Is Coach Dave Academy any good?

James77 · Jan 9, 2022

Hi,

I'm a mediocre sim racer at best but I would like to get better. I see a lot of advertisement lately from Coach Dave Academy. I believe you can download setups there and track guides etc. I think it might be helpful but I'm not sure if it's worth the monthly cost. Does anyone have any experience with it and is it worth the subscription?

Thanks!

Jan Larsen · Jan 9, 2022

I bought the setup pack for the M4 GT3 and at Silverstone where we raced this week, it was brilliant. Then tried the Spa setup for one of the evaluation races over at ACCSS and it was loose as hell. The winning guy beat everyone with the aggressive default with pads set to 1, so mostly I think it depends on the driver. But if you find the setups suit your driving style, they can be worth their weight in gold. Note, I dont use the subscription service, I only buy the packs.

Mauser118 · Jan 11, 2022

If you are too busy to make your own setups to test, there is some value in them. That said you should simnply treat the coachd dave setups as a base to build on as you'll still have to adapt them to your driving style.

pgreenwo · Jan 11, 2022

I was struggling to set the 720 up and just couldn’t dial it in. I bought the setup bundle to give me a base and have to say it was great and I was really pleased with the change as a start point to build on.

Botmeister · Jan 13, 2022

Aris from Kunos shares his setups for free on his own Google Drive. For those who are interested.

Aris.Drives - Google Drive

drive.google.com

Viktor Schmidt · Jan 13, 2022

Botmeister said:
Aris from Kunos shares his setups for free on his own Google Drive. For those who are interested.

Aris.Drives - Google Drive

drive.google.com

Thanks for the link. I have seen some of Aris, very very very long

, videos and it is a very good information source for beginners and alike. Unfortunately he does not have setups for my cars and tracks.

I also would recommend to take some usable setups and develop a little feeling for making them by yourself in the future. If you are in a hurry, the CDA setups are a good and fast compromise, though.

For good track maps I could not find an alternative so I "bit in the sour apple" and bought the whole package.

Deleted member 963434 · Jan 14, 2022

dont pay coaches just go career mode on hardest diffuculty and lose some races, repeat until you catch up to AI and you win over most people online. biggest success is not to leave server when you crash just return and drive, there are lot of rage quitters in sim racing and you can be top 10 if just finish race

Ripp_ · Jan 16, 2022

I'm curious to try one before I go spending out a fair bit of cash because setups are very subjective so one persons car feels rubbish for someone else. I tried some of Jardiers setups and I can't drive those at all as he likes an extremely oversteer biased car from what I could tell.

guidofoc · Jan 17, 2022

There are some free setups here: https://******************/setup-download/

As a "Sunday driver" I don't really spend much time on car setup so.. I mostly learn through driving and driving. I can say that lately at Imola on the Porsche 911 II Gt3 I went from low '45s to low '43s using one of the setups from that site but mostly through practice. It is quite remarkable how in the beginning one feels "I cannot drive any faster than this!" and then little by little you discover a bit here and a bit there and you improve. I have that last second to shave off but low 43s is decent for public lobbies. If only the Porsche had some top speed

Ripp_ · Jan 17, 2022

guidofoc said:
There are some free setups here: https://******************/setup-download/

As a "Sunday driver" I don't really spend much time on car setup so.. I mostly learn through driving and driving. I can say that lately at Imola on the Porsche 911 II Gt3 I went from low '45s to low '43s using one of the setups from that site but mostly through practice. It is quite remarkable how in the beginning one feels "I cannot drive any faster than this!" and then little by little you discover a bit here and a bit there and you improve. I have that last second to shave off but low 43s is decent for public lobbies. If only the Porsche had some top speed

I have those already, I'd specifically like to try a Coach Dave setup because they're all done by the same person (James Parker IIRC) so they should all feel pretty similar and obviously they cover the whole range of cars and tracks so could be a nice neat and tidy way of having good setups. I find I spend so much time testing, tweaking and messing with settings and have to keep repeating it over and over and there's the time I spend in Motec as well. My free time is fairly valuable to me and I'd rather spend it racing than messing about with setups.

Bram Hengeveld · Jan 17, 2022

Ripp_ said:
My free time is fairly valuable to me and I'd rather spend it racing than messing about with setups.

And that is exactly what the majority of simracers should do: hit the track and don't worry to much about setups. The default ones in the game are suitable for most drivers anyway.

A setup won't help you to speed up, a setup will not prevent you to spin and lose time. Practice and improving skills do.

Race and practice as much as you can and when you are really really close to the absolute top drivers, then start to worry about setups that give you that 0.1 advantage per lap when you nail every corner right lap after lap after lap.

Ripp_ · Jan 17, 2022

Bram Hengeveld said:
And that is exactly what the majority of simracers should do: hit the track and don't worry to much about setups. The default ones in the game are suitable for most drivers anyway.

A setup won't help you to speed up, a setup will not prevent you to spin and lose time. Practice and improving skills do.

Race and practice as much as you can and when you are really really close to the absolute top drivers, then start to worry about setups that give you that 0.1 advantage per lap when you nail every corner right lap after lap after lap.

I saw some good decreases in lap times when I started tuning dampers via Motec myself but it's very time consuming.

Bram Hengeveld · Jan 17, 2022

But how are you sure those decreases are the result of setup changes and not just extensive practice with the same car and track combo

?

Ripp_ · Jan 17, 2022

Bram Hengeveld said:
But how are you sure those decreases are the result of setup changes and not just extensive practice with the same car and track combo ?

Because I pretty much spent 3 days recently with the same car/track, I'm a pretty consistent driver when it comes to hot laps as my times are alomost identical when I get used to a car/track and after getting used to the car/track my times plateaued after about 6hrs lapping after that I spent 2 days lapping and tweaking dampers with Motec and alomost every time I made the damper curve look better my lap times went down, the car had much more grip and therefore gave more confidence to throw it around.

There's no two ways about it that tuning the dampers made me faster. Problem being it took me 3 days, and that's just purely messing with dampers and that's just one car/track combo. Imagine doing that for every car/track combo as well as dialling in all the other car settings, it would take forever. Sure if it was my job then it would be time not wasted.

Having a good setup underneath me AND spending a lot of time driving and learning to go faster is a no brainer imo.

I spent a lot of time in Project Cars and Project Cars 2 just hotlapping and tuning and I still hold a few World #1 times on there now, but with ACC I want to race not tune really.

Bram Hengeveld · Jan 17, 2022

Ripp_ said:
Having a good setup underneath me AND spending a lot of time driving and learning to go faster is a no brainer imo.

That's the perfect combo.

But even in that scenario. When everybody buys the same setup, it's still only about the driver skills making the difference. Hence I am always pretty much a fan of fixed setup races

Ripp_ · Jan 17, 2022

Bram Hengeveld said:
That's the perfect combo.

But even in that scenario. When everybody buys the same setup, it's still only about the driver skills making the difference. Hence I am always pretty much a fan of fixed setup races

Exactly, currently I'm racing people on Low Fuel Motorsports who probably do have paid setups so by me not having paid setups I'm already at a disadvantage.

Bram Hengeveld · Jan 17, 2022

Ripp_ said:
Exactly, currently I'm racing people on Low Fuel Motorsports who probably do have paid setups so by me not having paid setups I'm already at a disadvantage.

I doubt that, but that's my personal opinion. Practice makes the difference.

People can have the most optimized twitchy setup in the world, all advantage is out the door when you loose control for a second and bin the car in the gravel trap and loose a few seconds.

But if you really want to believe that purchased setups, that you didn't make yourself to suit your driving style, make you faster by all means get that wallet out