How To Setup Cars For Drifting In Assetto Corsa

Written by Will Hurst(Gone.)                        version 1.2

If you have any comments suggestions or concerns please DM me on discord at 

hiimgone and if you would like to check out more of my content follow my IG @hiimgone_ and @hiimgone160 on youtube.

Disclaimer: 

This document is intended to help people understand what the effects of different adjustments have on drift cars and allows the person reading this document to be able to actually setup their own car without the need for paying someone on gumroad for their VDC setup or conversely just going on youtube and using whatever setup you find on there without actually having any idea of what your changing and what the purpose of what your doing is. 

Unfortunately I’m only one man and I am not an automotive engineer so all of the information compiled in this document come from 11 years of compiled sim drifting knowledge and testing. What this means for you is that there are most likely going to be small things I am not right about or things that I do that aren’t 100% optimal however this shouldn’t stop you from being able to make a fairly successful setup for your car using the information found in this document. It should also be known that most of this information mainly is based on stuff I use for VDC cars but can be used on pretty much any car pack that doesn’t suck.

The original most up-to-date version of this document can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rITmKOnmwWcvm4aGIs6t-27tlaGlD3dTdfVH8WdUnmY/edit?tab=t.0

Tyres

Tyre pressures are the easiest thing to understand, tires like to be at their optimal heat and pressure and they will give you the most grip that you can get out of them when they are at this optimal heat and pressure. You can find this by using the Tyres App while driving in game. If you set your tire pressures to be at a lime green colour you’ll be able to get the most grip out of them, however for street cars you might want to set your tire pressure to be a little bit lower than optimal so you don’t lose optimal tire grip immediately when trying to make many laps around on a track.

Suspension

Anti roll bars: (ARB or also known as a sway bar.)

Low anti roll bar: (0 - 5000)

High anti roll bar: ( 10k - 15k) 

Front:

Your anti roll bar ties your suspension together. This means that when going around a corner the anti roll bar will cause the inner wheel to compress at the same rate as the outer wheel. Having a low anti roll bar value will cause the front of the car to be very accurate at the cost of making the car twitchy. Having a high anti roll bar value will induce a lot of understeer into the front end of the car, however in some cases it can be useful to have some understeer; if you’re on a track that has a large entry or you want to do backwards entries having a light anti roll bar in the front may cause the rear end of the car to follow the front more and cause you to spin where having a tight anti roll bar and adding some understeer will let you get away with more.

Rear: 

In the rear anti roll bar is the main way to adjust side bite into the rear end of the car. Adding anti roll bar into the rear end of the car will take away a lot of grip and make the rear end want to step out more and allow the car to get sideways easier but it will also come at the cost of making the car snappy and feel like it wants to transition really fast. Having a very low value for anti roll bar in the rear will add a lot of grip into the car and make the car gain speed mid corner however it’ll be harder to transition the car and harder to initiate a drift.

Edit 1.1

Anti roll bars can also be used to limit the stroke of your suspension in some cars if they have a really long suspension stroke, Meaning that if you find that your car transitions really violently with low arb it might be due to the fact that your suspension is unloading and loading too much causing the car to transfer too much weight. In this case you might need to add some arb in order to stop one side of the car from compressing too much and allow the other side of the car to also take load which will allow your inner tire (front or rear) during a drift to have more contact with the road rather than forcing all of the weight of the car on one tire. 

Spring rates 

Low spring rate: Front 75 N/mm and under

         Rear 40 N/mm and under

High Spring rate: Front 105 N/mm and above

         Rear 65 N/mm and above

Front:

A low spring rate (Soft) in the front end will make the car super gripped up in the front and can possibly make it twitchy to drive similar to having no front sway bar, and it also will make the front end of the car feel numb to a degree. it also means that the front ride height will go down since there is less force against the weight of the front end which I will expand more on in ride height later. A high spring rate (Hard) in the front will make the front end less twitchy and it can start understeering and naturally put the front end higher. It will also make the front end of the car very lively and give you more road feel. If you go too high on a spring rate you may notice that the front may start being bouncy and might jump when hitting a bump.

