‘Grand Prix Legends’ Driving and Setup Foolishness
A motley fool contemplates Grand Prix Legends
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‘Grand Prix Legends’ Driving and Setup FoolishnessA motley fool contemplates Grand Prix Legends |
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This is a small, static web site containing race car driving and suspension setup information. While the site does have some general relevance, it is focused on a race car simulator called Grand Prix Legends. GPL recreates the 1967 Formula 1 season (the last year before wings and cigarette advertising); what distinguishes it from all the other driving simulators is its astonishingly accurate and convincing physics model and the facility to race against other drivers via the internet.
I have 'played' with racing car simulations since Geoffery Crammond's REVS on the BBC Microcomputer in 1984, through all the usual suspects like F1GP, GP2, F1RS, Gran Turismo and Colin McRae. I also used to drive competitively in real life. Then, in February 1999, I tried the Grand Prix Legends demo. I vividly remember the replay of Matt Sentell overdriving the Ferrari at Watkins Glen and thinking “I want to be able to do that!”. As Jim Barry put it:
GPL, as great as it is, is an extremely difficult game that literally sucks the life out of you. Why learning to be competitive takes so long I’m not sure. I’m of the opinion that although the cars physics model is very realistic, there is still a basic problem that you are sitting at a desk deprived of G-forces, wind, bumps, peripheral vision, and feedback in the wheel. These sensory losses must be overcome with your eyes and ears and like a blind person learns to "see" with his ears, you too learn to "drive" these legendarily difficult cars. That it can be done at all is amazing enough. How much free time you have to commit to this apprenticeship will be the key to your enjoyment. In almost every way, buying GPL is like buying a violin.
This information was compiled and created out of frustration; I have found it hard to get driving and racing advice from other racing drivers, both in real life and in simulations. This seems to be for one of two reasons:
Frankly, neither of these will do. There is no harm in sharing knowledge, and I am always curious to analyze how people and things work. If I am slow or fast on the track, I want to know why. These pages are my unreliable contribution; they contain a bunch of highly subjective tips, observations and opinions that I have not come across elsewhere in the printed manual, or the many other GPL and driving sites.
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
It is all about slip angles, weight transfer and traction budgets, right? If you didn't know this (and it surprises me how many fast drivers don't) then try reading the physics of racing articles by Brian Beckman. Contained therein are some amusing and weird perspectives - for example, I never, in my wildest cheese-induced dreams, realized that the ground might exert a lifting force on the wheels, i.e. the ground pushes the car up...
Drive sensitively, with a light touch. Make the phases of a corner blend into one another. Feel your way into each corner with gentle pressure on the brake and small steering inputs. When in the corner, make small adjustments in the cars attitude with the throttle and steering, and finally exit the corner by squeezing the throttle open and releasing pressure on the steering wheel.
“[Jim Clark] was the quickest man in the team
and yet his car would have less tyre wear,
less brake wear and more fuel left at the end of the race than any of the others.
He was light on the cars and he had a mechanical sympathy for things.”
-- Bob Dance (Chief Racing Mechanic, Team Lotus)
These cars must be driven with restraint. There is no justification for spinning; it's unprofessional. Finding the limit of grip by spinning is a waste of your time; you learn nothing useful. You should know you've exceeded the limit well before a spin starts. If you have to be going backwards to know when you've made a mistake, you are missing the point of this.
Line, exit speed, braking - in that order. When learning a track, first get the line right, as that is where most speed is gained and lost. Only then work at increasing the exit speed from the corners, and only then, right at the very end (after maybe 50+ laps) work on braking as hard and late as possible, as that is where the least time is gained and lost.
Why is exit speed more important than late braking? Because your speed down a straight is determined by your exit speed from the previous corner. You spend, say, 75% of your time going down straights and only 5% of your time braking. So the advantage of a good corner exit massively outweighs the advantage from a late braking corner entry. Then, consider that your corner exit speed is determined by what you do earlier in the corner: if you've arrived at the corner on or past the limit of traction because of late braking, then you are going to find it hard to take the rest of the corner well. I know it feels fast to brake late and deep into a corner, but the stopwatch will usually disagree with you.
