Many of today’s higher-end sports cars and sports sedans have active damper control. The factories engineers use this active control to tune the suspension in the same way that we turn the knobs on race dampers. However, with the advent of sophisticated sensors and the ability to multiplex numerous sensors on the modern cars CANBUS, these systems have tremendous performance potential limited only by the skill of the engineers tuning them. Although these systems have a lot of capability, we have been ripping them out and installing things like sophisticated and expensive 3-way and 4-way adjustable motorsports dampers so we can do our own tuning. Some of our complaints about the OEM systems is that they are still tuned too soft and there is not enough differentiation between comfort and sport. Other complaints are that the system acts unpredictably, there is a feeling of lag in the system, etc. Well in the past the only option was to gut the active damping and install race dampers but recently we discovered the DSC Sport Suspension Controler. We got the plug and play system for our Porsche GT3RS but DSC offers plug and play as well as universal systems for many performance cars with active dampers. The DSC Sport box will allow you to tune for changes in spring rates, bars, and tires to make more track-oriented or ride comfort damper control programs for your car.
Read all about Project GT3RS here!
With its OEM front nose lift, there are not many options for race-type multi-adjustable shocks that are compatible with the front lift. The DSC Sport damper controller might just be the answer to our needs.
Our DSC Sport system works on any 991 911 Porsche with the factory PASM system. The connectors plug right into the factory wire harness.
The DSC Sport box has a mini USB port so the box can communicate with a PC running Windows 7-10. Sorry Apple creatives no box for you. Once you are set up you can tune 1899 different parameters that the box has control over!
So you register your box with DSC Sport and you are ready to go to town and start doing some detailed tuning. What we did is visit the DSC Sport website and downloaded the latest software file for the 991.1 GT3RS and uploaded it to the controller. We found that they have a stiffer than their standard sport mode file so we downloaded that and uploaded it to the Sport Mode side of the maps. In the software for the Porsche, tuning the Normal Mode has a yellow background, and Sport Mode is red. However, we did some of our own tuning once we did some hard driving and got a feel for DSC Sport’s improved programming and how we could mess with it to set it up for our own preferences.
5 comments
I need to dig through this with notes and stuff but it’s really interesting getting an idea of the algorithm that the controller’s using. On the shock hardware side themselves, do you get the impression the stock Porsche dampers are functioning like the Tractive setup DSC offers, where it’s a solenoid bleed valve to tweak bypass flow around the piston shim stack? From hearing about issues with the magnetorheological shocks, I’ve always liked the idea of doing things this way more.
I know what OEMs are using it for and all but… looking at the way you can set up the DSC controller, do you think there’s good opportunities to set up a race car to gain lap time with something like this system compared to a well setup 3 way motorsports damper setup, or are some of the ways you’d do body control with dampers for a streetable setup just kind of crutching not enough spring rate?
I am pretty sure it’s a PWM solenoid controlling a bleed around the piston. The aftermarket Damptronic version is like that, there is the valve on top of the piston that controls the flow through the shaft.
thanks for the in depth descriptions. DSC doesnt do a great job in telling people how to use this thing. this will help in tuning my c7 z06. I have the dsc box on my car and it really is professional level software and tuning with a steep learning curve (and a bad software interface to boot) therefore the only changes i have made are to the tour and sport G comfort settings and left track mode completely alone.
They really don’t but once you get the hang of it, you can do a lot with it. How well does the magnaride respond to tuning inputs with the box?
This is a few years old, but was wondering if you had the resultant PDTS file lying around somewhere to use as a new baseline. As noted, the OOB settings need some love