[James Blint]

First up i want to say it's not an argument against fixed setup (on the contrary) but i ve often heard that fixed setup makes the grid more even, and i had yet seen that in my experience in fixed series so i wanted to find some tangible comparisons with past series on SRS. I compared the ten best lap times of a GT3 series a couple of months ago on the same track, Imola which was open GT3 class, open setup and regular rate vs the fixed setup, higher fuel/tyre rate of the Digiprost 488 series.

Here are the top laptimes of each series

Digiprost 488
01:43.329
01:43.33
01:43.336
01:43.967
01:44.093
01:44.239
01:44.404
01:44.478
01:44.796

GT3 Euro
01:43.423
01:43.659
01:43.664
01:43.677
01:43.887
01:43.89
01:43.894
01:44.158
01:44.475

First surprising thing is that, in the 488 we were actually a tiny bit faster in quali than in this past series where you could choose any GT3 you liked or see most fitted for that particular track, but this is still very comparable. I didn't expect that frankly, although Imola is a relatively small track, quite technical, the 488 has to be very good at it because of its massive torque but some other GT3 might be at least as fast (Huracan, 650s, Porsche GT3R,..) and some actually picked the 488 too back then. I don't think there was much difference in the strength of the field, in the GT3 series you had Marek Vons, Josh Martin, and other excellent drivers.

The modified rates don't have much influence at least in quali flying laps, even if you need a bit more fuel to make at least one outlap and one hotlap, as well as not getting the bonus extra grip you can have at 100 tyre rate in the very first kilometers of fresh tyres, the difference should be negligible but of course in actual race the laptimes cannot be compared at all, as we all started with like 100l of fuel, which is a huge weight deficit (at least +1s per lap just for it) and once you get a bit less loaded then tyre degration at 170 kicks in much quicker.

So it doesn't seem it makes much difference to have fixed or open setup, even in races it's still 2-3s difference between the front and the end of the pack, no surprise it still comes down to the driver but does it make the grid safer, maybe that's more important? I don't think so either from what i ve seen but probably only because of the locked tyre pressure.

This is what i was getting after 10 min or so, driving rather hard on Imola (fixed at 16 psi on all 4 tyres)



It's really bad, it's literally like running with slow punctures in the front which is gonna give you a quite lazy and vague steering and also weirdly more turnin once it grips than your rear would allow and be able to keep up, on other tracks it was even worse as we were getting both over pressure, and/or cooking temperatures. So to me fixed setup is absolutely great, it's just driving, eventhough i don't really think it levels the field but at least it's not hurting it i guess, it would just be even better and more importantly safer for everyone if we could at least change tyre pressure, it's like a 2min setting that you can even do in practice before the race, it would prevent a lot of wrecks in my opinion, while bias isn't locked, and you can do some mad things with it.

Any thoughts, experiences about this are welcomed.

[Alex Leif]

Yep I totally agree James, I have said it a few times elsewhere already that tyre pressure really should not be fixed. Having wrong PSI can make a car much harder to drive, surely that is not desirable?

[Jaroslav Černý]

Tyre pressures should never be fixed, they are not fixed even on quite fixed cars/championships where you can't touch your car and work on it in any way, always have to use original parts and only a certified shop can change them.
V10 tyres in AC are very sensitive to pressure. Plus AC doesn't support automatically venting tyres from excess pressure either, which can also be banned from use on some series/championships.

Most of the default setups are horrible, borderline undriveable and can cost you 2s on a 2min lap, say 2% penalty time wise from using a crappy default setup. The default setups are there so that you can drive and tune the car yourself, Kunos has said it before, they don't have the time and people to go and tune every car for every track, they just give it some default that often sucks and let you do the work of making the car decent.

Some cars the difference from default to custom is low, on other it's massive.

And if you can drive a car, fixing the setup doesn't help anything, the driver differences stay the same. And all you do with fixing setups is lower the skill/practice ceiling that already is fairly low.

Another problem with AC is that it uses psi not kpa and having 1 psi steps is too large for how damn sensitive the V10 tyres are to pressure And I think you can't set 0.5psi as AC will round the numbers when you load a setup... at least that's how it seemed to me from driving.