“Approach the corner always with the aim to exit the corner quickly”
-- Mike Laskey
If you want to know more about the 'line, exit speed, braking' approach, skip along to the Skip Barber Racing School, or go and read their book, Going Faster.
One of the 'secrets' of making a good corner exit is to co-ordinate the rates at which you simultaneously unwind the steering wheel and increase pressure on the throttle. Utterly wrong would be to snap the wheel back to center and stomp on the throttle. Better, but still wrong, would be to squeeze the throttle open and then snap the wheel back to center. The fastest way out of a corner is to start straightening the wheel at the same time as you start to apply pressure to the throttle, and to finish straightening the wheel at the same time as the throttle is fully depressed. (Why? Because you have to stay on the edge of the friction circle, not go through the middle of it.) Jackie Stewart once said that the driver should never feel the end of a corner - the transition from cornering to acceleration should be so smooth as to be imperceptible.
Much of my youth was mis-spent racing boats (Lasers, if you are curious). One the first things you learn about making a boat go fast through water is that the rudder acts like a brake. Everytime you use it, it's like putting out an air-brake on an aeroplane - it creates drag and your speed dies. It's so bad that you end up using the roll angle of the hull to steer - anything to avoid pulling on the tiller extension. I found the same principle to be true in motor racing. The steering wheel acts like a brake, and everytime you use it, you slow down. The greater angle you rotate it to, the greater the effect. So try and be reluctant to use it.
Your hands follow your eyes. Learn to look ahead to where you want to go, and not at some random kerb or piece of tarmac. There is no point at looking at anything close to the car, because at the limit of grip you will have very little control over where the car is going to go in the next few yards. So you might as well look at something useful. This takes time to learn (actually, it takes time to remember to force yourself to do it), but pays off by making you more consistent. For example, when you are approaching the braking point your eyes should have previously located it on the track and, long before you start braking, have already moved forward to the turning in point or apex. Simply put, your eyes should always be one step ahead of what you are doing.
The further you look ahead, the slower the car will seem to be going and you'll have more time to react to things. When you really get going, you no longer perceive speed and distance.
Jim Clark: “ ...one of the great things in motor racing is concentration. Accidents aren't caused by speed as everyone thinks. I think they are caused by lack of concentration! Quite often on the track when I want to go faster I don't drive any faster, I just concentrate harder, which makes me go faster. By concentrating on the braking, by concentrating on the way through the corner, by concentrating on the amount of throttle open - power I can get on out of the corner - just by concentrating that little bit harder all round.”
It is not essential to have lightning reflexes or bravery to drive fast. (Indeed, relying on them will probably impair your driving.) While there may or may not be such a thing as so-called 'natural' ability, remember that we all start off with much the same talents; how they are developed is up to the individual. As some top drivers have shown, it is possible to win at the highest level by carefully developing whatever combination of genes and upbringing we are dealt.
“Pedro [Diniz] admits that [his trainer] has reined him in psychologically – a process begun by a book written by golfer Tom Kite. In it, Kite states that there is no such thing as natural talent; there are only those who assert themselves better. This book has been the foundation of Pedro’s belief that, ‘If you work hard and put yourself in the right place at the right time, you can do anything’. ... He knows, although he would never admit it, that he isn’t God’s gift to motor racing, but he’s forced himself to within a whisker of being mega by sheer determination.”
Finally, my favorite quote on the subject comes from Graham Hill, who said that the chief qualities of a racing driver are concentration, determination and anticipation.
Choosing a good racing line, and staying on it, should be the number one priority when you are driving. I once spent some time with Nick Dudfield (a very quick Formula Renault driver) who was watching other competitors on a track where he held the lap record. All his comments were to do with the line that the other drivers were taking; he said nothing about their shiny new racing suit, car control, technique, braking or overtaking. The line was all that interested him.
Information on choosing a good racing line is available from several sources, starting with the classic The Technique of Motor Racing by Piero Taruffi. (In general though, a good line is one that lets you start getting on the power as early as possible in a corner.) Here are just a few points that I thought were especially pertinent to GPL.
Get into the habit of using the full width of the track. The difference in speed around a corner between using the full width of the track and staying a few feet from the kerb on entry, apex and exit can be relatively enormous.
