Driving Technique Discussion

You are a really good driver Karsten, in a sense that you pretty much know where the limit is. Here's some more food for thought.
It seems to me that what everyone is looking at are advanced techniques that you may need to learn. Two things I keep thinking about as I read all this and watch your laps are "flicking" and "scrubbing", and I'm not sure if I see you really using these important tricks in your driving much. The fastest laps are not the ones where the car just follows a perfect safe line and never gets near the limit and never under steers or over steers. The most important thing I ever learned from watching and listening to pros is that you have the most grip when the tires are sliding a bit. That's why pushing hard is faster- Not just because you are going faster, but because you have squeezed everything out of the rubber and forced the car to it's maximum performance.

I would describe these two tricks, "flicking" and "scrubbing", like this. (others may see it differently, and hopefully pick this up and expound on it)
You can use "flicking" on high speed corners to encourage turn in. And you can also use flicking on slower corners to make the car rotate at the apex.
In higher speed corners. you can use a "scrub", (slight 4 wheel drift) in conjunction with a "flick", (to get the car into that drift) in liew of adding brakes mid turn or on exit, in order to avoid introducing under steer and to help maintain flow and pace. A good example is T4 fast left- I think the fastest way through there is to tap the brake, downshift a gear, and flick it onto the apex curb while adding another downshift and then coast and scrub speed on the exit into the next right hander. It feels amazing when you get this right!
I'm sure you've heard people talking about how these cars need encouragement to get them to go fast. It's techniques like these you need to use to get this top performance out of them. Some cars more than others of course.

Another important thing is to avoid "binding" the front too much on exit. (what you might call over-steer, when it feels like the front is stuck in honey) The "bind" happens way before you feel it as all out over-steer and you need to "dope" it at the apex by turning out in a way that you balance right on the edge of the binding. It's all about having good angle of attack with the chassis and a good trajectory toward the exit. It's a knife edge balance but when you get it right you can really feel the acceleration. This is what you are missing when you say others are on full throttle earlier than you.

These tricks are a bit difficult to learn and often just happen without help from you. That's kind of how I learned them. But the nice side benefit of learning flicking and scrubbing is that you can use them to get yourself out of almost any hairy situation in traffic and therefor improve your safety.

Edit: The best track to practice flicking and scrubbing is Monza. I Flick and scrub through both Lesmos, at the S's, and into Paribolica.

 

I will read the all thread when I have time, but i would like to tell you not to strees too much about laptimes.
Aliens are aliens. Many reasons for that.
At one point, you just have to admit that and enjoy our favorit hobby.

It doesn't mean you and me can not make any progress.
You must concentrate on becoming better with what you prefer .
Hotlap ? Race ?, ….

When I look at the ACC challenges, I can see that regarding hotlap, I am not a quick guy. Always at Pace between 55-65. It means average. It also means I can not handle the sometime crazy setup the aliens are using (yes, they are quick with every wheels and pedals)
But regarding Hotstint, I am more at 70-80. Better. It means I am probably too conservative, but I can stay on the track.

I personally concentrate on that, and try to work on my lowest pace on the ACC challenges. It makes me progress everywhere.
I am not quick, but in average I am better as at the beginning of ACC.

Enjoy ! That is the key

 

After reading the thread, I understand better some aspects.

I you want to be quick, you need first to know the track perfectly (my problem too) and be comfortable with the view .
Ignore the FOV fundamentalists. You need first to find a comfortable view for YOU.

Go around the track slowly and check first what is allowed from the game without penalties in every corners.
To go quick, you need to use ALL the allowed track. Every cm of it.
Very important
You need to brake Always at the same mark, and not miss apexes.
Very important

Forget about setup. for us, agressive setups are excellent.
The best aliens are laping 5 seconds quicker as I do , and that with the safe setup .
Only concentrate on setup when you can lap within 0.2 s per lap regularly.
When comfortable at a pace, time to give some more gaz, late braking etc...

Of course, the more time on the track , the best to progress.

 

Probably people are already more than bored of this thread, but i'm not one that surrenders too easily

Latest update:
I changed my fov tried to act on the suggestions i have got, trying to work on my braking points, to let the car slip more before applyingh throttle, ecc ecc

So latest hotstint:


and i have a video of the 1.46.9 too from inside the car as requested. In previous hotstint i did thrash out a couple lap where i was 0.3 seconds faster, but my pace looks like being in the 47.5 with occasional magic laps (no sure how those pops up).

 

It all looks a bit smoother and better, but more progress is still needed in terms of smoothness, braking, not being on throttle too early, confidence in car.

 

Yep definitely there is improvement happening, thou will probably need a lot more of it to get laptimes down a second or two.
It all comes down to car control. The magic laps happen when you overdrive a little bit and then the initial saving action guides the car to a fixed good line. At this point i feel like your brain understands what needs to be done, but the limbs can't quite follow, instead they do their own thing. You have to level up this connection to actually use the advice we've been giving out.

