The Hanoi Street Circuit is a handful to drive at the best of times. When it’s raining, it can seem downright frightening!
However, with the right tweaks to your setup, you’ll find yourself sailing around the streets in no time.
In the wet conditions, stability is always the key. While this setup may not be the fastest in terms of a time trial lap, it will give you the utmost confidence in your car.
This will allow you to be consistently fast on F1 2020's new track without throwing it all away.
Aerodynamics
It may come as a surprise that you don’t need to pile on the wing angle around here to deal with the wet conditions.
In fact, I’ve even gone for a lower front wing setting than I had for my dry setup, while going quite a bit heavier on rear downforce. With 5-8 wings, you’ll be able to floor the throttle nice and early, thanks to the planted rear end.
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Running a much larger angle on the rear wing relative to the front will make the car understeer a little, which is exactly what you want in the wet conditions!
Transmission
Less of a surprise is the fact that I’m recommending 50% for your on-throttle differential. This gives you a good amount of stability with no major downsides.
For the off-throttle differential setting, go for 80%. Unlike with on-throttle, off-throttle differential yields greater stability as the percentage rises.
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Going higher than 80% might leave you struggling to get the car turned in on the tighter parts of the track.
Suspension Geometry
Front camber is generally well balanced at the default settings, and this remains true in the wet. -3.00 and -1.50 keep the car steady.
Running a slightly lowered front toe of 0.08 will lend you a little extra stability at the front of the car, while raising the rear toe to 0.44 helps smooth out those traction zones without compromising performance.
Suspension
A stiff car will often struggle in the wet, as it tends to make the car more responsive and thus harder to control.
Once again, therefore, it is in the name of stability that I suggest 3-5 for your suspension.
The anti-roll bars are a little more of an issue. I’ve gone with 5-7 for the front and rear roll bars respectively.
Raising the stiffness of the bars could prevent the car from understeering mid-corner, if you’re having issues with that.
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However, I felt that the potential for overly stiff anti-roll bars to overheat the tyres on a drying track would wreak havoc with the car’s overall balance.
For ride height, I’ve simply raised the values a little from my dry Vietnam setup to 4-5. It will come as no shock to learn that this helps to keep the car stable.
Brakes
Brakes are always a matter of personal preference to a certain degree. In the wet even more so.
I would still recommend going all out with 100% brake pressure, and then running 52% brake bias to compensate for potential front lockups.
As you will generally be at lower speeds in the wet, a rearward brake bias will help the car to rotate when its going slowly.
Tyres
Tyre pressures won’t have a drastic effect on your overall performance in the wet.
Running the default 23.0psi on both front tyres works well, and taking a little bit out of the rears to 21.1psi each will help a little bit with traction.
As much as a wet race in Vietnam will be a struggle for many, this setup should alleviate much of the stress involved. Your car won’t be trying to throw itself off the road quite as fiercely as it would be without these changes.
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