In true anorak fashion, I've been using Juha Kallioinen's GPL Dump utility to analyze replays. I've found that if I compare two of my replays - one significantly quicker than the other - the most obvious difference between them is that the faster lap uses more of the track. I'm using the "lateral distance from track centerline" graph to view this.
You can use more than the full width of the track at places where there is no kerb: at Mexico, the Nürburgring, Silverstone and Spa I routinely brush the inside (unloaded) wheels over the verge at my clipping point. I find this helps me stay on line; running over each verge is like hitting a 'waypoint'. I win a cuddly toy if I hit twenty in a row.
When asked, "Why aren't you using the whole track?" people usually respond with surprise, "I thought I was".
The one who gets on the throttle first usually wins, because all we do is drag race
between the corners.
-- Carroll Smith (paraphrased)
One of the most common mistakes that you see beginners make is to continue driving like a maniac after they have deviated from the line. They've been over-driving the car - or more likely driving beyond their ability - and the car has drifted off to a seldom-used part of the race track. To my mind, there is little point in trying to drive quickly if you're not driving in the right place; it just makes a bad situation worse. If you're not on the line, then back off and get back on it.
Take the time to look at a replay of yourself from time to time; you might be surprised at how far off a good line you really are. The TV1 and TV2 camera angles really make it obvious when you aren't using the full width of the track.
Take double apexes on 180° medium-fast corners that come before straights, notably Nürburgring/Südkurve, Watkins Glen/The Loop and Mexico/Peralta. Exit speed is all at these corners. The AI cars don't, to their demonstrable loss.
Generally, the faster a corner is, the earlier the apex (i.e. your clipping point will be near the geometric apex). Certainly, you might need to aim for an imaginary earlier apex, because the car might drift and take you to a later one than you intended. Conversely, the slower the corner, the later the apex (i.e. your clipping point will after the geometric apex). There is a sound reason for this rule of thumb; coming out of a slower corner, you have a lot of torque/accelerative capacity and can very quickly get the car back up to speed. So, if you travelled a few extra yards into the corner to get a late apex, it won't hurt your overall time. In a faster corner, the car doesn't have much torque/accelerative capacity left, and so you need to carry as much speed through the corner as possible because you won't be able to accelerate out of it.
Take a very late apex for the first corner of a fast esse, so that you get the widest radius through the second corner of the esse, thus maximizing your exit speed from the esse as a whole. Good examples at Spa are Eau Rouge and the esse on the run up from Stavelot to Blanchimont (Piero Taruffi calls the second corner 'Cottage'), Kyalami/Esses and Zandvoort/Hondenvlak.
”He (Clark) was so unpunishing with his car. Take brake pads.
We used to replace them after four or five races on his car because it was embarassing.
Graham (Hill) might go through two sets per meeting.”
-- Alan McCall
Are you using engine braking to help slow the car down? Be careful. In GPL, you can lose in three ways by changing down gears too soon as you brake:
The brakes in GPL are already very effective - for example, the Lotus had 12" Girling brake disc rotors that were “wide and profusely ventilated” with four pads per disc. It is the deceptively high speeds and lack of decent rubber on the road that makes stopping such an art in GPL. Engine braking doesn't increase the size of the 'friction circle', so it can't do much to slow you down faster, other than by creating drag on the rear wheels and dynamically changing the apparent brake bias. (GPL doesn't model brake fade or wear, so you can't use that as an excuse either.)
So: brake first, then change down each gear only when you have got the revs down enough so that you are sure that the engine will not go over its redline.
I've read several GPL drivers who have commented that the brakes work better if, when you start to brake, you push the pedal really hard and them modulate it back to normal braking force. I can think of two reasons why this might be so:
If you are having trouble braking, try using your ears: listen for the squeal of the tires while braking, and gently modulate the brake pedal to just stop the squeal from starting (keep the squeal on the threshold, if you like - threshold squealing instead of threshold braking). The maximum braking effect seems to occur just before the squeal starts.
Also, keep an eye on the tires when braking, especially the blur of the manufacturer's name on the inside sidewall. As you slow down, the blur changes in nature to the point where the wheel stops revolving (i.e. you lock the brakes). You can use this to judge braking; when you are theshold braking, the wheel rotates 10-30% slower than it's normal road speed.
