Advanced Mechanical Damage Modelling

## Clutch Damage

For starters to enable clutch damage, you need to have mehanical failures enabled.

The basic variables of clutch damage are temperature and wear. You accumulate wear by slipping the clutch. If you apply more pressure (as in press clutch input in less), it'll wear faster as long as it's slipping. Also how fast it slips as in the RPM difference between clutch's gearbox-side vs engine RPM has a big effect. And depending on the car and clutch, it can wear faster if it's slipped when the gearbox-side is spinning fast. This is a concern when driving an h-shifter car and not letting the revs match before dropping the clutch - or even not lifting throttle at all between shfits, which is very bad. This isn't really a concern with sequentials if they have autolift.

Wear won't instantly start degrading clutch performance (how much torque it can hold, how fast it "bites"), but it will become more sluggish after extensive wear and eventually slip from sudden jolts or if you don't let it settle after a shift. And with a lot of wear it can't hold the engine's full torque at all.

Wear is a long term issue if you mostly drive the car normally and especially with sequential gearboxes. The first ill effect you will get if you slip the clutch a lot with major pressure is overheating. Easily achieved if trying to gain a better start with too much clutch slip in cars that do not handle this - more on this below. This will make the clutch slip prematurely and cause a lot of wear in a short time. Never let it slip like this, but instead baby the throttle and let the clutch cool down. You'll notice that it's possible to destroy the clutch like this in seconds.

If you believe your clutch is gone, go to the pits with mechanical damage repairs on and they will handle it.

One more thing is that carbon clutches like on F1 cars (F-Classic onwards atm) have more bite when they heat up. This also works if you have mechanical failures disabled. It'll make them a bit tricky to launch with slip technique unless you're aware of this increase in bite after brief slip.

### **Clutch Limits per car**

Some context for sudden clutch damage. Race cars don't necessarily handle clutch abuse all that well. They can take moderate abuse - which racing always brings - but not really more than that. Racing clutches tend to be as small as possible to remove driveline inertia while holding the engine's torque. This also enables mounting the engine lower which improves CoG. As you can imagine there is a lot of torque and heat, and not that much heat capacity involved when slipped for even a second with strong pressure.

As a rule of thumb, F1 clutches are designed to do a standing start with some clutch slip to prevent bogging down in low RPMs or starting too big of a burnout from dropping the clutch too harshly. GT3s are not designed for this.

However since standing starts are popular in practical gameplay, GT3s in AMS2 are designed to do a decent standing start. The clutch shouldn't fail if you simply start with moderate RPMs and throttle, and quickly release the clutch input. It's a compromise between a gentle start and not bogging down too much in lower RPM. If you dare, you can disable traction control and try letting the tires most of the abuse with a small burnout which helps keep RPMs up until the car is moving along nicely.

### **Clutch temperature and wear monitoring**

As for cluch damage info, this hasn't been added yet to any built-in HUD. But it's available through the latest shared memory header.

1. ↑ https://forum.reizastudios.com/threads/clutch-damage.24692/