Rear:

 A low spring rate in the rear will give the car a lot of forward bite and cause the car to squat under power. This also means your launch will be better as more weight is being forced straight into the tire when on throttle. A high spring rate in the rear will make the car easier to get into a drift but you'll sacrifice forward bite which can be preferred for lower powered cars. Too low of a spring rate may cause your suspension to bottom out causing the car to potentially bounce when getting on throttle and will affect how high you can raise the rear end of the car.

Note:

Do all of your measurements/modifications to your setup from the live suspension readings on the right hand side of the screen during setup in the next few sections. 

Setting up on uneven ground:

When setting up your car you might notice that on some tracks you car will spawn in uneven ground which will make your setup look a little funky in the live suspension even though your chamber values on the left side of the setup are symmetrical. If you run into this you’re going to unfortunately do some mental math and adjust your chamber/toe by averaging out the numbers. 

Example: left rear chamber -1.0 

  Right side chamber 1.0 

  = 0 chamber average chamber between both sides.

Ride height: 

This is a little more complicated as this affects the balance of the car more than people think. Essentially think of ride height as a way to ballast the car and change where the weight of the car sits. if the front end of the car is higher than the rear that will mean that more of the weight of the car is naturally being placed on the rear tires which can get you more forward grip and make the rear end more gripped up in general. If the rear end of the car is raised higher than the front of the car you may find that the front end will have a lot more grip but the rear end of the car will become snappy and unstable. In general you want your ride height to be as low as possible to lower the centre of gravity of the car to add more grip however sometimes this isn’t possible due to camber and elevation changes in the track/road. 

Note: your ride height doesn’t actually affect the travel length of your suspension as assetto corsa has a separate value for that in the cars data. This means that it doesn’t matter how low the car goes theoretically provided that the car doesn’t physically bottom out the frame before the suspension hits the bump stop. 

Alignment

Camber:

Front: 

The more camber you have the more grip you will have at steeper steering angles. This means that if you're at full lock you will have more grip at a higher negative camber than if you had 0 camber, and on the other side of things; if you have 0 camber in the front you will have more grip in the centre of your steering compared to the closer you get to lock. ( I usually run around -6.5 of camber in the front but this is just my preference and it doesn't always work with all cars depending on how much angle the car has) Also you never want to have positive camber in the front unless you're trying to look goofy or you're trolling. 

Rear: 

In the rear of the car ideally you will want to have 0 camber while the car is on throttle as this will give you the most amount of contact patch on the ground and give you the most amount of grip. Unfortunately some cars gain negative camber when squatting which you can see with mainly 90’s chassis like S chassis, e36/e46, etc. in order to get 0 camber during squat to maximise grip you might want to add +0.5 camber in the rear. 

Toe: 

Front:

Negative toe in the front will cause the front of the tire to look outwards and will give you better turn in, but it also has the added effect of giving your leading wheel more angle in extreme cases. In general I stick to setting my toe in the front to around -0.3 in the front however you can add more if you find that you want to get slightly more angle at full lock, with the downside of making the car slightly less responsive and cause understeer due to excessive toe. In general, positive toe in the front will only add understeer and actually take away angle on your leading wheel so it is not recommended. 

Rear: 

Negative toe in the rear will cause your car to feel unstable and cause your transitions to be snappy; however I don’t recommend using negative toe as a means of making your car snappier. Having positive toe will cause the rear end to have more grip. With that being said though I wouldn't go past 0.30 positive toe or -0.25 rear toe because after 0.3 toe in the rear you may start to experience a feeling that can only be described as “rear end understeer” at angle and you will not gain any more effective grip. 

How suspension affects alignment

I kind of alluded to this section earlier in this document when talking about the rear camber but this is going to be a little bit of a complicated section. 