You need really good, smooth pedals to brake properly in GPL. In real life, you brake by varying the pressure on the brake pedal. In GPL (unless you have very expensive hardware) you vary the travel of the brake pedal. Off-the-shelf pedals, made for arcade racing games, are never going to be good enough for GPL. If you have some, it usually helps if you can make the brake pedal as resistant as possible by fitting it with a stiffer spring, taping a tennis ball behind it, or jamming a dead baby squirrel underneath it. (One of those suggestions arrived by email.)
Always find features on or by the track to act as brake markers. These could be trees, pieces of kerb, fence posts or changes in tarmac texture. Changes in the GPL 'racing line' can be good for this. (Once, in Real Life, I used a member of the crowd as a marker and then missed the corner when he moved. Another day, I used a shadow that fell across the track - which slowly moved and finally disappeared when the sun went in. Some days, I couldn't drive a nail into a piece of wood.) Never judge a braking point 'by eye', you will lose consistency.
The printed manual implies that trail braking (a.k.a. 'brake-turning', braking while turning toward the apex of a corner) can't or shouldn't be done in GPL. This is certainly true when you are learning, but every decent racing driver I know of uses trail braking, so it's another learning curve for you to climb sooner or later. However, learn trail braking slowly; if you're used to road driving (where you're taught to finish braking before turning into a corner) then you might find it tricky to learn the extra delicacy demanded by trail braking. In GPL, the trade-off between brake pressure and steering input is hard to judge when you can't feel the car turning and pitching through your body.
What is trail braking? In essence, it means continuing to brake after having turned in for a corner. The further you progress into the corner, the more you turn the steering wheel and the more pressure you release from the brake pedal. Typically, the procedure goes like this:
What's the point of it? Trail braking helps you rotate the car into a corner by controlling the transfer of weight onto the front tires, giving them more stick, and thus compensating for any understeering tendancy the car would otherwise have.
The alternative is: do all of your braking in a straight line, then release the brakes entirely, then turn in. The trouble with this technique is that when you release the brakes, weight - and therefore stick - will be removed from the front tires, just when you need them to be loaded enough to turn the car into the corner. So - unless the car is set up to be driven like this - it will understeer away from the corner. This is typical behaviour for 'street' (aka massively understeering) cars that have been adapted for racing.
On the other hand, a 'proper' race car will probably oversteer if you don't trail brake. If you turn into a corner with your feet off both brake and throttle, the front tires will have all their traction budget available for turning while the back wheels will be doing some (engine) braking. Net result: oversteer. In GPL, this is especially noticeable on setups that use 'realistic' differentials (i.e. those with few clutches and high coast side ramp angles). In this case, application of the brakes settles down the oversteer by substituting a proportionately balanced loss of steering traction (because the brakes are biased towards the front). In fact, with a 'realistic' differential, you use the brake pressure to control the rate at which the car rotates into the corner.
How much trail braking you do at a particular corner - i.e. what percentage of the corner is taken under braking - depends on the angle of the corner. For a 60° corner (e.g. Monza/Curva Grande), you'd typically only trail for a few percent of the corner, for a 90° corner (e.g. Monza/Lesmo 2, Monaco/Virage du Portier) you'd typically trail brake for maybe 25% of the corner, and for a bigger corner (e.g. Monza/Parabolica) you could do it for up to 50% of the corner. You are aiming to trail off the brakes until they are released completely at or before the throttle application point (which typically occurs somewhere before the geometric apex).
Another way of looking at trail braking is: what you're doing is braking so late for a corner, that you're never going to make it if you carry on in a straight line. In order just to stay on the track, you have to release a little of the pressure on the brake pedal and bend the car into the corner, just to give yourself a little more road - enough extra road to finish the braking. Kyalami/Crowthorne, Monza/Parabolica, Silverstone/Stowe are prime examples of this. If you find that you've finished braking before the throttle application point in these corners, then you didn't brake late enough. (BTW, if the car won't turn in when you release a little brake pressure, then you probably need to reduce the front brake bias; likewise, if the car swaps ends when you turn in, add some front brake bias).
