So, How Did You Learn SimRacing? What Was Your Process Like

What I'm wondering throughout reading this topic. If you are struggling so much, why haven't we seen a video of your driving? I have seen people before who were talking about setups and all that jazz, but couldn't find the ideal line if it hit them in the face Not saying thats you, but in my experience, setups really matter for those last tenths, there is a lot of stuff before that comes into play where you can gain seconds without too much hassle

 

How I learn simracing...
...fire one of the SIM I have...
...try to complete at least 3 laps in a row without hitting walls or cars...
...fail hard...
...restart session swearing as there isn't a tomorrow...
...rage quit...
...smoke a cigarette...
... start it again...

 

I learned to get faster by reading, data analysis, and practice.

 

If you're trying to learn, I'd suggest using cars that aren't crazy fast and have really good handling, brakes and plenty of grip.
When I try to introduce a friend to racing sim's, I usually put them in something like Formula BMW or Formula 3 cars. Single seaters like those have good chassis, great brakes, excellent handling and decent down force, but aren't insanely fast.
IMO - it makes learning the basics of driving a whole lot easier. Then start moving to higher performance cars, when you can thrash a Formula BMW car well
...just a suggestion - but keep at it and it will all come together in time

 

IMO we try to drive too many different types of cars to early. A high down force car is not the same as driving a mild powered chassis restrained sedan. For me choose the type of car that you like open wheeler tin top or what ever and just drive the starting car for that type of vehicle. With that said now it is just lap after lap identifying the various characteristics of the car. What does over steer feel like and what did i do at that moment to cause it because it will not be the car that caused the problem but me driving it. Next best is to be part of league yes we are slow but your league friends will encourage and help to make faster lap times come out. Legaue friends are the best to learn from and support you at the same time.

 

Until you get too fast ..then your on your own sunshine

 

Yeah, I know why many people don't like underpowered cars.. or Karts.. because when you make a little mistake, it will be quite obvious because the kart will take forever to regain speed... it's frustrating.. but it's a learning experience and when you consistently can turn around the track with your engine high revving, you know you are doing well and it's pure joy.. and fun.. even with the most underpowered karts.

 

Years of gamepad and keyboard skills from Grandprix-Series over Gran Turismo-Series and then GTR1. At that time a friend had a wheel. We all failed at the beginning, but managed to get it right during the first night. Helping each other with tipps on how to do all the stuff. It basically was a big brainstorming while driving and failing....haha. Then the addiction kicks in and you do miles and miles and kilometres over kilometres and forget that there was a time you wasn't able to to drive like this... Then new hardware gets added and you have to learn stuff again... Then new software gets added and you have to learn stuff again.

RF2 really is a hard place to start in my opinion. Back in the days GTR2 for example was really easy to setup. And fast guys were trading car-setups so you were on the right track immidiatly... on top of that you had full public servers to communicate.... something that is missing a bit in rf2 (at least in the past. It gets better).

 

@John First of all, thank you for finally being the person that helped me magically understand everything that's been going wrong with my driving. I am genuinely grateful. I have been driving Nissan GTR GT-500 on Silverstone GP, an unforgiving car on a tough track. As you might imagine, it wasn't going well. I was two to three seconds behind AI at 100% and couldn't figure out how to get better until your post really sunk in.

Karting indeed helped me immensely (I can't stress on that enough) because you don't worry about setups in a kart as much. I hopped into the seat and figured out I was actually doing fairly close times to the AI. I drove for another five or so hours on kart and it was only getting better so I started to understand that setup is the aspect that was holding me back in GTR.

So I spent quite a while reading on setups, as in-depth as I could and indeed as I learned the basics of setup, all the stones started falling into their correct places. Now, you might remember my first post where I whined quite a lot because I wasn't getting close to being good. My best time was 1:58 in Silverstone GP with GTR GT500 after pushing everything to the limits. Today, after cleverly making very slight changes to the setup, I finally did a 1:55!

I went very methodical. I listened to the car, tried to understand what it was lacking. Starting with default setup, first of all, ridiculously low rear tyre temps indicated that rear tyres weren't working at all. So I stiffened rear suspension a bit and tried about ten laps. Lap time was down to low 1:57. This time I increased rear tyre pressure just a tad and tried again. High 1:56.

At this point I noticed that the car couldn't accelerate much in corner exits. So I increased rear slow rebound so the car would set back on rear tyres quicker and start accelerating earlier. Result: low 1:56.

At this point I realised that the car was banking too much laterally on high speed corners like Copse and Abbey and would remain unresponsive until I either braked heavily or went off the track. So I increased both front and rear slow bump. At first I tried stiffening the left side since there were more right hand turns but turned out it cause balance issues at corner exits. The time: High 1:55.

The funny thing is, without further changes to the setup, I noticed I could actually push further. I could get on the throttle a little earlier and see how it worked out. The car was so responsive that even if I did a mistake and oversteered, I could easily counter it and correct. Only after five more laps, I did a 1:55.5. I was going to try and push more but hot weather and intense sweating prevented me from doing so.

To think that I haven't even fiddled with ride height, gear ratio, rear wing etc. I can easily see that 1:24 is indeed possible. So long story short, @John your post was that one post reached my thick skull and made me understand what I was lacking and I thank you for it. Also, all the others who were patient enough to bear with a whining newbie like me, you people are awesome as well. Thanks for doing all you could to help me and I am indeed grateful. So, this will be my answer as to how I learned how to simrace

Have a good day and I wish you fast laps.