I need help, I play A class circuit racing online, but I’ve noticed something…
My fastest lap time is slower than the leader usually by 15 seconds or more, and the guy in front of me has a time that’s 5 seconds faster than me, I need help, do I need more handling? Do I need more acceleration? What do I need? Please help, I want to actually be competitive
Its not the car. Go to rivals and put some laps down. You have learn the track. Run your ghost and see your mistake and improve on it.
Poor thread subject fixed.
This is something I posted on another forum but may come in handy, basic principles apply across all non-arcade racing games.
Next up, watch this playlist:
For now, you should focus on getting faster and honing your driving techniques. I recommend you try one of the Spec Rivals events as everyone uses identical cars for those. The higher up the leaderboards you go, the better you’re getting at driving around a track at speed.
Once you’re confident enough in your driving skills you can then look into other factors, such as finding a setup that suits your driving style.
Your car build is important too. You can try running tunes from Raceboy77’s if you use a controller. If you like to tune yourself I have found that downloading tunes and then removing them will give good pointers on what the top tuners use in their builds.
Practicing in Rivals really helps. You can download top tunes from there as well. And definitely try to get use to as few assist as possible. Hope this helps.
A good build and tune defiantly important, but alot of people think its every thing. Being 15 sec off , its all about fundamentals. Then car/build/tune.
Assist will slow you down, so removing them will help too. It’ll be really hard to start. Took me a couple of weeks to go from auto to manual, about a week to remove TCS from all but the most powerful cars, etc etc.
The thing about removing the assists is it’s not the assists per se, it’s the fact you learn how to drive properly when they’re off. You get a better feel for the car, and you learn more that way.
Yeah, I’ve got them turned off
I’m going to take a different opinion: If you’re 15 seconds off pace, turning some of the assists back on (at least for a while) will probably be an overall help.
I’d recommend activating TCS, ABS, and the braking line. Learn to shift manually. Your goal right now should be to learn the tracks, that’s where the braking line will help you. If you’re 15 secs off, you’re WAY off somewhere on the track, probably in multiple places. The braking line is conservative, but you should be able to get within a few seconds of a good time following it.
When you’re doing better with the tracks, next turn off TCS. Now you’ll have to learn to feather the throttle to avoid wheelspin. Until you master this, A class should be the absolute maximum you even think about racing. Lower is even better B or even C class would be a better place to start. Leave TCS on for S and R classes for a good long time.
Stopped spinning out and having massive wheelspin? Then turn off ABS. This is the hardest assist to live without, IMO. By now you should be able to routinely post laps within 2-3 seconds of the top of the LB.
You can add the clutch in at some point during this, that’s up to you. Don’t use LB though.
That’s exactly how I dealt with assists…
Racing B/C class is the way to go too. I’m better at the game now but by no means a top leaderboard guy. I look to get 4-6 secs from the top generally or on a track I know really well with a car/tune suited to it nearer 1-2 secs from the top.
I race a lot of FWD cars in B/C class because they happen to be the cars I like or have driven in real life. They are a great place to start you’ll be learning how to race with quick changes of direction and tons of grip Try some of the more stable RWD like the S2000 in B or the MX5 in C.
When getting tunes from the leaderboards go for ones titled grip or balanced leave the power ones alone for now. You’ll be able to familiarise yourself with the stats of them soon enough to know if they are going to be within your current capabilities or not. Then go to Rivals and hotlap using advice from further up the thread
When I started out, I used to hot lap, and with a ghost to chase that was always a second faster than me. Id always also try to.be in the same car/tune, so instead of wondering if he has a better tune, you know it’s all down to driver skill.
I used to be happy to get a top 1% time, then I’d be happy with a top 1000, now I’d expect to get top 100.
I’d suggest picking one particular track to start with. Run 10 laps, and see what time you can get. Then go to the leader boards, and select a person one second faster than you, and make sure to download the tune they used. Chase that ghost until you can almost beat it, then again, select a new ghost one second faster.
It works. You begin to realise where your braking too soon, and where your using the wrong line.
In the lower classes especially, turning gears to manual w/clutch is worth a lot of time. Definitely worth getting used to. I’ve never used the other assists, so couldn’t comment on how they would affect pace.
Personally, I also found that turning OFF the line completely also helped. It sort of forces you to test how late you can brake, and discover your own lines.
(Contrary to popular belief on here, turning the line off will not, however, make you a better person lol)
Great advice, thank you.
There’s no subsitute for seat time…
The easy thing to say is practice, practice, practice, and it’s true. But the hard part is to tell you what you need to be practicing. You are doing a lot of stuff wrong and don’t even know it, so when you go to race or practice you wind up reinforcing all those bad habits that were slowing you down to begin with.
The best thing to do is to have someone good come over and sit beside you and show you how it’s done → Brake HERE, like THIS, start turning HERE, move the stick THIS way, DON’T brake here, coast thru this corner, so forth and so on. That’s very hard to arrange, Daveyskills isn’t going to be coming over to my house to give me lessons. 2nd best is to get into a private room with someone who is willing to do all that, there are plenty, usually you just have to ask nice. Join a league, you’ll find someone that will take you under their wing. 3rd best is to watch replays and chase ghosts around in rivals, you can learn a lot this way but it takes longer. No matter what you will still need to get onto the track and go do it.
Don’t give up, the game does reward practicing and you will see your laptimes improve.
Yeah i’ll run a civic or similar in B class cos front wheel drive is a bit more predictable, just understeers a bit. But i ran in a BTCC league with a BMW M3 E96. Learning how to tune, running each track dozens of times to get ready for the race. Learned more running in that league than the 3 years previously! lol