Just about every corner you brake for demands some amount of trail braking (I'm struggling to think of an obvious exception in GPL - anyone?) Good ones to practise on are: Kyalami/Crowthorne, Monaco/Virage du Portier, Mexico/Turn 1 (what else are you going to do?!), Monza/(all of them), Rouen/Scierie, Silverstone/Woodcote, Spa/Les Combe, Spa/Blanchimont. The contrast between Monaco/Virage du Portier and Monza/Curva Grande could hardly be greater, but you use same technique at both, honest...
Alison Hine: “[trail braking] takes a good setup, a deft touch on brake, throttle and steering, and a lot of practice. I use a setup with brake balance fairly far forward (usually 58 to 60% on the front wheels) and trail brake to rotate the car. The rate and smoothness with which you trail off the brake (i.e. smoothly release brake pressure as you turn the car into the corner) is critical, and is probably one of the most difficult and subtle things to learn in GPL.”
Tim Sharp: “Some drivers brake hard enough in a straight line to slow their car down for the corner, but then they totally release the brake or go to the throttle before they get to the apex of the corner. They transfer the weight off the front tires and onto the rear wheels just when they need their steering the most. This can cause the car to go into an understeer skid. In order to keep the weight on the front and the tire contact patches expanded for optimal steering, you should use trail braking. Trail braking is simply continuing to apply a diminishing percentage of braking until you complete your turn into the apex. The transition from trail braking to the apex and the application of throttle to the track-out point should be smooth and seamless so as not to upset the chassis.”
For more advice, I refer you to history:
Four-wheel drifting is an essential technique to master in the the pre-aero overpowered world of GPL, as it is used at so many corners. You'll need a setup with neutral (very slightly understeering) steering to do it well, so that you keep both front and rear wheels in their optimum slip angle ranges.
You set the drift up by rotating the car during corner entry so that the front is aiming inside the apex, and then by keeping the steering fairly neutral while you use the throttle to 'push' the car away from the apex. You think that you'll hit the apex but you don't, because (a) the car drifts sideways and (b) the corner curves away from you. Remember that bit from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where Arthur Dent is learning to fly? It was described to him as “throwing yourself at the ground and missing”. Well, four-wheel drifting is a bit like throwing the car at the apex of a corner, and missing.
Well worth a read is this little piece where Enzo Ferrari describes the four-wheel drifting of Tazio Nuvolari. Nowadays in Formula 1, we have 'aerodynamic packages' instead. What a shame.
This little bit of banana comes from Eliot Clarke: I believe turning in early is the most important element in improving lap times, and the thing that most people don't "get" when they first try GPL. If you brake really late then take a nice line round the apex of the corner you have just lost yourself a whole lot of time. You want to brake relatively early, then start your turn in *way* before the corner; extreme examples of this are Spa and Zandvoort; on the later I find I am turning in for the some corners before I have finished the previous corner, with very light use of the brakes. ... So now we are turning in early and hopefully you should be noticing something quite special. You have turned in way before the corner and the car goes into a slide *but* it is still going in the right direction. This is what we were aiming for, now you are ready to "hold the slide", as you reach the approximate apex of the corner, floor the throttle and be ready to add a little opposite steering lock if required. If all goes to plan you should now be accelerating out of the corner. If the car starts to push towards the outside of the corner, then turn harder if that doesn't work then release the throttle *slightly*. If the car starts to push towards the inside of the corner add the opposite lock, if that doesn't work then release the throttle *slightly*. Simple eh?
Jim Clark: “I know I am inclined to go into a corner earlier than most people. By that I meant that ... most people run deep into a corner before turning the wheels to go round. In this way you can complete all your braking in a straight line, as everyone recommends you do; but I prefer to cut into the corner early and, even with my brakes still on, to set up the car earlier. In this way I almost make a false apex because I get the power on early and try to drift the car through the true apex and continue with this sliding until I am set up for the next bit of straight.”
Over-rotating the car before the apex of a corner (aka 'pitching', yawing the car so much that the tires are past their optimum slip angles), can have its uses, and is relatively easy to master. The point of it seems to be that over-rotating lets you think you're getting the power on earlier when coming out of the corner. It is a good technique to use for corners that you don't yet know intimately - maybe this is why rally drivers do it a lot - and indeed it helped hustle me around parts of the Nürburgring while I was learning it. But, over-rotating the car is not the fastest way around a corner in GPL.
