How many seconds can a good setup save you?

Huh, gigantic post to answer.

regardless of who´s setup is faster.

Obviously yes! The purpose of racing is to finish ahead of others. Did you ever saw a RL race where the leader slows down to have a fight? no. Spectators like to see fights, drivers like to win.

Not necessarily, you can compete with people that are faster than you if your setup is better and vice-versa. You´re still competing anyway. As i said before, setup is only one variable.

A slow but good driver? yes. I bad driver? no, he will keep spinning everywhere.

And how can that be setup´s fault?

Grids are closer when people of the same skill level race together. Setup isn´t a very good BOP (balance of performance) tool.

Understanding and setuping a car is a skill that evolves wih experience. If a guys isn´t skilled and/or experienced enough, there is no way you can jump him in against someone who is more skilled/experienced. An unexperienced driver won´t even know how to judge if his setup is good or not.

Maybe the guy who is 2sec behind, don´t have a clue why and blame the setup, isn´t as good a solid racer he think he is, setups are the perfect excuse. A good solid racer know that even if in a particular race he could be at an disavantage setup wise, it wont be like this forever, and in some races he can have the upper hand.

So, someone develops a "setup database app", good. It only solves the problem of people not having enough options. But the real problem is that if people don´t know how to develop setups, they wouldn´t know either how to judge a setup. It can happen that a slow setup will make someone faster just because it is forgiving all his mistakes. But if the guy has no clue, there is nothing that can be done about that.

And it happens a lot, imagine for example an GTR2 race with porsche RSR, someone asks for a setup, than i post this link

http://race2play.com/sim/show_car/90#setups

What happens? they keep asking for a setup! it needs to be exactly for the track in question, or duration of the race or whatever. Because evaluating a setup requires as much knowledge as making one! Then someone posts a qualy set, loose, with high tire wear and they use it for the race... sad.

 

Since i've started using that session ranking app (gives sector times) ,i became really fast ! focusing on sector times is the way to go ... when you focus on a sector time you become very consistent and fast

 

on some cars the setup is critical to getting major time gains, but that's only to a point.
with the default setup on Monza 66 in the 49 I can get down to 1:32.xxx, but just changing the setup and doing nothing else it went to 1:30.xxx
now that I want to get another 2 secs off of that it's no longer in the setup, but how I need to drive the car.

so I think you need a decent setup to be able to go fast, but the driver still has to work correctly (apex, trail brake, slow in-fast out etc,..) to be able to take advantage of the setup.

 

I learned we have grip cheaters here.

I don't care how they are doing it, but you might not want to take the top times on RSR very seriously until this is corrected and RSR does a complete reset, and wipe all previous cheaters data from the site.

I'm not even fast enough to get into the top 50 on most tracks, so this has no bearing on my gameplay, but if you are one of those guys with the antennae you may want to stop worrying "how do they seem to have more grip?"

they're cheating. simple as that.

IMO a cheater that adds more grip, or uses aimbots or scripts is a pussy that can't learn to get better so they resort to a lame *** code overwrite to compensate for their lack of human skills set.

I'm pretty sure everyone knows about this, but just in case I throw it out here.