Losing grip

markturner · May 12, 2015

Hi, I am pretty pleased with my set up in the sim, especially compared to Pcars, I feel AC is the best and most realistic FFB....one issue though - it's soooo easy to lose grip, even in a straight line by overaccelarating...and very easy to lose the grip under braking and almost impossible to feel until the car just keeps going.

Is it really that easy to swap ends in a high powered car under acceleration ?

Is there a way to lessen this or at least to tweak settings so you can feel it a bit easier before it happens? Its like drivng on ice sometimes, some cars are worse than others, but I feel on the whole its way over modelled....what do you think?

Radu Oros · May 12, 2015

What car, game assists, track surface type, temperature, controller, you are using?

Panos Manineas · May 12, 2015

same for me! it feels so easy to lose grip. just a small throttle input on cobra for example and you faceplant the barriers

P*Funk · May 13, 2015

The Cobra? Most of the charm of these old cars is that they're mad men. Too much power, too little grip, constantly trying to kill you, however even for modern high powered cars with no TC, its absolutely easy to lose the rear I'd say.

There was an interview done with a famous alien sim driver by The Simpit youtube channel I think and he talked about his experience of driving a real Formula 3 car compared to driving in sims. The one comment he made that I remember clearly is that you spend way more time sliding in a real car compared to most sims, and I don't think he meant sideways. Traditionally sims are horrible at getting that fine line of traction right and this alien said that he felt AC was pretty excellent at covering most of the driving style compared to many sims.

The Cobra is really old tech, very much a dog by modern standards, but even modern cars can spin out with too much throttle from a slow speed. Spend any amount of time driving a well modeled Formula 1 car in a good sim and you'll very quickly learn the difficulty of feeding power in at low speed. I've been driving Stock Car Extreme's Formula V12 a lot this month and leaving the pits on cold tires I still occasionally spin it out and nose plant into a barrier.

Panos Manineas · May 13, 2015

i totally agree on what you said but still i think a 0.3 sec full throttle input shouldnt make the car uncontrolable and lose traction for 3 whole seconds

xnorb · May 13, 2015

Old cars (AC Cobra, old F1 cars) barely have any downforce and tires didn't provide lots of grip.

A good comparison are the V8s vs. the Opalas in GSCE.
High-tech downforce cars with high performance tires vs. basically destruction derby cars

Guess why GT3 is so popular in the racing game scene.
Plenty of downforce and high performance racing tires make driving those beasts quite easy.

Driving any of the formula cars in GSCE gives you a nice feel for the power of those monsters.
But that's what you expect driving a car with 540kg but 900HP

0.3 seconds full throttle = spinning for days

markturner · May 13, 2015

Hi, I am driving with all assists off, "as real as it gets"! I currently use a G25 and was on Imola in sunshine, I also drive the Nordscheife a lot in the Nismo GTR..( This car is not too bad, pretty grippy, but same comments apply when it lets go to a certain extent) I was trying out the McClaren and Lotus open cockpit cars and particularly noticed it, I guess the real issue is not the fact that if you are anything other than really careful with the throttle, it will spin, but the fact that once it goes, it's gone and very difficult to regain traction, and that it's extremely difficult to feel it let go, there is virtually no perceptible transition....IE, its very difficult to know when you are "on the limit" and to keep it just that side of the line.

I dont drive any kind of racing car, but have 2 racing motorbikes, and a John Cooper works mini, plus I have owned several high performance cars in the past until I got sensible and got a Range Rover, so I have some experience of driving fast and it's entirely possible to control a car or bike with the tyres spinning in real life, but difficult or nearly impossible in the sim.......unless I am doing it wrong! Seems once it lets go, that's it, you swap ends!
I am pretty new to sim racing, so perhaps I just need practice and to get used to things, so any advice regarding set up gratefully received...

Billy Pilgrim · May 13, 2015

The way it seems to me is that there isn't too little grip in AC. I'd even say that it often seems quite forgiving.

xnorb · May 13, 2015

markturner said:
its very difficult to know when you are "on the limit" and to keep it just that side of the line.

And here's the huge difference to real life.
In real life you feel the car and all forces with your whole body.

In sim racing (at least how most of us do it) your only feedback comes from the steering wheel and here correct FFB settings are crucial.
If your FFB settings aren't how they need to be, you'll miss out on important informations.

You can watch loads of people catching cars that seem lost on youTube. (EmptyBox + Skip Barber in iRacing shows at least one near death experience per video *g*)
So, it's possible if everything is set up as it needs be and you're capable of pulling it off.

I just start learning how to catch a car, still in early stages, but i can tell when i start losing the car.

FishPapp · May 14, 2015

I find that FPS has a big impact on catching slides - a low framerate means the car will have passed the point of no return before it can 'tell' you through FFB and visuals that the back-end has gone. More frames = more information = better control.

