AC GT3 @ Silverstone - Sunday 31st May 2020

[640er]

Thanks @Chris Down for organising Had some super nice and clean battles throughout the whole race. Didn't expect too much without having much practice, but with a lot of the Top Guns not participating, the door to a podium was open. Spun once at MBC but luckily, it was a clean 360 without overheating my tyres so I lost not much time. The rest was just consistency and a quick 650s... Oh boy I think I'm going to become a member of the 650s gang

 

[Medilloni]

Where were you @Medilloni , struggling to hold these guy’s, managed to hang on to Andreas @640er for most of the first stint, but to many laps after he pitted on the dying softs did me no favours. could only hang on, no chance of achieving any thing else. We basically yoyoed back and forth for first 15 or so laps.
We need you up front, they are all getting too fast for me.

Great event @Chris Down, thanks from us all for the organisation,.

lol, thanks Ernie, the good news is my pc ran a race with a full grid, no stuttering, yehaa! ....I didn't quali 'cos I was still nervous I'd have 'the problem' (this was the 1st full online grid test) and wipe half the field out but all was good in that department

Race was a disaster - on Rasmus's (good!) advice I've got rid of some apps that were hammering the cpu, but forgot to put something there to tell me how much fuel I'd got, oops Tried a 'clever' strategy to pit very early, didn't take the fuel on, ran out of fuel.. and brains.. end of race

 

[Chris Down]

And as usual, my VR onboard (featuring 15 minutes of drifting at the end of each stint):

 

[GEO147]

Yeah, must have been lap 23,24 and 25 in which magically and sudden I had less grip on the rear. Copse was very scary in those laps. This phenomenom happens sometimes (only to me?) but it's totally unpredictable. It wasn't there in the first stint.

In some other race @Kek700 (or was it @GEO147 or @Medilloni?) dropt some oil right in front of me but this time he was much more in front so that wasn't the case tonight .

Anyway. Ididn't have high expectations for this race because for me the softs were a nogo for the race and with the mediums I couldn't follow the 650s in must of the turns.
And for me with a single screen The Loop is a blind turn in which I must guess the apex. Lost a lot of time there because the exit is very important for the long straight afterwards.

But getting from the 21st to the 10th is not bad and I have had quite a few battles, unfortunately mainly defensive.

Thanks all for racing and @Chris Down for organising. Hope to see you all next week.

What oil

 

[GEO147]

Thanks @Chris Down for organising Had some super nice and clean battles throughout the whole race. Didn't expect too much without having much practice, but with a lot of the Top Guns not participating, the door to a podium was open. Spun once at MBC but luckily, it was a clean 360 without overheating my tyres so I lost not much time. The rest was just consistency and a quick 650s... Oh boy I think I'm going to become a member of the 650s gang

Congrats Andreas (and Matt) I just couldn't hold you off at the start, you were clearly quicker. I thought Andreas must be on softs but then realised after you passed me you were on mediums. That was pretty disappointing for me and where I started to regret my very poor setup skills.
The track felt like an ice rink to me after 6 or 7 laps.

 

[GEO147]

lol, thanks Ernie, the good news is my pc ran a race with a full grid, no stuttering, yehaa! ....I didn't quali 'cos I was still nervous I'd have 'the problem' (this was the 1st full online grid test) and wipe half the field out but all was good in that department

Race was a disaster - on Rasmus's (good!) advice I've got rid of some apps that were hammering the cpu, but forgot to put something there to tell me how much fuel I'd got, oops Tried a 'clever' strategy to pit very early, didn't take the fuel on, ran out of fuel.. and brains.. end of race

Don't believe it John. After all that. I was checking the rear view for ya for a few laps and though the pc must be acting up. Great to hear it ran well. I just use a calculator on my phone. Am I missing some super duper app?

 

[GeekyDeaks]

Thanks for the race all! I didn't get time to practice (or qualify) due to circumstances, but fortunately we had raced there on one of the Wednesday nights and @Kek700 's suggestion for the GT-R felt super easy to drive (thanks Ernie!) so I actually ended up doing a full clean 60 minutes for the first time. With that and my 2 clean shorter stints on Sunday I think I might have started to get the hang of keeping it on the black stuff

 

[GeekyDeaks]

I've got rid of some apps that were hammering the cpu, but forgot to put something there to tell me how much fuel I'd got, oops

Do you normally use something external like Crew Chief or is it an AC app you use John? I'm finding CC is telling me I'm running on fumes when I still have several laps of fuel for some reason, but it's at least an early warning.

 

[nash112]

I found the sidekick app good, it does duplicate other things like gear, speed etc but in the fuel box you can toggle between L/lap, L left, laps left with current fuel. Interestingly the R8 displays laps left but is often a bit different to what sidekick is reporting

 

[640er]

Congrats Andreas (and Matt) I just couldn't hold you off at the start, you were clearly quicker. I thought Andreas must be on softs but then realised after you passed me you were on mediums. That was pretty disappointing for me and where I started to regret my very poor setup skills.
The track felt like an ice rink to me after 6 or 7 laps.

Thanks Goerge. I was running on softs though Had no big problems with them.

 

[butcher85]

@Chris Down

I learned so much during that race including some valuable lessons on the blue flag system

It was flashing at me for ages but you were barely in my mirrors and when it stayed on I moved over but I still managed to get in your way at turn two (43min 20sec in the video) so yeah - very sorry about that!

