[Andrea Piovanelli]

Today I was playing with setups, trying some "very effective pro setup" I found on a Youtube video, promising impressive lap times at Spa (2:16, my best laps are around 2:25 - yeah, quite slow).
As a total ignorant, and a bit lazy too, I expected to take my timing down a little (definitely not to 2:16, of course), but with my partial surprise the "pro setup" is a nightmare to drive. That's something I already noticed in the past, with a couple of setups kindly shared by the experienced drivers in this community, but I somehow fell again for it.
Ok, I try to explain a little more: it's not really been a "nightmare" to drive, but all that oversteer in the hand of the youtuber looked quite easy to manage and, in the end, in my hands that setup gave me less than a second advantage on my best times, losing a lot of safety / consistency because of how difficult was to keep the car steady, especially in fast turns (which are key in that track).
Anyway, I'm losing the subject of the thread like my Mercedes at Eau Rouge (and I'm writing it myself!), so I conclude with a beginner suggestion from beginners: don't trust too much a pre-built setup of a very experienced driver, because you're probably going to have a worse performance than the one you get from your safe, "stability first", setup.
I'm trying to work on that for now, and I humbly suggest you do the same, even if the effect of some of the options and how to apply them to a specific track is not completely clear to me, yet (bumps, rebounds, ... I'm looking at you, mostly).

Any consideration from the drivers who have raced for years?

[Donnchadh MacGarry]

so I conclude with a beginner suggestion from beginners: don't trust too much a pre-built setup of a very experienced driver, because you're probably going to have a worse performance than the one you get from your safe, "stability first", setup.
I'm trying to work on that for now, and I humbly suggest you do the same,

I pretty much agree with this bit, as a beginner you do not need to focus on setups at all and in fact downloading ones by someone who is setting records on RSR or whatever might be 

1. Undriveable for a beginner
   
2. Undriveable for a well experienced racer over the course of a race. They can only do 1 hotlap and that's after many attempts where they constantly restart the run (they never seem to show that part in the video, I wonder why).
   

Getting a setup that you are comfortable with is the most important thing. I wouldn't stress on it too much yet, judging by the time difference between and the "pro setup", I personally believe you have much more time to gain in your driving technique though improving your racing line and brake points. This is especially true when you are over 2-3 seconds slower then the fastest guys here on open setups. There are a few little things you can do to help though

• Tyres: Open the tyres app (default or ProTyres), and do 3-5 laps. Drive at a good pace, but if you are spinning then you need to restart again as you will have cooked the tyres and will get bad readings. Look at the hot tyre pressures and make adjustments to the pressures so that the hot tyre pressures will be in the ideal range. getting the tyres in the ideal pressure range helps with car stability immensely, you will really notice this if you haven't tried it before.
  
• Fuel: Do 5 laps (which you should have done for the tyre readings). you should now have a reading on the average fuel used per lap which is pretty reliable in my experience. If you want to do calculations manually, convert all time values into seconds to avoid confusion when doing the division and multiplication when determining the number of laps in a race and the fuel required. NEVER UNDERESTIMATE FUEL, always add a lap or two extra if you are not sure.
  
• Geraring: Find a final gear ratio that means you are close to the rev limiter in you last gear at the end of the longest straight (where the car should be at its fastest over the lap). Allow for a small bit of headroom, so you are still able to gain some more speed when slipstreaming someone on that straight so it makes the overtake even easier. If you hit the rev limiter long before the end, lenghten your gear ratio as this increases top speed but reduces acceleration. If you are getting nowhere near the rev limiter on the last gear, then you can shorten the gear ratio which will improve you acceleration but reduce the cars potential top speed (but in this case that doesn't matter).
  
• Brake pressures: If you are always locking up, perhaps reduce the brake pressures. If one end is always locking, you can adjust the brake bias away from that end to reduce the brake load at that end. Even now, I rarely adjust my brake settings and just adjust my own inputs instead, so I am actually still poor at knowing what to change with them.
  
