I made my life harder than needed, but it also made the race more exciting. As you can see here It is interesting how flow sensitive this track is, I needed a while to get there. But even though I felt incredibly fast, if I look at the times the others were doing, oh dear...
A very disappointing evening for me. Started really well and some nice race action with @Edward Jones until lap 2 when I went too wide and onto the grass. Tried too hard and made mistakes, tried to hard (again) and made mistakes (again). I really struggled to find a 'flow', my lap times just got worse and I became a little despondent. Very lonely after that except for seeing my usual lapping friends! I perservered for the points and had the small consolation of not being lapped by the whole field! I must be missing something I think - you guys overtake me and hurtle around the corners in clouds of smoke, whilst I am driving like an old man (which I am). I had a really good result (for me) on Sunday in the V8 Supercars. I think they are easier to drive than the Mini!
It amazes me too Simon as these cars are so understeery when you go into corners too fast. I'm not sure whether all that smoke is from braking or sliding
Despite my reply to Simon above, I was really surprised to see all the tyre smoke my car was generating in these few laps of Philipp's replay as I didn't really see any of that from in-car myself. Visually it appeared to come from the rear inside tyre mainly, but that wasn't reflected in the Hud tyre temperatures, so its mystifying. The front tyres are those that wear so much on any FWD car, including these JCW Mini's, so maybe the gfx representation is not correct. I didn't see much if any tyre smoke from your car Philipp, so what's your take on it? Got any setup tips for us mortals?
First of all, I am not fast enough to be considered as immortal. However, what I noticed during practise was, that this car very easily locks up its tyres. So I reduced brake power to 90 percent, although as you could see in the video, I had more than once a huge drifting moment at the end of the long straight. So the other part was probably being gentle on the brake. Or more precisely, let the car roll, especially in the last three corners and the long double left in the last sector. By doing that, I only rarely saw the locking tyres warning in the HUD. The other question is, was that actually faster because it seemed to me in practise, that at least Kiril created a lot of smoke (if I am not mistaken).
The reason for the smoke is that this car lifts it's inside rear wheel making it touch the asphalt only lightly. This is because some of us set the car up to be loose in the rear. At least, I do. The locking brakes is common with this mod. Shaun Clarke made this car as close to the real cup car as possible. The real cars have the same issue. With loadcell pedals it's very controllable. In AC we have a option the real cars don't have. In car brake bias adjustment. My advise, use it About the track, It took me a good few laps to get the fast lines and setup. There is no substitute for practice. Learn from the mistakes made in practice and find better lines by making mistakes.
I would expect that sliding and tyre wear to be reflected in higher tyre temps and wear rates for those rear tyres, but that doesn't appear to be reflected in the rF2 HUD, with much, much higher temps/wear for the front tyres (expected with any FWD car of course)
We "waste" 45 minutes when we could call it off after quali I think it is pretty rare. Order for final position, quali time and best lap time are the same.
On certain tracks I change the brake bias during the lap(s). Example, On a lap I might have Bias at 70% for turn 1, change it to 71% for turn 2 & 3, then change it to 68% for the next 3 corners. And so on. This is slightly exagerated, but it's just to show one of the things a driver can do to get those last tenths of seconds out of a lap. This not easy and takes a lot of practice to get it right.
