for a track in here they are so with a fair bit of practice these are the values that I've decided upon using for my brake bias when I'm coming up to each section the percentages themselves are not really important what counts here is for change in percentage between each style of corner if you compare to brake bias used for turn one which is 49 percent that's vastly different from the brake bias for I select for a final turn Parabolica because they're two different stars of corners and if I was to go into Parabolica with 49 percent brake bias I'd find it really hard to keep the car under control half the time the back end would come around and it only takes one incident in a lap distance to really ruin a race whereas if I enter term one with 53% break bias instead of 49 I'd find the Front's lock up way too easy and it wouldn't be able to beat people in the braking zone into the first turn so to demonstrate this all in practice here's what it looks like you can see the brake bias at the car at the top right hand corner we're coming into turn 1 and I've already not burb a bias back to roughly 50% it's not always bang on because you have to you know twist your brake bias bias dials or pressed buttons to get it right and sometimes you've got a little bit too much to think about to get it bang on but the target was 50% and we're near an affair coming up to the second chicane now we want to knock it forward a little bit because for characteristics of a corner while similar it's a bit faster and you're not coming in quite as fast so you want to be able to trail back a little bit easier in this complex onto the first and second there's Moss we knock the brake bias forward otherwise to be car can be pretty unsettled going into it so we want to add a bit of stability to the front by knocking the brake bias forward by adding percentage coming up to the third chicane after this pretty long straight we've got plenty of time to just tick the brake bias down a little bit because I prefer to have a little bit extra turning on this pretty fast left-right-left you came so we knock it down another percent we turn in get through the chicane and we come out the other side now we're heading up to Parabolica which is the heaviest trail braking zone of the entire lap for me so on a knock it forward or increase the percentage by you know a percent percent and a half - around fifty to a half percent and because it's quite a long trail break comparatively speaking adding brake bias increasing that percentage means that the car is quite planted it might come at a cost of a little bit of understeer but it helps me nail Parabolica time after time without the car feeling unsafe or slidy remember I said to ignore the bias percentages themselves on that Monza diagram and focus on a differences per section instead this is because each car type be it formula GTE and so on have a different baseline bias value which is considered normal for that car for example let's say V setups for the Ferrari 488 GTB have a neutral bias setting of around about 51 percent in the BMW M HGT it might be 52% in the Ford GT it'll be 49% and the Porsche 911 GTS a line bias value of around 57% which is completely different so if you were to go out in the Porsche GTE at Monza and try and use the exact brake bias settings that I showed you in the Ferrari 488 GTB month a diagram it is going to end up in disaster so I encourage you to start off with the neutral value that you find already in the setup you've loaded up for the track and just tweak it slightly to try and make every corner work best for you if you struggle to remember what brake bias is settle on for each section of a track you could print our track diagram and drop the values down so you have it for reference another useful thing to know to understand rate bias is that the percentage usually represents how much braking force gets sent to the front wheels so a 50% bias readout means an equal split of braking force front and back whereas if it says 60% that means you're sending 60% to the front 40% to the back another neat little thing some simulators might model the brake bias dial actually wizard around as you make an adjustment as seen here in iRacing lastly don't feel obligated to restlessly fiddle with a brake bias all the time monser I'll make a good 4 or 5 adjustments per lap but at Lamont I only make an adjustment twice per lap because that's all I feel it needs you could decide to adjust bias just for one particularly tricky corner and then return it to the neutral position for the rest of a lap and that's fine you'll still be better off and if you didn't borrow it all and I'm making a big deal out of brake bias because I think it's important especially if you're struggling to put laps together or you find in particular sections of particular circuits really tricky if you start using brake bias you're not going to stop I've been trying to mentor a mate of mine in iRacing and I've been banging on about rate bias all the time constantly droppin a hint you know add more brake buyers for this corner and take more brake bias away for this heavy braking zone and now he understands what brake bias is for and how it can actually help you out loads when you're getting a hang of a track and really starting to shed the time he's addicted he's hooked on it so if you are just starting out or you just trying to find that extra tenth don't ignore brake bias real racing drivers use it and you can bet that the best people the fastest sym races especially are not ignoring brake bias so you should - at the end of the day if somebody said to you that you could take two or three tenths off of your best lap times by pressing a button in your steering wheel you would take it and that is what brake bias will give you over people who do not use it if you haven't dabbled with brake bias on the go before now but I hope this video inspires you to give it a try because it's so useful for tuning out instability and front brake lock ups and will definitely help you nail each trap that is a little bit more please subscribe and help us to get over a thousand subscribers and share this with anyone else you feel might benefit comment below if anything is unclear and I will respond and leave feedback there if it helps you in any way thank you very much for watching

Channel: Danny Lee

Views: 164,516

Keywords:

Id: zNw4wQu__Oo

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020