Alison Hine on cornering: “I use a little trail braking going into most corners to rotate the car into the corner, try to balance the car on the throttle through the middle of the corner, using a touch of left foot braking if necessary to tuck the nose down to the apex, and then try to get the car straight for the exit so I can mash the throttle as early as possible. Of course, in most slower corners, you have to feed in the power carefully, keeping the tires right at their peak slip ratio, waiting for that moment when they can take full throttle and you can nail it. When you get it right, it’s an absolutely delicious feeling.” (Alison's use of left foot braking in mid-corner is, I think, not a planned thing, but rather something you do if you've overcooked the corner slightly and you feel the front understeering away from the apex. A quick dab of the brakes can often transfer enough load to the fronts to give them just enough stick to correct the problem - at the expense of a little lap time.)
Stirling Moss on fast cornering: “A racing car is always in an attitude at corners, never pointing directly fore-and-aft in its line of travel as a road car would be in normal motoring. The racing car is sliding, to some degree, nearly all the time, but to be quick the best drivers try to do the slides and drifts with the least drag possible at moments when drag doesn't matter. One can put the car into a Kriste - a broadside as in ski-ing - to slow it into corners. But once one has presented the car to a very high-speed corner it's rather like throwing a dart - when it has left your hand you can't do a thing about its path. If you present a car accurately to such a corner it will track through in a long drift on a virtually predestined trajectory. You can make tiny adjustments, but once you have presented it to the corner you can only adjust the trim, not make major changes of direction - not if you are on the limit. Steering is used to present the car, then to compensate for the throttle, because as one opens the throttle, and car starts to slide you may have to use the steering wheel to compensate - to balance the power. I would describe the steering wheel as the presenter and balancer really.”
The subject that pops up most often when talking to the fast people is the importance of making a good corner exit. Quotes like these just keep appearing:
"The following is Matt Bishop's description of Jenson Button's exit from turn 5 at Hungary:
...his car control is demonstrably superb. During qualifying in Hungary, I watched at Turn 5 the long 150° right- hander at the back of the circuit. You approach it in fourth gear at around 140mph, brake, then hook third, dropping to about 80mph at the apex, before accelerating up through the gears towards the chicane.
The exit is bumpy and tricky, and most drivers struggle to get the power down, their cars skipping this way and that as they fight understeer, then oversteer, then understeer again.
Not Jenson. Lap after lap, he turned in smoothly, sometimes locking the inside front but never both and never therefore missing the apex by more than three inches. But the exit was the key. An even application of the loud pedal, a classic powerslide, left hand visible and unwavering above the lip of the cockpit cowling, no sawing at the wheel, the car held at 10° to the angle of travel via masterful throttle control. And this was not a mistake.
This was not Jenson correcting a bit of exuberant overacceleration. This was Jenson’s way of negotiating Turn 5 at the Hungaroring. Jenson’s line.
“I like a long, soft throttle pedal” he explains “that gives you a lot of travel, and you don’t have to exert a lot of pressure. That way, I find I get more control. Because that’s so important with these cars. At the start of the year, I was putting my foot down a lot faster. It feels the natural thing to do - to get the power down as fast as possible - but, in fact, it gives you more oversteer and less traction.”
“Nowadays, I use more measured throttle inputs, and what you get is gradual oversteer, which is easy to control. And in qualifying, it’s vital you’ve got controllable oversteer.”
“You’re bound to have some oversteer in qualifying because you’re giving it everything; the important thing is to make it controllable so that you don’t have to lift to get rid of it.”
Stop fiddling with your setups. It's your driving skill that makes the biggest difference to your lap times.
...there are drivers who continually want to alter something.
No matter what the designers or mechanics do it is never quite right,
and I find that those drivers seldom, if ever, are vying for the front row on the
starting grid; in fact, they are often not even the fastest man in the team.
-- Denis Jenkinson
One big point of a setup is to make the car easier to handle, so that you can position it where you want to on the track and make it turn, brake, drift and accelerate when you want to and how you want to. The setup allows you to demonstrate your driving skill, it cannot not create skill for you.
