Do not touch the car settings until you can lap with a regular time? Yeah, right....

[Apatride]

A bit of a click-bait title but I kind of mean it...

I used to be active here, mostly with the R3E driving club (these guys are cool and great fun to drive with). And I have learnt quite a few things so I followed advice to the letter. It was a good idea except, maybe, for one thing, and I'd like to get more opinions on it:
"Do not try to change the car settings until your laps are within .2 secs of one another"....

I just got back to hotlapping on AC (after a year off or so), having a lot of fun and trying the "New generation" challenge (Porsche GT3 on Zandvoort). My laps were all over the place, so was the car... I got a bit frustrated and I broke the rule, I downloaded settings for this car/track (I do not remember who posted them but thanks).
Within 2 laps, I was improving my best lap time. Now that's nice, but I know it might end up counter-productive. What really changed, though, is that I can actually control the car... Now my laps are still a bit all over the place, mostly because I get out of corners much faster, with much less oversteer, so I have to adapt to the fact that I go much faster on the straights which means that my previous breaking points have to be adapted. I expect to improve a lot more tonight.
I remember when I was learning to play bass, everyone was saying: Start with a low tempo and increase slowly, play with a metronome... This was utterly boring, so I ended up playing less, then decided... Forget it, I want to have fun. I enjoyed it more, played more, and started to see real progress. Then I asked those who were repeating the "start slow and then increase" mantra what their practice looked like. All of them told me: I just turn on the music and jam on it... None of them ever applied what they were preaching...
I wonder if it isn't the same here. How many here really use the AC default settings (they are usually quite bad in my experience) until their laps are within .2secs of one another?
Bonus question: How many gave up because they were not having fun and could not achieve the holy ".2 secs" goal?

 

[Emery]

My example would be the Lotus 25. It is such an understeering pig(*) with the AC default settings, enough so that I hated to drive it in AC. You'd approach a sweeper and try to balance the car with the throttle and nothing would happen as the car slid off the track disregarding any steering or throttle inputs. Finally realized how numb the damper settings were and turned up the rebound. Now the car has some life!

(*) A lightweight pig, but nonetheless definitely of the porcine family.

 

[Mathieu Labbé]

Depends on the car really, for street cars, I tend to modify the setup before I even take the track for a first time because the camber and toe adjustments are usually very conservative. On race cars, yeah, I'd say I tend to try the default first until I get to where I think I'm stable enough to play with the setup. About 20 laps max though, if not I get bored

 

[Brandon Wright]

It's not necessarily a hard and fast rule but usually it's sound advice. You can often find as much time from adapting your driving technique as you can from a tune, and when you combine the two you're at your best. There's always exceptions, if a car's default setup is rubbish you're not going to learn as much lapping with it.

That being said, I almost always drive with the default setup because I'm rubbish at tuning. I get by ok and on occasion even win a race.

 

[Cristian Haba]

The basics:

Always make sure your top gear is at peak power in the RPM range on the longest straight.

Your tires reach, and maintain optimum temperature/pressure and range of temperatures IE. Out/mid/inner across the foot print of the tire over a ten lap stint.

Use appropriate downforce levels for the track.

Practice x 38483093 laps

Basic things. And what @Brandon Wright said.

 

[Stereo]

I set fuel for what I want to do (most of a tank to learn the car, then 3-4 laps worth for hotlap challenges) but nothing else.

 

[Leonardo Chaves]

Sometimes the dfault setup is so bad it needs to be fixed first to get a solid baseline... so no i don't subscribe to that view.

To keep moving things back and forth leads nowhere, you should focus on your driving, but the default setups cars come with are hardly a reliable thing in simracing(not restricting this to AC).

If there's something you feel it can benefit the car right away why don't change it now and use that as a starting point?

 

[William Levesque]

Depends on the car really, for street cars, I tend to modify the setup before I even take the track for a first time because the camber and toe adjustments are usually very conservative. On race cars, yeah, I'd say I tend to try the default first until I get to where I think I'm stable enough to play with the setup. About 20 laps max though, if not I get bored

This. I do adjust downforce level on race cars before I go out tho. Rest not so much, unless I know the car well.

 

[PhilS13]

Most of the time when that 0.2s advice is given it's a polite way of saying : Your driving is more crap than your setup is, focus on the driving.

People who have reached a certain level can even most of the time detect if it's bad driving only by looking at the wording of the post asking for advice. Don't even need to try the car or watch the guy driving.

 

[James Nance]

To me cars in AC are setup like civilian road cars, understeer in mind and not ideal for being exactly quickest. Right away I usually do my normal setup changes for every car and also changes that pertain to the track nature.

 

[AadHofman]

In general AC default setups suck, so I immediately set me new defaults to fiddle with.

 

[hape]

hi
i'm slow with new setup or without. But i find it depends very much on the car. If you take the Lotus 49 in Zandvoort with a good setup its much easier to drive and therefor you get faster and faster after a while (and you can handle mistakes).
But i drive the Maserati GranTurismo MC GT4 in Zandvoort and take the default setup. For me a good combination.
So it depends imho.
hape

 

[William Levesque]

Most of the time when that 0.2s advice is given it's a polite way of saying : Your driving is more crap than your setup is, focus on the driving.

