AC GT3 @ Nordschleife, Sunday 16th May 2021

[640er]

About the Lambo:
In 2018 I practiced the endurance layout a lot with it, together with Matteo Caruso, if that rings a bell for some.
He did a freaking 8:06 with it! A little colder track (16/20) and on softs, which went red for some right handers.

My all time pb is a 8:11.4xx iirc, done in 2019 after getting the Fanatec wheel and finally feeling the increased grip at higher speeds due to the aero. (the increase of strength was hidden for me with the G27)

I tried it for this race too but couldn't put in a single clean lap. That car wants to kill you and itself too many times..
Hit a kerb, dead. Brake a meter too late, dead. Hold the brakes too long, spin. Lift the throttle in a slightly wrong way or moment, dead.
No matter the setup, it always wants to wash wide, while over rotating in the most unpleasant ways haha.

But if you manage to keep it on the track and keep the momentum while being just early enough on throttle, it's flying!

The Audi, being almost the same chassis drives similar but it has a bit more grip, less "character" while being a tiny bit slower.
Overall the safer bet and while a Lambo can overtake you on the straights, in the slipstream the Audi can still retake position against it!

My Audi setup is very stiff and high. Just soft enough to not bump into the barriers when touching a kerb.
The Lambo setup is pretty soft though, which is why it's so fast.

Always funny to read someone's opinion about a car and you are just wondering if he plays the same game For me the Lambo feels pretty stable but maybe it's because I'm only doing 8.05s so far.

 

[RasmusP]

Always funny to read someone's opinion about a car and you are just wondering if he plays the same game For me the Lambo feels pretty stable but maybe it's because I'm only doing 8.05s so far.

Decide for yourself if it looks familiar haha
I've recorded the replay of my PB back then:

It hurts to watch.. I see to many little mistakes... But doing Flugplatz with 228 in the Lambo isn't too bad

 

[Interslice]

I'm interested to try the audi now that it's OP! Lambo struggles for grip alright but i wouldn't call it unstable as such.

 

[Kek700]

@RasmusP
It's another reason for my "stiff" setup. It's just easier to stay precise and not wander across the track or washing wide or similar.

Really confused me, ran the Nissan very stiff, could not understand why it was quicker than what I expected.

The soft setup was slower.

 

[RasmusP]

I'm interested to try the audi now that it's OP! Lambo struggles for grip alright but i wouldn't call it unstable as such.

Haha it's not truly op but it's easy to get competitive with it, if you can control the spontaneous over rotation (which you should easily be able to, coming from the lambo).
Nice grip and good top speed are a nice mix for the Nordschleife. But my PBs are with Lambo and McLaren!

@RasmusP
It's another reason for my "stiff" setup. It's just easier to stay precise and not wander across the track or washing wide or similar.

Really confused me, ran the Nissan very stiff, could not understand why it was quicker than what I expected.

The soft setup was slower.

If you get your inputs 95-100% correct, a soft setup is faster but if your inputs are a bit less perfect, it all changes from my experience!

 

[Luca Badin]

Hehe yeah we all had our little moments until your pitstops
Thanks again for backing out before the GT chicane! I was constantly changing my mind whether I should back out in the last moment or not. You made the decision a bit earlier and I just hoped I could maintain enough pace until the Döttinger Höhe to stay in front.

Yeah, honestly I still was a bit jittery and nervous from the adrenaline and lack of practice, so I was not going to take risks. I couldn't tell exactly how much room I was leaving you, and I didn't really want to attack the fast kink kerb and drift wide into you. On the other hand, when Thomas overtook me, he had completed the move even before the kink.

Btw. What wing settings where you using? I was on 5 at the rear and my ride height was pretty high (70/74 in the live view in the pits).
But both you and Reik weren't flying past on the straight...

I had 6 clicks at the rear (the default), I honestly can't remember the rationale but I probably preferred taking corners like Flugplatz at full throttle, and less wing didn't make enough of a difference since I'm pretty sure I still made 290? 292? kph under the bridge. My ride height is 66/75, I'm living that high rake life

Jokes aside, I trusted the setup since I went under 8 minutes with it, but it can probably use some work AND it's not suited for a race. I mean, we had about the same fastest race lap even though my strategy was supposed to translate to faster individual laps. It's just not conducive to lapping with consistency, and the softs were a big mistake, lots of sliding and overheating out of nowhere. On the other hand, I lost so much time in corners like Kallenhard and Wehrseifen because the damn thing just didn't want to rotate, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't locking the fronts or anything.

I think everyone got to this point during the race. I had some moments where my left hand wanted to shift down another gear and luckily some inner rhythm kept it from doing it just before the *click*
Did it once right before the full throttle part though, causing a massive code brown moment and losing me more than a full second until Mutkurve...

