Sorry, I'm new to this stuff. How do you "get some telemetry from outside time trial" ?
You'd have to ask someone to give you their logs. Searching the forum and google will find you all the stuff on motec, and how to configure the game to capture your own telemetry.
Obviously it would need to be from someone who has actually done a fast time using the methods and techniques they claim will work to get that fast time. This is why your own telemetry probably won't help unless you have something to compare it with that's better.
This is also why I'm wary of all the maxims and whatnot. Most, if not all, slow drivers can tell you what you're supposed to do and maybe will then tell you that they're still slower because physics is different for the other drivers because they are from a different planet
I'm far more pragmatic, you just need to do what they do (and what they do, not what they tell you they do, or what others tell you they do
)
Translating it back to the other modes of the game might be where telemetry helps.
The only thing I've found so far are with respect to realism :-
(A) FFB is a bit of a do-it-yourself kit. I wish simbin had set it up so the cars felt as near realistic as possible out of the box. Adjust for taste beyond that if you like. But I adjust the ffb so I have some ffb on the f3000 or forumula BMW, and it takes 2 of us to turn the wheel in the mini or wtcc. Do the reverse, so the wtcc feels right (and I say that based upon nothing really, how am I supposed to know what it feels like? But at least I can turn the wheel) and there's practically no ffb in the other cars. So what? Well, it affects lap times and even the playability of the game. Pointless wondering how the guy is quicker if it turns out simply to be the config of his wheel or controller. Indeed, it doesn't surprise me that some turn off FFB and get faster times - but that just seems like another aid.
(B) Ditto for steering lock / steering ratios. I'm not an engineer for Seat, I don't know what they use. I want the game to set the degrees and steering lock to realistic and sane values as defaults per car. Let folk adjust by all means. But finish writing the game don't leave it for us to figure it out. Again I mention this because it goes to realism and it too affects lap times.
(C) driving perspective. To me the cockpit view is like sitting in the backseat of a car looking the wrong way through binoculars out the front. So the corner you are currently turning looks like it's still in the next village. Hood is like you're in a kids pedal car, towering above it, driving along a track that feels a couple of feet wide. The other cameras aren't pretending to be realistic and obviously aren't.
In short, the perspective just feels wrong to me and it doesn't feel there's any camera where I'm sitting in the drivers seat, steering the car from that point of view. I can be behind it, outside it, above it, lying down in front of it, but apparently someone else sits in the driving seat and I steer them along from a choice of wrong places
The upshot, for me at least, is that none of the outputs (ffb or visual) seems remotely realistic by default and, judging by the plethora of completely different configs posted when folk ask, there's only subjective offerings from the community (i.e many folk seemed to want the same thing from which I'd deduce if I were the developer that something which is pretty key to how their sim is perceived in action should be something they provided with it)
None of the inputs either (steering lock / steering rations / ffb again) again, not by default at least. Again I can find what a variety of other people use, but there are so many variations it's clearly just taste at work plus perhaps a couple of snippets from google "such and such a car has 12:1" or crude measurements of folks own cars.
So even if the physics engine were extremely accurate (unlikely given that every other aspect is buggy that this isn't equally buggy, and obviously running on a PC it's never going to be more than a rough approximation in a game) so approaching the game like driving a car from the pov of what you see, and what you feel and what you do in response to those inputs simply doesn't work imo. In short, it's nothing at all like driving.
and the last :-
(d) The smoother I try to drive the slower the laps are and, as I said, I've done a few sets of hundreds and hundreds of laps now of brands hatch indy (and some other tracks but mainly this one) in a few of the cars, mini, wtcc, radical and caterham mostly.
Conversely my fastest laps aren't smooth - deliberately not so, because smooth didn't work. The AI was faster, the other guys were faster. Now I guess there aren't 24 versions of a physics engine running, so I suspect the AI is basically just a fantasy within a fantasy, but, to catch up with the other time trials I drove like a buffoon, and it worked.
But I've sat and watched a youtube lap of a guy driving BHI [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6T9GgPXxBU[/ame] with tuition and the only relationship I see with the game is the camera is from the back seat too.