Many different mods and different chassis have lots of differences with how their suspension geometry changes the alignment of the car during the stroke of your suspension at full extension to fully compressed but what you should know is that on many chassis will add positive camber and positive toe on extension and add negative camber and negative toe on compression. This means that when you’re setting up your car you should actually do a couple of test runs using the suspension Dev app on the right hand side of the screen when driving to watch how much camber and toe your car is gaining to optimise your settings as some chassis don’t add much camber or toe at all while others will add one or two degrees of camber during the sweep of your suspensions geometry. Also depending on the adjustability of toe and camber you may need to adjust the height of the car in order to optimise your suspension/contact patch of your tires. 

Setting up on uneven ground

When setting up your car you might notice that on some tracks you car will spawn in uneven ground which will make your setup look a little funky in the live suspension even though your chamber values on the left side of the setup are symmetrical. If you run into this you’re going to unfortunately do some mental math and adjust your chamber/toe by averaging out the numbers. 

Example: left rear chamber -1.0 

  Right side chamber 1.0 

  = 0 chamber average chamber between both sides.

Dampers.

Damping 

Note: this is probably the most nuanced section and damping is mainly used to fine tune attributes of the car rather than to make large sweeping adjustments. This is the only section that I believe deserves an actual explanation of how it works because I feel that it’s one of the most complicated things to learn in the beginning of learning how to setup cars and truth be told it can be almost completely ignored if you feel like it’s too daunting to learn but with that being said it can 100% change the characteristics of a car if you know how to adjust them. Due to the nature of damping in my opinion being one of the most cohesive parts of the car to work together with the front and the rear of the car I will actually stray away from the Front/Rear format used in the rest of the document. 

Explanation: Imagine two people kicking a rubber ball with the same amount of force, but one of them is kicking the ball on the ground and the other is kicking the ball underwater. Even though the force being used is the same you’ll find that the ball that was kicked on land will travel a lot farther and move a lot faster than the ball kicked under water. Now replace water with damping and force with spring rate and this is how you can imagine how damping affects your spring rate. Damping doesn’t actually affect the amount of force your spring rate applies to the car but rather it just controls the rate of speed that your springs can move. 

Bump: (Compression)

Bump damping specifically controls the speed at which your suspension can compress. This means it sets the speed at which your suspension will be able to take a bump or how fast the suspension will compress during braking or how quickly you can go from full extension to bump stop. This setting can be used to set how fast the rear end of the car can squat under power and how fast the front will dive during braking or how much it will dive during small taps of left foot braking or even E-brake. In general I run very little bump damping in the rear of the car because I want the rear of the car to get to squat as fast as possible without the rear of the car oscillating due to bumps. In the front of the car I set my bump to generally be around 50% of the maximum or higher if needed so that when I get off throttle the front end doesn’t dive too much coming out of squat into a neutral state and also so the front doesn’t dive too much due to left foot braking. 

Rebound: (Extension) 

Rebound damping specifically controls the speed at which your suspension can extend. This means how fast the suspension can raise in the rear while on the brakes or how fast the front suspension can extend while the rear end of the car squats. In the rear of the car rebound can serve to actually change how fast your car can transition and it can be really helpful to change how the car fundamentally acts off throttle. Using a high amount of rebound will cause the car to want to transition less and make the rear end of the car not want to “let go” of a drift as much. In the front of the car you can use rebound to balance how fast and aggressively you want the rear of the car to squat similarly to how bump damping affects the rear end of the car squatting because when the rear end of the car comes down the front of the car wants to raise and vice versa. This means that if you have a lot of front rebound damping the front of the car will raise less and can affect how your car launches out of the hole or how fast the car will get to full squat on throttle. 

General Settings

Brake Bias:

Brake bias is something that I think not a lot of people think about that can completely change the way you use left foot braking to make adjustments mid corner. With a brake bias of 64% or lower the car will want to lose angle while left foot braking due to brakes wanting to slow down the rear tires while on throttle. This can be helpful if you find that when you left foot brake while chasing someone you often over rotate the car. With a brake bias of 66% or higher you might find that while left foot braking the car will want to add more angle. This can be helpful if you find that while chasing you need to add angle to match the lead driver a lot while also slowing down. Personally I’ve found that 65% brake bias will cause the car to be the most neutral while left foot braking, however some car packs I’ve found don’t actually use 65% as the neutral point so this is something you might need to mess around with and your mileage may vary. Examples of Car packs this specific information is accurate with is: WDTS, VDC, DWG, and Gravy Garage. 