It's another reason for my "stiff" setup. It's just easier to stay precise and not wander across the track or washing wide or similar.

I should also have prepared a race setup, but I just didn't have much time to practice at all. During the race my biggest issue was eyesight actually, my eyes were burning pretty bad by around lap 5, no idea why That made it pretty hard to focus and keep the sliding under control.

 

[demetri]

Right, that was a proper messy race, but I'm still happy I somewhat powered through and finished P6. I knew the track well enough, but I should have taken the time to get used to the R8 and its idiosyncrasies after two months with no club racing at all. I used a custom setup that was way biased towards hotlapping rather than consistency (I did go under 8 minutes with it last year), so I should have used something safer, less slide-y/oversteer-y and especially NOT used softs in the race. They felt great in quali but no way they were suited for a 4 lap stint

I don't know how you could run it on softs. Maybe my setup or the way I'm driving is much harder on the tires, but I could barely keep mediums in the working range. They got up to 96-97C after Stefan Bellof S. When I tried softs during the week they overheated right away on the GP portion by Bilstein Kurve (3rd gear right-hander before the straight).

Big mistake! In those last laps on softs I must have spinned a dozen of times, leaving me with red tyres on which it's like driving on ice. I don't understand why the 488 seem to have less grip on soft tyres especially the rear. They have better temperatures (green) than the mediums (blueish). It happened in fast turns like Mudkurve and totally unexpected. With the same speed I didn't spin there with mediums.
Has anyone some explanation for that?

I think I might have. With mediums, you had fronts that were cold after the straight and had less grip and rears that might be cold-ish, but probably still in the good temperature range. With softs that: a) heat better and b) have a slightly lower optimal temperature range, your front had more grip and the balance of the car shifted forward toward oversteer. So it's not that the rears lose grip, it's the front that now bites more, so when your setup feels balanced and nice with one compound it gets out of whack on a softer/harder one. I don't think this phenomena affects any GT3 car (GT-R and Z4 seem to keep all their tires at more or less the same temperature), but from my experience it applies to the Audi and Ferrari as both tend to heat rear tires more, especially the R8. Very rarely you can drive the exact same setup on different tires in the same weather conditions.

 

[demetri]

If you get your inputs 95-100% correct, a soft setup is faster but if your inputs are a bit less perfect, it all changes from my experience!

Soft setup is also easier to catch when the rear decides to step out for a moment

 

[Luca Badin]

I don't know how you could run it on softs. Maybe my setup or the way I'm driving is much harder on the tires, but I could barely keep mediums in the working range. They got up to 96-97C after Stefan Bellof S. When I tried softs during the week they overheated right away on the GP portion by Bilstein Kurve (3rd gear right-hander before the straight).

I think we had this argument before on another track (Kyalami I think?), and my guess at the time was that you simply drive harder and extract more from the tires, while I simply don't load them as much due to driving slower or perhaps just different suspension/aero setup? I would stand by this interpretation as of now.

For reference, I ran 18 fronts, 17 rears, and the most critical spot was sector 3 where the rears went up to a bit more than 27, while they were stone cold by T1 and up until I loaded them up a bit later on the GP Strecke. So I could probably raise those pressures a tick, but that would have been a recipe for overheating-induced spins in sector 3.

Again though, I would not run softs in a Nordschleife race again. I'm simply not good at managing them and keeping to a minimum the mistakes that make them wear/overheat faster, which throws consistency out of the window.

 

[HF2000]

o it's not that the rears lose grip, it's the front that now bites more, so when your setup feels balanced and nice with one compound it gets out of whack on a softer/harder one.

That sounds like it's the case! Thank you very much! So for softs I'd better decrease ARB front and maybe increase ARB rear?

 

[demetri]

It's done, I've finally raced the Ring for the first time For me it was all about learning the track and trying to get an understanding of what's important here. I've chosen the Lambo because I've overestimated the importance of straight line speed (which in the end wasn't higher than the one of the top guys). After watching some of you during the race and afterwards in the replay, I saw lots of places where to improve.

Congratulations on losing your Nords virginity!

The most important thing is to stay on the grey stuff and avoid the green one as you've probably already figured out. This and knowing which curbs you can use and which to avoid is the key. Other than that it's just experience. CM says I've put 17 kkm on this track (in different cars and on all the different layouts), but I've been using it only since early 2019, so the actual number is probably twice that. I think it was mostly solo, online Touristenfahrten "track days", or short couple of laps races on public servers. I'm pretty sure I've done just a handful of one hour+ online races on Nords.

