Fixed Or Open Setups - What Do You Prefer?

Open setup. TL;DR paragraph at the end.

We always hear the arguments of people gaming the physics or the nerd's advantage of endlessly tweaking. But we completely neglect that fixed setups more often than not are plain awful, and there is people practicing endlessly, adapting their driving style, controller settings, etc, trying to gain a thousendth of advantage.

Since when spending two hours in tweaking a setup and have it race ready (while at the same time practicing driving, because human brain can multitask) is wrong, but practicing ten hours just driving to adapt to a fixed setup is right?

Let's get something out of the way: the equivalence of money in real life motorsports when portraying it in simracing, is spare time. Fixed setup? Drive for hours and adapt. Open setup? Put the same amount of hours in both driving and tweaking. And in all scenarios, knowledge and experience create more opportunities with less, but at the end, you either have the money in motorsports or spare time in simracing, or you won't have a much needed resource to succeed.

TL;DR: No matter if fixed or open, the simracers with more spare time hold an upper hand in a basic resource, even if they don't always win. Preference is about your comfort zone on what to do when practicing. The so-called "fairness of fixed setup" is nothing but a fallacy.

I think open setup is better – it allows people to tailor their car to their preferences and as Austin says above, setup work is a key portion of gameplay in modern sim racing.

However, I really appreciate titles that go out of their way to provide well-made, track-specific, and neutral (as in neither understeery nor oversteery) default setups. Helps people to be able to jump in, get a feel for things, and have fun at a given car-track combo, if they wish. NR2003's "fast" and "jasper" setups tailored to each track come to mind. ACC's "safe" and "aggressive" setups are not bad, but should really be updated for each car with each major physics revision (e.g. v1.8 versus v1.9); also, the "aggressive" setups usually tend too much towards understeer, in my opinion.

Team Fixed. Love the level playing field it provides. For me simracing is about the actual racing otherwise I would be playing simengineering games I think. After all these years I am capable of making a more than okay setup myself but I simply don't want to waste my time on it if I do not have to.

When playing a super realistic team-based FPS simulator I am also not going to spend hours and hours cleaning and polishing my guns for every match.

Iracing fixed setup = boring setup, iracing makes setups too conservative.

It depends, for online races or time trials, I prefer fixed setup as it will level up the playing fields.
Open, it usually turns into a headache for me, but it is a good tool to learn the physics of car dynamics when I have more playtime.

The fixed setup brings out the driving qualities of the driver to the fullest, putting everyone in the same conditions, it is also excellent for learning how to drive a specific car from 0. The open setup is suitable for competitions where you train a lot and the level is high, so you need to optimize the car according to your driving style. So what can I say, there are pros and cons for both cases. If I'm in a hurry better fixed.

Most awkward question to date.

Ofcourse it depends on the venue/situation. Should really be no reason to elaborate on. Period.

I prefer fixed setups. Not everyone is obsessed with "setup hacks". But the problem is most sims have bad fixed setups that are horrible to drive

I hate open setups

I want sim racing to feel as close to real life as possible so common sense answer would be open setups BUT even in the best sims you can do very extreme setups that no one would ever run in real life, not to mention various exploits (which I guess is part of the game) so for competition I'd prefer setups to be fixed unless someone comes up with a physics engine that is 1:1 to real life.

Fixed setups only make sense if people would drive exactly the same hardware.

First of all, a big compliment to Yannik Haustein for asking this question. The answer to this question is very personal and depends on your preferences and experience.

There is no single answer to this question because it depends on many factors. Less experienced drivers usually prefer mild understeer. Rental karts usually also have understeer for that reason. If you can't make the corner, you just have to go a little slower through the corner. The brakes are also not set aggressively. If you go into the corner too fast, you just have to brake a little earlier. If the brakes are set too aggressively, an inexperienced driver will lose the car if the brakes are applied too hard. With oversteer, an inexperienced driver will spin in the corner if you turn in a little too much. For an experienced driver, understeer and slack brakes are terrible. He wants a car to turn easily in the corner and understeer makes them slower. They also want to be able to brake very hard as late as possible and they have enough experience not to lose the car or let the brakes lock up.