[Alex Leif]

Lol being from the UK I am used to PSI and have no idea what kPa translates to, but yeah it is strange you can’t change the readout at least like you can with kph / mph. All the rest I totally ageee

[James Blint]

I agree with your points, some default setups are really horrible and "dangerous", the one im now used to with the 488 was not that bad (laptimes talked) but it took away a lot of the fun with these fixed tyre pressures, on some tracks it wasn't feeling like a proper GT3, more like a hard riding old muscle cars or something like that, that was really weird. Judging by the amount of spins i ve seen in the whole series, i think it was most of the issue, it's also probably the most edgy GT3 to begin with and this wasn't needed at all to add that on top. I could not understand as well the point of having 200 fuel rate either in 20min, since there s no possible pit strategy (except the last 1h race), it just made the car heavy especially at race start for nothing, but 170 rate on tyre was actually very cool to me, it was really a bold move to go soft and try to make them last 20min x2 while being always loaded and some did well in medium too, so that something to dig i think for future series, only Brands Hatch it was physically impossible, and Barcelona was just madness but possible.

I believe you still get an advantage knowing at least the basics of setup even when it's fixed, since you can understand the issues and characteristics of the fixed setup has and try to work your way around, adapt your driving and so on. It might be an even bigger advantage this way than having open setup when people download random ones that can be also very bad like on the setup market.


Also always wanted to be able to set decimals of tyre pressures, im surprised nobody managed to find a workaround since with pro tyres you can see them, and yet we cannot do anything about it.

[Jaroslav Černý]

Set the setup file to say 20.5 PSI and then load it, enter track and check with proTyres, no difference, same PSI reported by proTyres as when using 20.0 PSI.
You can set the decimals, but AC ignores them when you load the setup.

AC does a crap ton of rounding even when loading cars, ruining what car creator has made but at least they sometimes report it in the log file so one can find out that it happened and what it was rounded to.

Considering there is PSI everywhere on tyres in AC configs I doubt they will ever add an option to to allow proper metric units and it wouldn't be nothing more than a displayed number conversion still with no fine adjustment. All the "imperial" units are defined based on metric units anyway, it's just a stupid conversion and rename.

[Bryan Happel]

if i had my way. i would have everything fixed except fuel and tire pressure.
sorry to anyone i have crashed. enjoy racing with you guy's.
driver quality is getting better and better in my opinion.
thanks SRS.

[Michal Janak]

better and better, every day i am crashed by someone else ;-)

[Bryan Happel]

that is also true michal. the worst is when someone jumps in to a weekly race with no points crashes us with a stupid move and then quits the race.
there are new rookies(idiots) being born everyday. that means an endless supply.
plus i do not consider my self exempt from stupid choice's . crashed a guy the last race i  did.
but i seems like most who stick with it get better.
                 good racing with you.

[Jaroslav Černý]

The problem also is nowadays many racing games are online only and as such people have nowhere to practice in an interesting fun way. There is singleplayer with AI in AC, LFS, etc. but it lacks any career, story, anything interesting so that people want to drive it and learn there first. LFS used to have a driving tutorial, AC doesn't have even that I believe only these useless challenges.
Games decades ago used to be mostly single player and people learned to drive better first with AI and enjoyed story driven gameplay, sure they didn't have as great physics simulation but some had features even AC etc. don't have anymore.

Now, new people buy a popular simulator and think they can drive if they even have a driver's license to begin with, jump right into online gameplay trying to learn there. Fail. They better keep with the arcades, Forza, NFS/pCars, ...

But for example AC tries to be something for everyone, not being a pure sim nor a pure arcade, trying to sell as much as possible to everyone, even on Consoles, while there isn't enough features to allow for a better separation of the player base to sim and arcade groups since it lacks league features etc. for sim use.

On SRS this skill issue could be resolved by having tiers, offering entry level easier/slower cars for novices and limiting more powerful faster ones to higher tiers. Such as they sometimes do with minimum rating requirement.