I think the top speed is very important here. If you look at RSR times (use the most popular long Endurance layout), you will see that the best lap time is for 650 (3 laps logged under 8 minutes) while no other car could do that. But in a race it lacks the top speed (Lambo, AMG and Audi all can do ~300, while 650 is more like low 290s) and won't be able to pass faster cars in basically the only place possible, so driving it you're either relying on others making mistakes or you taking the lead from the start and getting yourself 1.5-2 seconds gap before Dottinger. If you fail to do that you're likely getting passed in the slipstream and there's no coming back

 

[demetri]

That sounds like it's the case! Thank you very much! So for softs I'd better decrease ARB front and maybe increase ARB rear?

If you do that it would shift the balance toward oversteer even more. Try the other way around or add more rear wing. This is a high-speed corner, so aero plays a bigger role than pure mechanical grip

 

[RasmusP]

Soft setup is also easier to catch when the rear decides to step out for a moment

That's true!
But only helps if you first manage to stay on the grey area

That sounds like it's the case! Thank you very much! So for softs I'd better decrease ARB front and maybe increase ARB rear?

What demetri said:

If you do that it would shift the balance toward oversteer even more. Try the other way around or add more rear wing. This is a high-speed corner, so aero plays a bigger role than pure mechanical grip

Additionally though I find a stiffer front ARB helps a lot getting more precision and less "roll induced oversteer", so probably 1 click more rear wing and 1 click stiffer front ARB should work well.
Softer rear ARB, from my experience, mostly gives more traction on corner exits but not really less oversteer through longer bends (no matter the speed).

Congratulations on losing your Nords virginity!

"Nordsginity" is definitely a thing

 

[demetri]

I think we had this argument before on another track (Kyalami I think?), and my guess at the time was that you simply drive harder and extract more from the tires, while I simply don't load them as much due to driving slower or perhaps just different suspension/aero setup? I would stand by this interpretation as of now.

For reference, I ran 18 fronts, 17 rears, and the most critical spot was sector 3 where the rears went up to a bit more than 27, while they were stone cold by T1 and up until I loaded them up a bit later on the GP Strecke. So I could probably raise those pressures a tick, but that would have been a recipe for overheating-induced spins in sector 3.

Again though, I would not run softs in a Nordschleife race again. I'm simply not good at managing them and keeping to a minimum the mistakes that make them wear/overheat faster, which throws consistency out of the window.

I think this was after that infamous race at Donington, but yeah, pushing more heats them up more, so if the tires are too cold - just drive faster

I had 17-18 and 16-17 (left to right). Mediums were very cold on the GP portion, but thankfully it was a very short one, so that didn't matter much. Just had to brake earlier into the T1 hairpin. I think I would be able to use softs with air temps below +15. In fact, there was one 90-min race I had where it was +12 or +13 and my softs weren't heating up enough (but I was using a very different setup back then).

 

[Erik Axelsson]

@Erik Axelsson you were much faster, didn't you have this problem? Maybe you can share your setup so I can see if there's something that might work for me too.

Sure, here it is!
The 488 is a pain to set up i my opinion. I was never able to find a setup that worked with the soft tires either. They just overheat to easy. Maybe they work if you drive super smooth (which I don't )

However, my PB with this setup on mediums is a low 7:56 and there is room for improvement. I just wasn't able to get a lap together during qualifying and I was in traffic for pretty much the whole race. Also I increased the back wing one click for the race which turned out to be a huge mistake since a lost more time than expected on the straights.

Despite my terrible qually It was such a good race. I had so many close battles and everyone was very respectful. Being my first race ever in the 488, I've never been more happy with P5

 

[uvraver]

This is scary just to watch

 

[demetri]

This is scary just to watch

Going almost 300 km/h in Schwedenkreuz must have been a lot of fun, but honestly I expected it to go even faster there, that thing has a massive downforce compared to a GT3 car

 

[Interslice]

Going almost 300 km/h in Schwedenkreuz must have been a lot of fun, but honestly I expected it to go even faster there, that thing has a massive downforce compared to a GT3 car

Maybe some self-preservation involved!
Interesting to watch the hybrid boost come and go so quickly.

 

[RasmusP]

Porsche 919 EVO

---INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS--- 1) Make a copy of the folder "ks_porsche_919_hybrid_2016" in your Assetto Corsa/Content/Cars section 2) Rename that copy to "ks_porsche_919_hybrid_2016_EVO" 3) Inside of "ks_porsche_919_2016_hybrid_EVO" you need to...

www.racedepartment.com

If you want to feel the massive kick in the back when putting the right foot down
Simracing barely gives the immersion of speed. But that evo car.. Holy moly...

Installation is a bit complicated but he changed it to comply with the RD upload policies

 

[Fiberoptix]

Maybe some self-preservation involved!
Interesting to watch the hybrid boost come and go so quickly.

Yes, I guess he is running with full damage and risk of death in an accident rather than an unwanted pitstop.