Granted, I'm not a petrolhead, so this might just be me being dense, but.... As far as I can figure, dampers slow down the weight-transfer. The stiffer the dampers, the slower the weight shifts. Correct? So I did a little testing with Second Monitor. TCR18 Hyundai at Imola. Only thing I changed was the front dampers, everything else is exactly the same. Lap 10 is with no front damping at all. Lap 12 is with full damping, as high as it goes. The difference is barely noticeable. So is there a bug, something wrong with the data-channel, something wrong with SecondMonitor, or am I simply missing something blindingly obvious?
A few things to consider are that the damper 'clicks' don't necessarily mean huge changes, the difference between 0 clicks and maximum clicks could be quite small in terms of damping values. Another thing is that for these velocity plots to be reliable, it's best to take an average over a couple of laps, say 3-4, as the car movement can vary quite significantly per lap. You can see this effect pretty clearly in the front left graph of lap 12, a large peak appeared in the slowest bar, if you still get this small of a difference when averaging the data, then something might be up
It's the same with an average over 4 laps, I just forgot to take screenshots of it. And yeah, I get that dampers are for fine-tuning, and thus might not have a massive impact. But still, I would expect to see something.
You should see something, so I'm surprised that you didn't do.. What did you set your low/high speed thresholds to? It's important to note that 0 clicks does not at any point mean zero damping. With these TCR cars, you have less than 5% change in damping force per click.
Just used default values, i.e. 30mm/s. I was more interested in finding a pattern than the values themselves so I didn't bother faffing about with SecondMonitor. No, I get that. And I wasn't expecting wild swings either way. But I did the same thing with the FRJ, and while the effects are subtle, they are there. More importantly, the info displayed is usable in making the car balanced. Or at least so I suspect. Still learning about this stuff, so right now it's Mad Scientist time, just trying extremes to see what happens to the graphs and the handling. But for some reason it doesn't seem to affect the Hyundai at all. I'll keep testing, and see what I can find out.
Now I'm back in front of my computer, I can give you a proper explanation. The actual transition speed for the front is 100mm/s, and for the rear it's 80mm/s, for all the WTCR cars we have in game. Those are very high boundaries, and it means that high speed damping is only used for the biggest of curbs. If you look at the charts you posted, you can actually see quite a clear difference in the high speed range (the actual speeds) between them. Try again with those boundary settings and you'll see a clearer difference.
As I understand we can only change low speed damping though? What is happening with high speed damping is sort of irrelevant. Surely a change from minimum to maximum damping should show a difference in the low speed graphs? (I realise spring stiffness would make the biggest difference in this case, but still....)
Yes, that's correct. What I'm saying though is you have to set the damping transition speed correctly otherwise you're not displaying the correct ranges in the histogram.