That, and tire temps - make sure they're nice and toasty before dropping the hammer.

Last thing - and something I needed to be told, when you start losing it apply the brakes but keep your foot on the throttle to regain control.

markturner · May 14, 2015

I see, getting very pro then, with the old left foot braking and heel and toe.....!

I had another good session last night with the McClaren FW31 at Mugello, a track I know quite well....there is certainly a knack to driving an F1 car, would you recommend altering the degrees of wheel rotation, as I notice it has a much smaller range of movement on these cars ?

Also, another thing which seems quite apparent is that once a slide starts, its very tricky to get the grip back........even if you very quickly take your foot off the throttle - the thing that kept catching me out was fast corners like the double apex uphill right hander at Mugello, it's easy for the car to just slide sideways off the track without spinning if you take it too fast, and there is no perceptible warning, suddenly you are just going off the edge of the track.....what would you advise in that scenario for recovery , or is it too late by then!

FishPapp · May 14, 2015

I leave degrees of rotation at 900, the game automatically adjusts according to the car you drive.

Always worth a quick visit to youtube to see what a car is capable of in the right hands, not that seeing and doing are the same thing as there are so many variables which makes it very tricky to compare two of your own laps, never mind comparing with anyone else's.

markturner · May 14, 2015

Thanks for the advice, that was a pretty fast lap, I can see he has the revs far higher than me most of the time and a fair bit more corner speed, but not really any perceptible slides except coming out of the corner at the end of the pit straight and through the next couple, where there seemed to be some very quick & small opposite lock corrections and hardly any change in engine note.....I obviously have a lot to learn....!

xnorb · May 18, 2015

markturner said:
I obviously have a lot to learn....!

Who hasn't?

Although with simulations i still believe that it absolutely makes sense learning the basics before heading over to the big boys. If you can't keep a Formula Vee / Skip Barber on the road, how would you ever expect to be able to tame an F1 monster? Leave alone gently dancing around the track with it.

Kurt "Yoda" Kalbfleisch · May 18, 2015

One of the things I've learned recently, thanks to being able to parse it all in AC, is that the tires are "grippiest" when they're sliding a tiny bit. When I drove an F430, my driving instructor kept pushing me to give the car more throttle in the corners, saying that I actually SHOULD hear the tires squeal a little, but I was so overwhelmed with the idea that I was driving a real, honest-to-God Ferrari that I didn't get it -- until I started looking for faster lap times in the 458 GT2 in AC. Those corners where I'm hearing the tires start to squeal turn out to be the ones where I'm picking up the most time (thanks to the cornering app for showing that). That led to a realization this morning -- that I've been driving the 458 GT2 like my street BMW in real life: Turn the wheel enough to stay on the line, and back off the throttle to avoid losing grip. That's fine with the family in the car, among Southern California drivers more interested in their cell phones than the cars around them, but doesn't make for competitive lap times at Spa.

You want to hear the tires scrubbing a bit in the corners.

Another thing I'm learning is that the guys posting videos with stellar lap times have their FFB dialed in really well. I found a tip on the internet last night regarding the minimum force setting -- it advised that most folks should have this set to between 5% - 10%, and that the way to find the best setting is to set it high enough that the wheel starts slightly oscillating with no steering input at all, then backing off on the minimum force setting until the oscillating stops. (For my Thrustmaster TX wheel, that's 5%. Yours may be different.) That one setting helped improve the feel of my wheel, and my performance in difficult corners like La Source, Eau Rouge, and the Bus Stop Chicane at Spa improved significantly.

I suspect that videos showing exceptional hot lapping may be a bit "forced" -- track temps bumped up to raise tire temps for better grip, super soft tires, very light fuel loads, and so on. I've stopped using those videos as my standard of performance and started looking at real world lap times to find my performance targets. I go to the World Endurance Cup website and pull down the post-race data, and use THAT. I hot lap in a race configuration (fuel enough for an hour of non-stop lapping, harder tires), and examine my performance against those racing lap times.

Finally, I keep in mind that I have about 60 hours driving in AC, spread across about three weeks. I've made a lot of progress, but the guys I'm comparing myself to have been driving race cars for years. OF COURSE, they're faster than I am!