People who have reached a certain level can even most of the time detect if it's bad driving only by looking at the wording of the post asking for advice. Don't even need to try the car or watch the guy driving.

lol yes.

 

[Turk]

There's nothing wrong with getting a setup from someone that knows what they're doing, I've done it. Although some setups suit a drivers style and aren't always all that drivable.

But the way I mess with setting is probably wrong. I'll go out do a few laps, and I do mean a few, maybe five. I'll go in and start making changes like camber on a twisty track, change suspension. But as I don't have a baseline to work from I don't really know if I'm making things better or worse. Without knowing the track perfectly and being able to be consistent I don't know if I'm driving poorly, or the setup is wrong.

Without intimate knowledge of how the car behaves and how to get around the corners properly it's hard to make a positive change.

In the real world we just accept a cars issues and work around them, it's sometimes what gives a car character in the real world. I think that's a valuable skill to have too, cars like the moby dick aren't really going to change their understeering characteristics all that much with a setup, you have to adapt to the car.

 

[Apatride]

Most of the time when that 0.2s advice is given it's a polite way of saying : Your driving is more crap than your setup is, focus on the driving.

People who have reached a certain level can even most of the time detect if it's bad driving only by looking at the wording of the post asking for advice. Don't even need to try the car or watch the guy driving.

Maybe. But with default settings, I really struggle to control the car. Because of that, I tend to stay in the middle of the track so I have a chance to recover when the car starts losing grip. Not exactly the best way to learn to use the entire track properly. I also get much regular times once I am using a setting that makes the car behave in a more or less predictable way. Using a setting that makes the car unpredictable (which is the feeling I get for the default settings on several cars) prevents me from lapping with similar times, which is, according to this piece of wisdom, a pre-requisite to actully move to settings that make the car predictable. A bit of a catch 22 here.

 

[Keith_G]

I would say the .2 sec rule also applies when you are driving a track that you aren't familiar with. I think it is important to pick one track that you are very familiar with to try new cars on. Since you know the track and have a long list of lap times with different types of cars; you already know what a good time is and about what it should be for a new car of a certain type. It also lets you really appreciate the different characteristics of each car since you know how fast you can make it around various corners. I typically use SPA just because I know it and have a lot of laps on it in various cars. It also has a number of different types of corners to try.
That said, I usually do a few laps on the default setup just to get a feel for the car and then immediately start to fiddle with the setup Springs settings and damper settings are my go to starting point in AC since it appears that they use pretty much the same settings for all cars. Mostly I enjoy race cars and find that a setup that works on any GT3 car is a good starting point for other GT cars. F1 cars are much harder and I unabashedly borrow from others for their setups!!
Sometimes they work and other times they don't but I always learn something. I find that fiddling with setups is very satisfying and can certainly make a difference but my driving can also make a big difference so it is fun to have a couple of different setups for each car and then try to drive differently to get the same lap times. Just my opinion!
Try the Ruf RT12r for fun at Spa, I couldn't drive it at first (with default) but then changed the setup and got better- but then went back to the default and found I could set better lap times even though I had to change my driving style.... Whatever, just have fun and do it whatever way works for you!

 

[PhilS13]

Maybe. But with default settings, I really struggle to control the car. Because of that, I tend to stay in the middle of the track so I have a chance to recover when the car starts losing grip. Not exactly the best way to learn to use the entire track properly. I also get much regular times once I am using a setting that makes the car behave in a more or less predictable way. Using a setting that makes the car unpredictable (which is the feeling I get for the default settings on several cars) prevents me from lapping with similar times, which is, according to this piece of wisdom, a pre-requisite to actully move to settings that make the car predictable. A bit of a catch 22 here.

Default settings are sometimes slow but extremely rarely they will make any car unpredictable. (650S GT3 is a rare example of an unstable default setup that comes to mind)

The 911 CUP car is a very bad example for what you were trying to show. The default set is actually decent and can beat gold on this challenge by around 1 second. Yes if an unstable set is what prevents you from getting consistent then it's a catch 22 but most of the time(especially in AC), as in this case, it's not really what's going on.

The setup you downloaded will likely will not feel more stable to me than default. Either it's way grippier so it has moved you from overdriving to underdriving which to you feels like more stability. Or it's only better at "containing" some of the driving mistakes you are doing.

Pace and consistency are strongly linked, regardless of the setup. The main point of lap within 0.2 before touching anything is that if you can't lap consistently, it's very likely that there is more work to do on the driving than on the setup, that's all. It doesn't mean that you won't go any faster by downloading a set, it only means that downloading a set might give you half a second while there are 2 more left in the driving.

If you can manage to recognize flaws in a setup while being inconsistent and fix them, that's quite a good skill to have and by all means use it instead of boring yourself to death.

 

[Brandon Wright]

Pace and consistency are strongly linked, regardless of the setup. The main point of lap within 0.2 before touching anything is that if you can't lap consistently, it's very likely that there is more work to do on the driving than on the setup, that's all. It doesn't mean that you won't go any faster by downloading a set, it only means that downloading a set might give you half a second while there are 2 more left in the driving.

If you can manage to recognize flaws in a setup while being inconsistent and fix them, that's quite a good skill to have and by all means use it instead of boring yourself to death.

This.