[Andrea Piovanelli]

In my very little experience, I usually am the slower driver in every situation.
I tend to fight a bit, I'm learning to be safer in those situations even when I don't just give the position with no effort. If the rival is much faster than me, I defend for a couple of turns, sticking to my racing line until I find a good spot to brake a little earlier (if I see him attacking, I learned the hard way not to do that when he's waiting in my slipstream...) or a faster turn where I can take a wider line without losing too much to my real rivals (the drivers which are in my reach for their pace).
I usually try (in Assetto Corsa Competizione) to signal in some ways my intentions to the other drivers with turn signals, in the hope they get my intention to move sideways and let them pass. I know from experience that this behaviour can be misunderstood, but it works more often than not.

[Michal Janak]

Just my two cents: Example from GT3 at Nürburgring: Me and leader did a Pitstop at roughly 30min mark. I tried to undercut with switching to softs. He pitted a lap later, he came out of pits close to me and we fighted for the win even if we were just P5 and P6 at that moment. (This battle is reasonable as we both had decent gap to P3 so could aford to loose some time)


Then I approached a car that did not pit driving in P1, it had meds on for about 45mins already. Me with fresh softs and trying to get away from batteling guy behind me was having a pace advantage of nealy 1.5 seconds a lap. He defended like it was going for the race win with driving defensive lines, blocking, and even edgy stuff like driving one off the track in mercedes arena. (This battle is totally unreasonable as he would fight for P5 after his mandatory pit stop, with defending he went around 1s a lap slower than nomal and I was 2.5s a lap slower including almost an incident and position lost against the guy behind.. All in all the guy lost 10-15 seconds in that fight resulting in 3 positions lost at the end of the race... he finished P8 or so)


So you can choose: fighting "nice" fights or be smart and race for top position.

just like i thing, this "nice" battle can usualy lost race to both sides, racer after puit can lost his win because drivers behind him catch him and nontactical defender loses too, and higher posibility for crash you must count too, for me when i know the situation, why hold someone clearly faster like fight for life, nothing to gain there

[Russell Sobie]

You gain experience at race craft. That's not nothing... especially for many that race here on SRS. As long as you aren't doing stupid things that are protestable while trying to defend, if there's a crash, it truly does not matter in the grand scheme of things. Even if you are in the run for a series championship (which 99.999% of us never are).

I'm not saying "be reckless because none of this matters"... I'm saying you should actually learn to safely race with others BECAUSE none of this matters. And since racing with others is kind of the whole point of racing with humans, I think if your mindset is to let people by to "be safe" you might as well just go play with bots. Or worse, do endless hotlaps by yourself.