Did this improve your times? I have a g29 and could do the mod or get upgraded everything. But, as with real racing I'm reluctant to spend the money to gain a few tenths when I could gain seconds by just sharpening my skills.
This is disappointing to read, but an understandable point of view from someone who isn’t into their cars.
The issue is there are two kinds of modders: those who mod for the track and those who mod for street racing. I’d bet that OP has experienced the latter and not the former, hence the negative comment.
There is a massive group of car modders who build their cars for the track. We understand that the road is not the right place to drive fast, and that there is almost no advantage in doing so. We seek faster lap times which often requires improving features of the car such as tires, brakes, suspension, stiffer anti-roll bars, gearboxes, clutch, seats, weight reduction, etc...
Yes - very true. I race timetrials and keeping a stable aero position requires effort and practice but it's worth it as the gains from aero improvements can be huge.
GT Sport has a DLC-mode where you can do time trials vs. Lewis Hamilton's lap times. On a track where he clocked 1 minute 37 seconds, I was pretty shocked to find that the top 10 GT Sport players _all_ clocked lap times around 2 seconds faster than that.
Looks like we agree more than disagree. Seems like whoever is deciding on the tools, are failing to do so based on the job/project, instead opting for 'fashion' or whatever.
Good reason to seek a new situation, since you have neither appropriate tools selected for you nor input to select better ones.
Racecars? Yeah, I've only won some SCCA super-regional championships. Yes the driver does have a very large inptut into the setup, BUT it is within the constraint of the combination of the setup change and the improved driver feel must make the combination of car/driver faster. And yes, sometimes a change that makes the car technically a bit slower but gives the driver more confidence will result in faster net lap times -- and those are OK. But whatever the setup is, at the end of the test sessions, whether the car feels great or feels like crap, it's the driver's job to get the most out of it.
And I've had many situations both in the racecar and in international alpine ski racing where something felt weird/odd/unfamiliar/scary, but was fast as heck, so it was my job to adapt, rather than go back into my comfort zone.
Better to keep pushing outside your comfort zone, use tools/setups that get better results, and change your 'feel' to appreciate the better setup.
For sure there are gains to be made by having proper material as opposed to entry level, but those quickly become marginal.
The biggest gains by far are usually found in working on your driving style. Have a look at telemetry of someone who's slightly faster and work out the differences methodologically.
Shameless self-promotion: if you're racing in iRacing, have a look at https://garage61.net, we have over 125 million laps of telemetry to learn from.
I am no where near your level, or that of a pro racer, however I have spent a lot of time on tracks in various cars (Audi S4, BMW M3, BMW M6, etc..) and held a race license for motorcycles for a while.
However, when using the pretty amazing racing sim setup at Turner Motorsports (NH based BMW shop who runs some successful race cars) I couldn't make it a single lap without spinning out. There's a lack of physical feedback that kept me from feeling the approaching edge of traction or the frame balance shifting, etc...
One my friends who would always beat me in any racing games, has backed into his own mailbox at least 3 times.
Remember that they're fighting for hundreds, sometimes thousands of a second, in laps that usually take 90-100 seconds. Anything that can be done to improve things ever slightly, even if it means having to do extra work for some of the corners, is worth it.
During the race, when they have the video from above the cockpit you can clearly see the drivers changing configuration all the time during the race.
With enough money you can actually go to such a “simulator”. There are these guys that run older F1 cars on tracks. The teams provide pit crews and everything else. If you can afford it, definitely a nice hobby!
I got to drive a car with aerodynamic downforce only once and it’s super impressive to feel how it works better the faster you go. Cornering with 2g is also pretty nice.
I race cars. I've been on track with Ex-Grand Prix Drivers. Some of the biggest names in racing, and for sure the Worlds Best racing instructors helped teach me how to drive race cars at the limit of adhesion. I have consulted with the same sports psychologist that pioneered the training program for F1 and Indy car racers at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis--The Performance Institute. They actually called me on the phone when my test results were calculated and told me "I wasting my time running a contracting business" because I was a World Class racer as far as their testing was concerned.
Now I'm not saying I have ever driven a car with the insane performance of an F1 car. I did however walk away from an offer for a fully funded season to race a Swift DB6 (2 liter) after I had tested in that year's national championship winning car. What a fucking car, I loved that car! There were two reasons why I walked away from that offer: Mainly because I am Not brilliant at learning new race tracks. And the faster and more expensive the race car--the less time you have to learn a new circuit and get into your racing rhythm (I suspect this is because I did not race as a child. I was in my twenty's when I started going to racing schools and racing). And the second reason is I was 33 years old at that time; I had a wife, a newborn baby, a contracting business, and a mortgage.
However; I was arguably the fastest Formula Ford driver in America on any given day. I beat a National race winner's lap time by .4 of a second a lap using the exact same car race car in back to back sessions.
For years and years.. and YEARS--all I thought about was how to be a better driver. Every sport I played was done to improve either my balance (driving at the limit, is in good part--feel and balance), my concentration and my strength.
My point is I have some idea of what is required to drive
a F1 car. I really don't to put anyone down here: but the fact is a racing driver Would Never Ever buy a self-driving car. And trust me unless you own fire proof underwear and can drive 100 mph on a snow covered road (with winter tires of course. Racers' employ a particular eye technique coupled a steering tactic gives us so much more time to make decisions when we drive. Plus we can drive a car sideways while whistling a happy tune) you would have a hard time imagining just how good GOOD really is.
Launch control, dual clutch transmissions yeah we love that stuff it let's us drive quicker.
Traction control, automatic braking, lane departure systems we hate shit. And No real racer would buy any car where those systems can't be turned off. I turn them off my on car ALWAYS and MOST ESPECIALLY in the Snow, Ice and rain... that shit is off--because I'm FAR better at controlling the car than those systems are.
> Is there some sort of feedback when you're really close?
If you watch the practice for the race coming up shortly in Australia, you'll see one corner in particular where pretty much everyone including the fastest guys slid off the track. So a lot of it's a feel thing, but you've also got engineering data telling you all the measurable stuff about how the car is performing, which you can then feed into a computer simulator which knows the exact (one hopes) layout of the race track.
One of the younger guys who qualified surprisingly well supposedly spent hundreds of hours on a PC simulator before this latest race.
My main hobby is taking my car to the race track and driving fast. Learning the line, finding a pace buddy and following each other, critiquing each others' lines. Trying out different tires, brake pads, alignment, etc. It's a great hobby because it will literally consume any and every resource I have (time and money, basically) so I have to limit it. I am very mechanically inclined so I do all the work myself.
I cannot state enough how much I love it. It's both an art and a science. It involves danger. It's exciting. The community is absolutely insanely great. It allows me to progress both through ladders set up by organizations, and by my own recording of lap times. I can compete as hard as I want or I can just go out there and turn laps at 7/10 and no one cares.
> a simulated race car has almost nothing in common with the real experience other than your hands are turning a wheel and your feet push pedals.
Real life engineer made a data analysis between a virtual F3 car vs real F3 car, keep in mind rfactor is an old sim from 2005, sure you can't (Yet) replicate the g-forces of the real thing but everything else is pretty close.
The entire point is to make it a game of skill, yes. In spec racing, you can't just buy yourself a win by having more money to spend on a faster car. Thousands of amateur-level racers deliberately seek this type of competition out specifically because it's more fun to them to have a competition where it's all about skill rather than how good your equipment is. The idea that this is "taking the fun out" seems precisely backwards to me.
Not GP, and fortunately not often, but I have seen that done to overcome race conditions. I pushed for it to be corrected by using a proper design. That was a stupidly hard fight, though.
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