[Luca Corso]

I just had a race in Spa with the Radical SR3, first guy was literally flying and so I studied his onboard. Basically he (and the other ones who are usually fast in split 1) never shifts gear. Apart from the race start they only use 6th gear, and then they shift to 5th gear for the Bus-Stop chicane and for the first corner.
I then tried this myself and suddenly went 1.5 sec faster than my previous best. 
It’s been like this all races, not only Spa.
I’m sure this is not intentional, and that that’s a problem related to the car. This “trick” is not supposed to make you faster, there’s no skill involved in this at all.
I just want to say to SRS admins that it’s not fun to race like this, at least for those (like me) who found out about this glitch just 3 days before the championship is over. This was also a fixed setup championship and nobody should have had a “technical” advantage to other drivers. I hope i never see Radical SR3 ever again in a championship unless it gets fixed, and it’s sad because i the car is really fun to drive while racing the correct way!

[Nico Mollica]

The car is not broken. If you look at the graph of torque and power, with respect to the rpm, you will see that after 5000 rpm it starts to lose power and torque, so lowering from 6th gear makes you waste time.

[Filip Stoyanovich]

It's just wrong data in the file which produces that weird behavior in the mod. 5000 RPM is nothing for these engines, as they don't get down to 5000 even in slow corners. Maybe behind pace cars. Those engines go to 10.000 RPM and peak power is just bellow that.
Too bad. The car handles kind of nice in AC.

[Charles Wayland]

The mod might not be accurate to the real car but I just want to know why you think downshifting and upshifting 2-3 more times a corner takes skill in a sequential gearbox? I found out about short-shifting I think the second week. I gained maybe half a second. To me, it's actually more difficult cause I have to pay attention to my rpm instead of just hitting the shift paddle when it flashes. I am slow in the SR3 since I can't drive anything with a wing, but I would bet anything I would go slower only shifting to 5th for the last and first corners. Curious what your PR is.

Edit- Well I was wrong so you can have whatever you want. I gained a second doing what you said. But that being said the post below me is spot on. Yes, the car would be a lot more fun to drive letting is scream to 10k RPM like it should, but I don't think it takes any more skill shifting, or that it affected the outcome of the championship, or that because its a fixed series that knowing about this trick gave you an unfair advantage. To me, fixed setups are less about a level playing field and more about being able to just plug in and play. For me personally, I never raced against anyone that did this. Most of them were short-shifting like I was but none of them were ever leaving it in gear. I do hope SRS doesn't do this series again until its fixed but to me it wasn't something that seemed to affect many people in any real harmful way.

[Filip Stoyanovich]

Another 2 cents from me. This is a sim and we're using it as a game to compete online. Similarly as race teams and drivers use cars and their knowledge to compete. It's kind of a game for them too, with awards, money etc.
In sim/gaming, whatever is more fun as opposed to realism, and sometimes things having to be balanced out, I get that. The question is, if this is an exploit or not.

This Radical SR3 2019 mod is trying to simulate its Gen. 4 Suzuki 1340 CC, 198 BHP engine. The handling itself makes it really fun to drive for me and, of course, I and many of us here don't know how accurate it is. But the numbers in the power.lut are wrong and this shortshifting is the result. Additionally, maybe drag and aero should be tweaked too. There's plenty of crappy mods out there. But I think it's purely a mistake from this mod's maker, and these sometimes happen. You can't help it.

There are some onboard videos of Radical SR3 with telemetry shown, so one should take a look what's normal for these cars. Pretty normal for most of the cars. In connection to that, you expect the mod to drive like that sort of, and it takes a while to discover what will bring down your lap time for a second, two or more. No car drives in 6th gear around the whole track. Even Indycars on ovals for the last 15-20 years with sequential and then semiautomatic are downshifting to be at optimal RPM all the time.

Here's the link to the Radical's website with engine specifics (1340 CC version that's in this mod). You can compare that to the car's info in AC and see the difference. This same input is in the above mentioned car's power.lut file that defines car's engine behavior.

Shortshifting or using lower RPM rather than peak RPM is a thing with some cars, for example some turbo cars like Kunos' GT3 Ferrari 488. It has over 8000 RPM yet the peak power is under 7000. The waste gate opens there thus losing turbo and power. So with that particular car there's no point going that much over when shifting up when accelerating down a straight.

[Michal Ringes]

Well going in 6 the whole track is surelly slower than downshifting, but also shifting lower than 4 is also slower. Another thing is when you dont downshift the car doesnt want to brake as fast as when you downshift and has more understeer on entry. From what i have seen i think that most of the slower drivers are slower because they brake too late, too much and the car is unstable mid corner, also they do horrible lines trough the corner because of that and are slow on exits. The only real problem with this car is the nonexisting optimization and resulting tragic performance, having 30 fps in VR in some spots of the track with full grid is borderline undrivable (i do have quite strong pc, 180 fps average on benchmark, and never have seen such bad perf with any other car).

[Shaun Clarke]

Hi All,

Henrique pointed me to this post, as I didn't know anything about this.

It seems to be a bug that has surfaced (I mean what racing driver test drives in 6th gear)

It seems to be cars that have high revs and a short final gear ratio, as I have tested other cars that have the same engine RPM and FR as my Radicals, and I can do the same in all of them.

I am looking at my Radicals, to see if there is anything I can do to minimize this, but it doesn't seem to be something I can radicate.

Regards

Shaun

[Shaun Clarke]

Hi All. Like I said above, I cannot "totally" irradicate this problem. What I have done it made it slower (not in top speed) but to get there.

I will release the updated version soon, as there is also a RHD/LHD verison as well as new front and rear.

Shaun

[Filip Stoyanovich]

Hey man thanks Henrique and you for responding, but great good job on the mod anyway.

[Shaun Clarke]

Hey man thanks Henrique and you for responding, but great good job on the mod anyway.

No problem.  Like I said, first I heard about it, and I have replied to your PM.

Regards

Shaun