Sim Racing Journey

 I finally cracked 1m54s in the Porsche 911 RSR 2017 at Barcelona in Assetto Corsa Ultimate. My lap times have slowly improved throughout the weeks, but now it’s time to move on from Barcelona. I started at Monza, then moved on to Barcleona, now my next stop is the Red Bull Ring — best lap time so far is 1m33s which leaves my current Personal Bests by track at: Monza — 1m57s Barcelona — 1m54s Red Bull Ring — 1m33s I’m thinking every month I’ll move on to learn a new track, but also come back and visit these ones briefly to see if I can beat my personal bests — this should be a good measure of progress! This video from Ermin Hamidovic is a great intro to sim racing that briefly covers a lot of good points. Something that I think has made a big difference for me is holding the steering wheel at 9 & 3 — turning seems to be smoother and it seems easier to straighten up and accelerate earlier. I’ve also dropped the force feedback on the Thrustmaster down from 100 to 55. I’ll probably

 I finally started getting under 1m56s laps for Barcelona in PS4 Assetto Corsa Ultimate — I’ve had the Thrustmaster since 29 July 2021 — under a month, and after studying this advice from TraxionGG I’ve steadily improved my time from over 2m10s down to 1m55s driving the Porsche 911 RSR 2017. I’ve got the canonical brake mod installed in the T3PA pedals, but I still don’t have a good feel for trail-braking and I’m still to slow on the acceleration coming out of corners — but it’s been great fun so far and awesome to see my driving improve over time. Best time ever! Multiple 1m55s laps Even got 1m55s in a 5 lap race (Very Easy AI) I’d still like to evolve my setup over time. I’m sitting too far away from the screen still, and would love to upgrade my pedals but I’ll be sorting that out slowly as I go… Here’s the video of my fastest lap — with some very rough cornering included… I’m planning to work my way through the Driver61.com Uni to further understand what is involved in driving w

Since studying this video from TraxionGG I’ve made some notes on positioning and gears. I’ve found I get my best times when I don’t try to set a personal best, but concentrate on positioning and choosing the correct gear. I heard somewhere that smooth is fast and fast is smooth. This seems to be true for me. Doing this I’ve taken 2 seconds off my lap time — but my laps are still very rough. I’ve put the rubber brake mod in my T3PA pedals, and I’ve got to get used to that now. I think I’ve got a much better appreciation now for how important pedals are. I’m tempted to upgrade to the T-LCM pedals so I can compare the basic potentiometer pedals to some Load Cell pedals. Now, I think I need to concentrate on braking effectively — I’ve found some advice here from Driver61 .

I’ve been trying to improve my Barcelona GP lap time… I found this explanation from TraxionGG which I’ve found very useful. I’ve printed out a copy of the track from RaceFans.net and annotated it with notes as described in the video — which gears when, where to start breaking, where to position etc. So now comes the time to put the theory to practice… And its not so easy! One thing I thought I’d try out is the rubber brake mod that came with the T3PA pedals. It was easy to install, but I couldn’t get Assetto Corsa to calibrate the brake properly — so I only had about 50% braking power. A problem similar to this one but I didn’t get to the point of breaking it, I just couldn’t put enough pressure on it to get it to register 100%. I thought I’d try out Assetto Corsa on the PC — it seems the PC version has lots of settings and customisations from what I’ve read. So I grabbed an old laptop, reinstalled Windows 10, logged in to Steam, and grabbed Assetto Corsa for less than $6 (it was o