Gearing:

Gearing is something that plays a large part in how your car will be able to put down the power that it makes and can even change how much your car will want to push toward the inside of a corner or to the outside similar to adding forward bite in your setup. To over simplify you want to set your gearing so that your drift gear is long enough you’re able to do most of the track with that gear but short enough that you’re nearly hitting the rev limiter and you have good engine response when coming on and off throttle. Something that you might want to think about specifically with VDC or Competition style cars in general is that if you’re running an H pattern shifter you might want to consider setting your 4th gear as your drift gear. This is because you’ll never need to shift up past your main gear (4th) and shifting down to 3rd is a simpler motion than coming from 3rd to second or 5th to 4th resulting in less possibility for mistakes.

Having a longer gear ratio will make the car want to float out to the outside of corners more and will allow the car to achieve higher angles in the corner, but if your gearing is too long you will find that your engine response as stated above will be worse and you might require more clutch work to get the car to spin the tires. A shorter gear will give the car more forward bite as it will limit how much your tires can spin, as well as it’ll make the engine feel more responsive and will potentially require less work to get the car into the powerband for smaller displacement turbo cars at the cost of lower angle or potentially having the car straighten due to the car’s speed starting to come closer to the speeds at which the tires are spinning. 

Drivetrain: 

Diff Power

Diff power controls how much your differential can lock the inner and outer wheel at the same speed, this means at 0 diff power your differential will only spin one wheel and at 100 diff power your diff will be locked while you’re on throttle 100% of the time. we can use this to change how snappy the car is on throttle while transitioning by lowering your diff power from any value less than 100. 

Diff Coast 

Diff Coast is what controls how much your differential will lock while off throttle. Like above if your coast is at 0 this means that your differential will not lock at all while off throttle and both rear wheels will spin independent of one another and at 100 your wheels will spin at the exact same speed 100% of the time. we can use this to change how snappy the car is off throttle while transitioning by lowering your diff power from any value less than 100. 

Preload

Your preload is what sets how much torque differential is required to unlock your differential. This means at a low preload your diff will open up quickly coming into a corner or if you have a high preload it will take a lot of force on both rear tires to make the differential unlock. This will not affect power or coast if you set them to 100 because setting your power or coast to 100 will cause them to be unable to unlock

Personal Note

Personally I only use a locked diff (100 Power 100 Coast) as I find that it is the most consistent option for me and differential settings are not something I often think about so the information in this section is based off of less experimentation in comparison to the other sections in this document.

Drift Glossary: 

• Side Bite (Sideways Grip): Sidebite is just how much grip your tire gets perpendicular to which way the tread goes.
• Forward Bite (Forward Grip): How much grip your tire gets pushing forward, usually meaning how hard the car pushes towards the inside of the corner.
• Squat: When the rear end of the car lowers (compresses) due to the G forces of moving forward. 
• Dive: when the front end of the car lowers (compresses) due to the G forces of braking 
• Ebrake: Hand brake, Emergency brake, parking brake.
• Left Foot Braking (LFB): as the name suggests, left foot braking is a technique of pressing the brake while still on the throttle to either add or reduce angle depending on your brake bias and to slow the car slightly while in tandem.
• Over Rotate (Over Angle, Spinning Out): Over rotating is when the angle of the car during drift exceeds the maximum amount of angle the car can achieve causing you to spin out. 

Edits: 

* 15/11/2023 edit 1.1

Added section on setting up on uneven pit surfaces. - Suggestion by AtizSlides (Atizrm)

* Added section for ARB due to new discoveries while driving and setting up more cars from different packs.

* 14/1/2023 edit 1.2

Added more information pertaining to gearing and toe.

* 27/4/2025

Changed small typo in tyres section.