There is no such thing as a 'golden' setup that will magically make you lap as fast as the hotlappers.
For example, in the early days, I was doing racing laps of Kyalami in the 1:22.0 - 1:22.5 region. I tried using the 1" setup that had been used by a hotlapper to do a 1:18.6 and, after getting used to it, found that it made no real difference to my lap times. Fiddle with the setup by all means, as it gives you something to do while you notch up the miles, but don't expect it to suddenly make you faster. Wolfgang Woeger is not fast because of his setups (I sometimes even wonder if he is fast in spite of some of his setups!).
In fact, that point should be taken further: do not use hotlapper setups. From several conversations I've had with these chaps, it is clear that they use completely different terms of reference than the rest of us when it comes to setups. They are trying to wring an extra tenth of a second out of their cars, and have enough driving ability to be able to compromise some aspect of the handling in order to achieve that. If you are still learning (and aren't we all) then use a stable setup - one, maybe, with a higher ride height, minimal camber, neutral handling and friendly differential.
Alan McCall: “We only changed Jimmy's new Lotus 49 twice during the whole 1967 season. At the German GP I tightened the very small rear bar up half an inch to reduce the understeer. He did one lap, came in, and asked for it to be changed back. At Silverstone for the British GP, it was decided to give the front wheel more negative camber to help him round 180mph Woodcote where it was pushing a bit towards the grass. We went up from a quarter to a third of a degree ... I was the first to get to his car after the race and he jumped out put his arm round my shoulder, but he didn't say hello, good car or anything - he just said: "That was a mistake, get it out of the front, will you...". And he'd just won the Grand Prix!”
Learn one thing at a time. Pick one car, and stick with it. Then pick one track, and stick with it. I'll only change one or the other after at least a dozen fairly lengthy sessions.
Download one of the replacement skid sound effects, load it into Sound Recorder and increase the volume by, say, 50% before saving it into the GPL Sound folder. This will enable you to hear the 'squeal' sound above the engine. This is an invaluable aid when:
A squealing tire is a happy tire
-- Traditional
The tire squeal is a tell-tail for the limit of grip - use it. It tells you how much of your traction budget you are using. If you are braking or cornering and you can't hear the squeal, then you are not using all your available budget and you could be going faster. You are aiming for a constant squeal though all the phases of a corner. Downloading and listening to some hotlap replays can be very enlightening.
(As a result of GPL, I've even started to use the sound of the tires more in Real Life racing, too, where there are a changes in pitch as well as volume. A high-pitched squealing means the tires are at or below their limit; the pitch deepens into a 'squal' as the tires go over their limit.)
Set the steering to fully linear. It may seem a bit weird at first, but it permits better medium-high speed steering control (great for Monza and Silverstone), makes it easier to catch slides and seems to give you a better 'feel' for the car. I find trail braking almost impossible without fully linear steering.
By the same token (if you are running version 1.1.0.3 or above) edit core.ini, find the [ Hack ] section and set steer_ratio to 0. This prevents the steering from progressively switching to a 7:1 ratio when the speed drops below 60 MPH. This may seem like a good idea for getting out of your pit stalls and getting round the tight hairpins at Moncao, but in reality it really messes up your handling of the car at these low speeds. For example, before I turned the hack off, I could never drive Monaco/Sainte Dévote or Rouen/Nouveau Monde consistently - I never felt I had full control of the car.
Turn off the drivers arms when in the cockpit - they are a distraction. And a waste of processor time. I can already see my own arms; seeing another pair just seems creepy.
Study the replays that came with the game, and those of the hotlappers. They are little works of art. The sub-eight minute laps of the Nürburgring are sublime. These guys have an ability to carry speed through the corners that I can only marvel at.
