[Andrea Piovanelli]

Looking back at the results, I raced with a Keith Holt... I've confused you, sorry.

[Michael Holt]

No worries! I'll try to hop on this weekend for sure. Even when I am losing I am having a ridiculous amount of fun!

[Andrea Piovanelli]

That's the spirit, and it's the truth!
Last race I fought a lot with a really clean racer for the final P9 and it's been one of the funnies races in a while!

[Michael Holt]

I'm still working on the clean too. Not with avoiding wrecks, but staying on the track! Sometimes, I get too overzealous in the corners and forget that slower and cleaner is quicker. 

However, I've been practicing like a fiend with the BMW on the Nurburgring circuit for this weekend. Still about 5 seconds off the slowest time I am seeing in race results though with a 1:44... I dropped my time about 10 seconds in 10 laps as I was learning the car and hopefully I can find those extra seconds consistently before the weekend.

[Andrea Piovanelli]

Good lap times will come, eventually (I'm still waiting for them, honestly ). Focus on safety and consistency on a initially small selection of car/track combinations, because this is going to improve your driving in general and you will see that the learning curve of a different combo is going to be easier to climb in the very next future.

[Michael Holt]

I think that's a good point. I might just enroll in more races just to get safety and consistency down. Even if I am getting lapped twice by the field in the process!

[Ilmari Ylitalo]

Hi!
The BMW is a very good and safe car to practise on. Has ABS and traction control so it's quite hard to spin it around. Always good tip is to participate in a race after plenty of practice, drive safe, and after race you can run the replay of the race and jump inside the lead car and spy how the fast guys drive. In the case of this BMW, fast driving looks super undramatic and clean.  It's all about the proper racing line, being quite careful on the throttle on the corner exits (sliding is bad mmmkay) and braking early enough so your car is on balance in the corner. Learning to be fast in a slow car will teach you a lot, the fundamentals of the car handling and driving techniques are very similar even with the fastest of cars. In faster cars everything just happens a lot faster.
And what comes to your speed... IMHO if you have a lot of trouble staying on the track and lap time is +10s of the fast guys, you're better off with more solo practise. Being outrageously slow and getting lapped 2 times in a 20min race, you're causing unnecessary troubles and risk of collision to other drivers as lapping is always a bit risky, especially if the slow driver's driving is erratic, as it propably is. Also do practice racing with the AI, turns their aggression and speed up enough to represent real drivers better.

[Michael Holt]

What you suggested is actually what I spent yesterday doing. I actually brought my lap times down by nearly 10 seconds. The BMW is a great car and much easier to control overall compared to the GT 86, at least for me. Even before practicing I watched a couple of videos that I found incredibly helpful. One was an older real life video on racing from Skip Barber and another taught me about where to keep my eye when racing. With nothing but those two videos and some practice, I got my time on the Nurburgring circuit the site is currently running down to 1:40 on a consistent basis, which is still a second or two off the slowest times currently. I know exactly which corners give me problems though and I am working on them. Overall I am much better and rarely go off the track though and am hitting good racing lines on I'd say about 70% of the corners. If I can get it down around 1:35-1:38 before Saturday, I will try a couple of real races this weekend.

I'm gonna race against some AIs today too and I will try turning up their aggressiveness and speed as you suggested. Hopefully that will help.