 

[GEO147]

https://www.racedepartment.com/threads/simracing-gp-assetto-corsa-driver-academy-monday-june-1st-2020.184802/#post-3194647

For anyone interested

 

[GeekyDeaks]

Ah, thanks @GEO147 - unfortunately I'm working today, but I'll keep an eye out for anymore sessions in future as I think I could really benefit from something like this

 

[GeekyDeaks]

I learned so much during that race including some valuable lessons on the blue flag system

Welcome to my world One second he's just visible in my my mirrors, next thing I know he's going around me on the outside of chapel! I'm going on the 'don't lift unexpectedly' principle, but I can see from the replay that I was so slow through Becketts that I'm not sure if I shouldn't have lifted straight after copse

It's soul destroying to watch myself getting lapped, but one good thing about it is that I can see clearly where I am way off the pace and concentrate on those areas in future

 

[Kek700]

I agree, i see being lapped as good opportunity to see where i am slower, it is always invariably grip corners, sometime a better line, which i can copy.
Most people are faster than me were this is a major factor. they just hang onto more mph than i can, also give up my speed to easily.
Once lost never to be regained under most circumstances.
You can study all factors in sim racing till the cows come home, get the above wrong and you will not be fast.
That is the sole reason for my lack of pace.

 

[nash112]

I sometimes try and copy people after they've lapped but usually makes it worse because I can't do things like trailbraking without losing the back end. Also blue flags are impossible to practise because the AI is bad so they either hang behind and don't overtake unless you slow down to 40mph, or they ram you off the track

 

[Chris Down]

@Chris Down

I learned so much during that race including some valuable lessons on the blue flag system

It was flashing at me for ages but you were barely in my mirrors and when it stayed on I moved over but I still managed to get in your way at turn two (43min 20sec in the video) so yeah - very sorry about that!

No worries at all -- the main thing is that it was safe and predictable. Not getting held up may be nice, especially if other leaders are close, but if it means the overtake is dangerous it's not worth it.

And yeah, it's good it comes on early to let you know, but it's worth having an app (like the stock one I use, Realtime) to see how far behind someone is and get a feeling for how quickly they are gaining on you and where.

 

[HF2000]

I sometimes try and copy people after they've lapped but usually makes it worse because I can't do things like trailbraking without losing the back end. Also blue flags are impossible to practise because the AI is bad so they either hang behind and don't overtake unless you slow down to 40mph, or they ram you off the track

RIichard. You had good pace last night! I think you were a bit faster then me with the same car. If you don't run off the track, you will not get blue flags in a 60min race with that pace.

 

[Chris Down]

Welcome to my world One second he's just visible in my my mirrors, next thing I know he's going around me on the outside of chapel! I'm going on the 'don't lift unexpectedly' principle, but I can see from the replay that I was so slow through Becketts that I'm not sure if I shouldn't have lifted straight after copse

It's soul destroying to watch myself getting lapped, but one good thing about it is that I can see clearly where I am way off the pace and concentrate on those areas in future

I used to be the one getting blue flags back when I got started in my Live For Speed days. I remember thinking "how can these guys be so much faster?". LFS had a feature where you could send setups directly in the game, so setup sharing was really common there, and I remember taking people's setups and just finding it didn't help at all. That was a really good environment to realise that the setup really isn't the problem, it's just pure driving experience with the car and track.

Silverstone is a track I don't know as well as some others, but I know the 650s like the back of my hand. When I feel some small tug through the FFB on the steering wheel I know what the car wants, and what it's going to want. That's not something you can get overnight -- that's why I really encourage people to stick with one car until they've learned it completely. If I'd changed from my car before I learned it fully, each race I'd be throwing away the knowledge which I gained. But because I've been here since 2018, more or less always racing in the 650s (except for recently now that I started trying to learn the 488), and clocking up 600+ hours in it, I know it better than pretty much any other car in any other sim.

I know also that sometimes people feel a bit down that they don't know how to set up the car. I pretty much learned how to do car setups from the "try and see if it's faster" method, I've never used Motec or any other telemetry apps because I mostly found them to be a distraction. They can be useful for tuning the final 0.1% of the car, but the other 99.9% has got to be on you feeling the car and working out what does and does not work. If you're already finding the setup hard to reason about, throwing _more_ graphs and _more_ numbers at you is just going to make things worse

The truth is, while there are some general guiding principles, setup is super specific to the car in question. One click of ARB on one car can be like doing five clicks of ARB on another. The way the car handles after softening or stiffening the suspension is also very different, even in a homologated series like GT3. And this goes for a whole bunch of setup changes: knowing how to do this comes with spending a lot of time with the car, doing a lot of very small, targeted changes, and knowing whether they worked for you in the past or not. Since setup is so specific to your driving style, that really matters. That's one of the reasons I don't share setups: because I think it's a distraction from what people should really be working on.

So I guess my guiding advice to anyone wondering "how can I get fast?" is:

1. Pick the same car every single week. Doesn't matter if it's weak at a particular circuit, still pick it until you've learned it. If it's weak there, it'll give you experience in tuning the setup for that kind of situation in future.
2. Make very small, targeted changes. Try to get a base setup that you like that could work at multiple tracks, then just make tweaks to it each weekend instead of grabbing new ones each week. This will give you a lot more consistent experience with the car instead of the "why did the car do X?" moments -- usually the reason for that is some other change in the setup which only really affects at race fuel and race distance.
3. There are no shortcuts to experience. Put in the time and effort to learn the car and track and you'll be rewarded.
4. Did I mention pick the same car every single week?

 

[nash112]

RIichard. You had good pace last night! I think you were a bit faster then me with the same car. If you don't run off the track, you will not get blue flags in a 60min race with that pace.

Thanks, yeah that was my fastest race by far but I was on softs, was keeping pace with most people until I realised they were on mediums haha, I just need to keep that consistency and try not to spin