The basic rules of racing in GPL are the same as any competitive sport, namely:
After a series of processional 'Grand Prix' length races where I could keep up with Clark but never quite beat him unless he broke down, I turned off 'global hype'. (If you don't know, this is a weighting that GPL applies to the performance of the AI drivers: out of the box, they are a little slower than 'normal' and as you race (over several races) they either slow down or speed up, so that they keep pace with you. The idea is that the AI always give you a race, no matter how fast or slow you are.) In gpl_ai.ini, you'll find a [ magic ] section. In that section, there is a variable called npt_override. If set to any non-zero value, this value will replace the 'global hype' setting that GPL has figured out for you at a particular track. Anything less than 1.0 will make the AI go faster. 1.0 is the 'natural' AI speed. Anything over 1.0 (up to a maximum of 1.8) will slow the AI down. After a fresh GPL install, the AI 'go at' 1.2. I set mine to 1.0; I want to race and eventually beat these AI cars, not have them patronise me by slowing down or frustrate me by speeding up. What's the point of racing if the odds change dynamically so that you never win? I don't cheat, and I don't want the AI to cheat either!
To get yourself in the mood, try reading the original race reports from 1967.
Keep away from the AI cars. They are keen to make contact with you, either by:
Driving in close proximity to the AI cars slows you down and increases your chance of an accident.
If you are following close behind someone, don't look at them. If you do, you'll make slightly amplified versions of all their mistakes. Let your 'subconcious' keep an eye on them, while you conciously keep your eyes on track markers, apexes and the like.
Overtaking is harder in GPL than any other driving sim I have tried. On fast tracks or sections, find one or two safe overtaking places and only use those (unless the guy in front thinks it's amateur hour, of course). For example, at Monza, overtaking seems to be safest on the start/finish straight; at other likely places (Curva Grande, Lesmo 1, braking into to the Parabolica) it only seems safe. At Monza I have learnt to be patient, staying back from the car in front for most of the lap, eventually closing in on them by making a better exit from the Parabolica, getting a brief tow at the start of the straight and then passing by the pits. Golly, this sounds more like real racing than simulated racing.
...that's on the faster tracks and sections. On the other hand, you can be really rude when overtaking the AI cars in the slower bits, especially at Monaco (the section from the Station/Lowes hairpin to Virage du Portier is my favourite) and the Nürburgring. Just remember not to be rude to humans, though - they can, and do, find you after the race and punch you.
The first rule of overtaking is “if in doubt, don't”.
Full length Grand Prix races are not the scary things you might think; just drive steadily rather than quickly, keep concentrating, keep out of trouble and hope that Clark and Hill break down. Normally, the AI do very little overtaking and less than half the field finishes the race (can you think of a modern equivalent?!).
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The AI cars in GPL suffer from the same syndrome that affects other racing sims, that of being slower than a human at overtaking back markers (caveat drivor - be very, very careful when trying to out-brake either of the BRMs...). In short races, you can be blown away by the AI cars. In longer races at the shorter circuits, the front runners soon start lapping the back markers, and this slows them down more than it will slow you, allowing you to close in on them in the second half of the race. Look at the report from my first Grand Prix-length race; I started last, stayed last for a few laps while the AI played dodgems, and then picked my way through the field to win (much to my surprise), lapping at only 1:32 - 1:33. (That was April 1999. Now, October 1999, I'm lapping the same race at 1:28.5 - 1:29.0. Maybe there is hope.)
Luckily, the handling of the cars does not suffer too much with full fuel tanks; the weight goes up, for sure, but the fuel is stored near enough to the car's center of gravity that you don't get any nasty surprises with your setup. In the early part of the race the car will accelerate more sluggishly, roll a bit more and take longer to stop; that's all.
Make use of the replay facility every time something exciting or unexplained happens. For example, if you make contact with another car and are not sure whose fault it was, wait until your car is back under control (or wedged into a straw bale) and press F2. Study the incident from several camera angles, work out exactly what happened, and vow never to repeat the mistake (remember - it could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others). BTW, pressing F2 is better than pressing Pause, because you get to see your current race position, best lap time, last lap time and other info.
Experiment when in training and in qualifying, but never during a race. During a race, you should not be surprised by anything either your car or a competitor does. You should not be thinking 'Whoa! I didn't know the car was going to do that!'.
Set your mirrors to 'cars only', turn off enough eye candy to get a constant 36fps when driving, learn how to start in a straight line, then read this advice by Phillip McNelley.
This is VROC Standard Operating Procedure:
(OK, OK, I know I'm far from perfect, but at least I never learnt the cars or the tracks on someone else's phone bill.)
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