Challenging yourself as i've been advocating here for quite a while is one way to get the limbs out of comfort zone of muscle memory (forcing formation of new neurons). But you might also benefit from consistency practice too, especially looking at your sector times. Even with laptimes that are very close together, you still have quite a big swings in sector times. So it might be a good time to try doing a hotstint or two full of 1:48.0's (or more) with less than 0.1s per sector. That should require a lot of conscious effort on keeping the inputs repeatable and thus making the limb-brain connection stronger. I would not be surprised if you'd beat your PB right after a consistent hotstint.

Anyways congrats on keeping the effort strong, best of luck!

 

I feel like i have little feeback of when i'm "overturning" my wheel, what setting should i change?

I'm usually extremely consistent, but i noticed i look to often at laptimes and telemetry to figure out if i'm improving or not

 

I have no idea about these things. I just use default settings.

 

You use default force feedback?

 

Yeah.
I think adjusting these things isn't that important. Maybe for highly competitive aliens it could make some tiny difference. But for normal players probably not worth spending too much time on.

 

What wheel do you have? I setted mine more or less as i was suggested on some FB groups about ACC; it's a t300

 

Logitech G27. Almost 10 years old.

 

AFAIK there is not that much feedback at the wheel, it's more down to vision and butt feeling IRL (vision taking priority). We have no butt feeling, but fortunately we can train vision.

The key is to know (feel) your speed which then determines the instantaneous turning radius and with it we know instantaneous yaw rate the car can handle. Sounds a bit complicated but in most cases it ends up being a linear relation between speed and yaw rate. And when you know the maximal yaw rates rest becomes pretty trivial/natural - with understeer meaning you expect more yaw rate than the car can has grip for. Knowing the car can't handle more turning when we need it to turn, it becomes obvious to use other means like brakes or line adjustment instead of overturing.

Interestingly when oversteer happens the car yaws more than it "should", so the moment you get a good feeling for yaw rate is the moment you start catching oversteer way before it escalates into a "save" that messes up your line. Controlling oversteer early is also the key to removing understeer. As it becomes easier to adjust car balance by pedals when you aren't completely maxed out on steering.

In general the holy grail of feedback for a sim and real racing is the sense of speed and yaw rates through visual cues, you don't really need much else. That's why there are WR's done with mouse or gamepads.
One very good advice that Driver61 (real racer with youtube channel) commonly repeats is to look far enough ahead. Which basically is a mean to get better at reading speed/yaw rate.

Hard to comment as everybody is different. I'm looking a lot on the delta too, analyzing every corner. But the best laps come early when im still not pushing the deltas, only to be eventually broken after many more laps. So in my case looking at delta is detrimental to raw pace, but can give knowledge of what's good (to be used in next session). Thou I know of people that literally drive like crap without any delta and magically become better with even badly set delta lap. So it depends.


edit: G27 here too, and last time i was in ACC i broke into 1:44's without even any setup, as i was testing other stuff (so it was probably "safe" with wrong pressures lol)

 

Do you mean the overall known lighter wheel in many sims, when turning much?
Fun or not so fun-fact: This effect doesn't tell you anything about the actual grip of the car or understeer, this is an effect, that is resulting out of many factors between the steering forces, but in many cases, you can turn the wheel even more, when it is getting light, it is not a clue for understeer, this a common misconception by many simmers. In fact, with power steering in GT3 cars, you shouldn't be able to feel it that much and regarding the FFB philosophy of ACC it is pretty likely, that this also will be the outcome of the whole thing.

You can see, if your car wants to turn more, without overslowing or getting overslowed and JUST THAT is relevant for your inputs, in every sim, you can play. FFB doesn't tell us that much about grip, while driving mid corner, actually.

Especially for this category of drivers, there is no significant importance, to have stronger nuances in the FFB, they're not relying on FFB, because it is not a tool to predict something to happen, it is a tool to learn something to predict.^^ (and make it more fun, of course! )

 

The way feedback works irl in relation to over/under steer-
Under steer: Your butt tells your brain- "We're about to die head first!"
Over steer: Your butt tells your brain- "We're about to die going backwards!"
Then your hands tell the wheel- "This is how were going to save us."

 

Then the hands ask the brain- "Uhm, what are we supposed to do, again?"
Then the brain tells the hands- "I have no clue, ask the feet, if they could do something about it"

....

 

Not meaning that at all, it was more like an effect that stiffened the wheel after a certain degree while turning that from my understanding many race cars have.

The light steer is something that is a thing in some fwd cars but there are none in acc, so...

 

Here is a video of a 42.8 I did round Hungaroring. Feel free to use it as a direct comparison to see where you are losing time relatively to the lap you have published of a 46.9.



I am currently at work right now, but in a separate post on here later on, I will break down your lap corner by corner and let you know where I think you can improve, whether it be braking, throttle inputs or lines through corners.

 

What settings are you using?
I have also a T300 and I'm using no or like 10% dynamic damping, no min force, and around 65% gain.
I think my Thrustmaster Gain is at 80% or so.

Can post my settings later on if you are interested.
I really love the ACC FFB and imo there is everything in it to have always the right amount of information.

If you want to dive deeper in FFB and the steering forces in general I can't suggest anything more than Niels explanation video about it. Probably best sim racing video I have ever watched and he seems to be a cool and funny guy also

 

Yeah, this video is a little eye opener