Hopefully, someone will take pity on a Southern California boy and offer a driving academy at a more suitable time than noon Pacific on Thursdays. ;-)

markturner · May 19, 2015

Thanks, some interesting replies. One thing I did notice last night, when I spent the whole night driving the Williams FW31 around Mugello - My previous session, I had been driving the Nismo round the Nordschleife and the settings on my wheel which felt perfect for that were wildly too strong. The wheel was bucking and juddering in the corners and i had to really reduce the settings over a few sessions to get it right. I just changed from a G25 to a Fanatec CSW V1 wheel and pedals and it's made a big difference, but with my G25, I never had to change the settings like that between cars. Is this normal? I know you do in Pcars, but it seemed to me previously in AC that once you got the wheel set up FFB you could keep it like that for all cars. I was reading the Fanatec thread and one of the last posters there recommended varying the for settings on both wheel and in sim, I was wondering why you change both, instead of leaving one set and varying the other. Surely that just makes it more complicated? The idea was that the sum of the 2 settings should equal 200, but that was not working for me in the Williams, the effects were way too strong. I used teh in game FFB clipping meter to set teh FFB in the pits for the car. I want to feel the road and what the tyres are doing, but not have to wrestle with the wheel the whole time. I still feel there is a lot of tweaking and testing to do with the wheel to arrive at the ideal set up, its certainly crucial to how you perform.....

On the plus side, starting to get a feel for what's happening under the tyres a little more, although the squealing from the tyres is perhaps a little more overmodelled than it should be I feel. What's really helped is setting up the rumble in the pedals and wheel rim, so you feel when the brakes are on the limit.

Radu Oros · May 19, 2015

You can turn down a bit the tyres sound if you want, in the audio options of the game. I used to do it, stayed like that for a while, but not long ago I reinstalled the game and now I'm just using default tyre sound value amount.

Kimmo Kokkonen · May 19, 2015

markturner said:
Hi, I am pretty pleased with my set up in the sim, especially compared to Pcars, I feel AC is the best and most realistic FFB....one issue though - it's soooo easy to lose grip, even in a straight line by overaccelarating...and very easy to lose the grip under braking and almost impossible to feel until the car just keeps going.

Is it really that easy to swap ends in a high powered car under acceleration ?

Is there a way to lessen this or at least to tweak settings so you can feel it a bit easier before it happens? Its like drivng on ice sometimes, some cars are worse than others, but I feel on the whole its way over modelled....what do you think?

Yes there is, there's a real sim called pCars, amazing sim for us who looking for real feel.

So try project CARS, that's the only simulator where you can feel and use this controlled sliding, other sims offers this only partly, with AC you must drive pretty fast flat out if you wanna drift, pCars offers also slow motion slides, that's fantastic and first sim ever to allow this feature that good, I enjoy that most. This makes driving as realistic as possible, if you can't find this option so try harder...i'm fully satisfied with pCars, can't ask anything better with that money I paid except more powerfull cars like +1000 hp monsters, possibility to add more Power if needed like in real life

brooptss · May 19, 2015

markturner said:
Hi, I am pretty pleased with my set up in the sim, especially compared to Pcars, I feel AC is the best and most realistic FFB....one issue though - it's soooo easy to lose grip, even in a straight line by overaccelarating...and very easy to lose the grip under braking and almost impossible to feel until the car just keeps going.

Is it really that easy to swap ends in a high powered car under acceleration ?

Is there a way to lessen this or at least to tweak settings so you can feel it a bit easier before it happens? Its like drivng on ice sometimes, some cars are worse than others, but I feel on the whole its way over modelled....what do you think?

Have not read the posts below you, just throwing this out: Make sure you have your wheel settings correct. Some people for some reason like turning the force feedback and effects way down, but then you can't feel the car and what it's doing. If you have the settings correct in the profiler and in-game then you'll very easily feel the car shuddering and losing grip. I think this is the best part about AC, so if you don't have that feeling something is wrong.

brooptss · May 19, 2015

Kimmo Kokkonen said:
Yes there is, there's a real sim called pCars, amazing sim for us who looking for real feel.

So try project CARS, that's the only simulator where you can feel and use this controlled sliding, other sims offers this only partly, with AC you must drive pretty fast flat out if you wanna drift, pCars offers also slow motion slides, that's fantastic and first sim ever to allow this feature that good, I enjoy that most. This makes driving as realistic as possible, if you can't find this option so try harder...i'm fully satisfied with pCars, can't ask anything better with that money I paid except more powerfull cars like +1000 hp monsters, possibility to add more Power if needed like in real life

Oh god here we go, you again, ever present in every thread like an old fart that won't stop smelling. This guy is really amazing me. I made a joke about Kimmo being a paid shill in the other thread, I'm starting to almost believe it now.

@Kimmo: is it your life's goal to tell people how terrible AC is and get them to buy Pcars? Go play your arcade games (I don't mean PC, but your own taste/preference) and leave us alone please, it's getting very irritating now. We've already deduced that you prefer more arcade-ish fun games (you said it yourself), so take that Pcars amazing simulator talk elsewhere please, it's a bit much now. You talk about how amazing a "simulator" Pcars is and how you can just load the game and jump right in. Meanwhile players and journos the world over have all said how poor the FFB in the game is by default. Anyway, can we keep the talk in this AC forum to, uhm, AC?