The ideal setup does not exist, it depends on your experience and your driving style. That is immediately a major disadvantage for a fixed setup. Less experienced drivers prefer a conservative setup and experienced drivers prefer an achresive setup. That is much faster, but it is more difficult to drive. It is also not easy to switch to oversteer when you are used to understeer. With understeer it is best to steer aggressively to get into the corner, with oversteer you steer much more precisely into the corner in order not to spin. To switch from understeer to oversteer, you actually have to learn to drive again.
The organizers of the race can take this into account by adjusting the fixed setup for inexperienced drivers or for experienced drivers and also communicate this clearly. The advantage of a fixed setup is that drivers without experience don't have to worry about the setup and it is the same for everyone. That will work well with inexperienced drivers. But experienced drivers with experience in making their own setups also have their own preferences and are not easily satisfied with someone else's setup. They want to be able to customize it to their liking.

Open setups have advantages and disadvantages. The downside of a fixed setup is that you eliminate an important part of sim racing, the ability to tune the car to make it faster. With an open setup you do use that aspect of sim racing. For the sake of convenience, we then assume that the way in which the various settings are simulated really correspond to reality. And that is of course not always the case. It is a challenge for aliens to find illogical adjustments that make them much faster than all other drivers. And those are often setups that you wouldn't come up with with knowledge and logical thinking, because they actually don't match reality. You could call that cheating. It would be if only they had that ability, but anyone can do it, you just need to know. I understand the criticism of this way of setting up and racing, I also struggle with it. It makes sim racing very frustrating for very good drivers who lack this unrealistical insight to see how someone else can drive unrealistically fast laps. (To be clear, I am not a very fast driver and I am not good in making setups, but I am in direct contact with experienced drivers who know how to setup their cars.)

So, ideally, fixed setups would be good for inexperienced drivers and open setups for experienced drivers. But that still leaves the problem of unrealistic setups that are much faster. It would be nice if someone has a solution for this problem within the capabilities of current racing sims.

I do drive both open and fixed setup. I see the plus side for the fixed in that I provides an ‘level’ playing field, but I in end it favors people who like that specific setup and people who are very adaptable for setups/ driving style.

What I see mostly is that a lot of fixed setups produce tyres which remains way to cold and then faster drivers produces more heat -> even more speed so in the end the field isn’t really closer (I do most of my fixed setup races in RRE)

So for me:
Low effort (fun) races -> fixed setup
Serious races -> open setup

Offline? Whatever floats your boat.

Online? I think it's best for the learning curve to start with fixed setups on leagues / championships with simple cars (MX5 for example), and move towards open setups with more complex cars as you gain experience. I don't think it should be a matter of choosing one over the other but of how these are implemented on leagues / championships.

I think tinkering with setups is part of learning more about all the bits and bolts a racing simulator has to offer. I am no engineer and cann't always "feel" the difference two degrees on the rear wing or the toe of my rear tyres make, so I trust my more experienced mates to help me put together a setup that I'm comfortable with and push it to the limit.

That's my 2 degrees of camber.

manu68 said:

In theory the fixed setup has many advantages for the sim racing.
But it is also very rewarding to be successful in taming a car we like with an open setup.

Let´s face the reality. No chance for me to win.
Then, let´s enjoy simracing in all of its aspects, including setup (of course it should only be available the same parameters as in the real car)

Click to expand...

The reality may be that the fixed setup is terrible, which is likely if it's the default setup.

Moreover, fixed setup doesn't really make sense if you have more than one car to choose. If I connect to a GT3 server with fixed setup, I'll probably leave immediately, because there is no point to force myself to drive a less fun car which behaves differently to what I'm used to and what I like because I won't get the benefit of fixed setups anyway, cars being uneven.

One thing I'm goign to add: fixed setup =/= default setup. Some games allow the host to enforce a fixed custom setup. Don't need to make it fully optimized, just give it some nice turn in without being too wild. You could even use some parameters to promote closer racing by making them unoptimal, such as playing with suboptimal downforce levels to create more overtaking opportunities.

I will also add that open setups don't force any body to take advantage from it. You like the default setup, go ahead. But don't limit others.

I literally made a post on the ACC forums a week ago about just this topic. I really want fixed setups in ACC.

I am good with Fixed setups. Open setups are usually an opportunity to make my car worse, and I always take it.

G_B said:

To be polite,

It depends on the skill of the developers to set the right default settings, whether it's realistic or fun to play, depending on the direction the game is taking.

Click to expand...

This one right here is ignored far too much.