•  Aero: This is only necessary for very aero dependent cars, generally open wheel cars. Tracks with long straights and low speed corners require low downforce aero packages, as they reduce drag and thus increase top speed. You will not notice the difference between a low downforce setup and a high downforce setup by too much on low speed corners, so its not a huge sacrifice there. Tracks with short straights and medium to high speed corners require high downforce packages, as they allow a driver to take more speed into these corners and losing top speed doesn't matter as much on shorter straights.With aero it is all about finding a balance, that is key. Start with a value for the front and rear wing that you think will suit the track, keep one value fixed and make changes to the other one when you want to make changes (I think usually the rear is fixed and the front is adjusted to find balance, but I could be wrong on this or it might be best for some cars to fix the front and adjust the rear for balance). Do a few laps and ask how is the car on medium to high speed corners. Too much understeer means there is not enough front downforce (or too much rear downforce), so increase the front wing (or reduce the rear wing). Too much oversteer means there is too much front downforce (or not enough rear downforce) so reduce the front wing (or increase the rear wing). It can be a good idea to create a low, medium and high downforce packages for a car and then select an appropriate one for the track you are running, but this would only be if you are using a particular car for many different tracks.
  

As I said before, I don't think you need to worry too much about setups. In my first 2-3 years of sim racing, I just focused on my driving techniques as I had far much time to gain by improving that. The only things I changed were tyres, fuel and gearing as mentioned above, I didn't even go at aero (although I only entered the fixed series when using cars that were very aero dependent). Last summer was about the first time I tried my hand at making some setup changes having spend a large amount of time doing some theory research. Even now I find it very hard to know what to do with some settings, dampers I find very hard to know what to adjust when doing some testing even though I think I have an idea on the theory. Making a good setup can only be done when you are able to drive very consistently very close to the limit, otherwise you will not know if the changes you made to the car made a difference to you lap or if it was actually the fact you happened to be driving a little bit better that time. Only when I started to be able to lap at a pace relatively near the fastest drivers and doing so very consistently lap after lap within a 1 second window for the 20 minutes session in practice (as long as the tyre wear wasn't too excessive of course), was when I started to think I was ready to move on from the list above and start looking at the other settings in the setup. Personally, I don't think there any of the default setups that are completely undriveable, certainly for the slower cars. Cars like the F1 cars or the Mazda 787b are a bit of an exception but often people tend to put up stable setups for those here in the forums. A good driver will pretty much always be able to drive any setup at decent to fast pace and more importantly do so very consistently. So until you get to that stage, then as a beginner I really don't think you need to worry about setups yet.

[Andrea Piovanelli]

As always, you're really helpful.
Yes, I'm focusing on driving and doing very little changes to setup (abs, tc and sometimes tyre pressure).
This thread had the purpose to share my negative experience and you nailed the intention by sharing yours.
Thanks again!

[Ilmari Ylitalo]

Donnchadh already explained these things, but here's my 5 cents:


Easiest things you could/should always adjust:
-tire pressures. Do a couple of hard laps, you wanna have your pressures "on the green" after that.
-Brake power: If you lock up a lot, consider reducing the power. It only means you need to press brake more to lock up.
-Brake balance: in brief, move the balance forwards until you stop sliding your rear on hard brakings too much. A little goes a long way here.
-Aero/wings: try to find a balance that you can take corners easy but too much is costly on the straight line speed. Generally you wanna adjust both front and rear, as more wing in the front needs more wing in the back for balance. If the ratio is not right, you get too much oversteer and slippy rear, or too much understeer.

-ABS is not usually very important, maximum (= value 1) is mostly fine. try reducing if you want the car to turn in better on braking.
-Traction control: Some cars manage corners a lot better if you allow a little bit of slipping. Value 1 usually means understeering car when on throttle. Experiment!

-Differential is worth experimenting with if you have trouble spinning the (RWD) car on corner exits.

[Tadej Župevc]

I agree with everything the Donny and Ilmari said, i'll just add a few more things.
I often tried setups from other very fast racers, and i found them hard to drive, or i simply didn't like it. The setup must be adjusted to your driving style, by that i mean how fast you turn in, how fast you want to accelerate out of the corner, and also what lines you take. However, you can learn a lot by looking at a "pro" setup to get a general idea on some parameters.
I suggest reading this to learn how different setups work:
https://www.racedepartment.com/threads/a...OS6uxBoxuM
Besides knowing what your car is doing (under/oversteering, or just being unstable), you must know when it is doing it, for example, if your car understeers into a corner, the causes are different than if your car understeers on corner exit. You must also know, if it's doing it in slow or fast corners - for example, if you're oversteering on corner exit, in slow corners, you must decrease power diff, but you must incerase it in fast corners.
Also, making a really good setup takes a lot of time, but it's possible to get a good base quickly. One more thing that might help you, when i was a noob, i really struggled with default differential settings. With 90% of car/track combos in AC, i like to do an "indy" setup, i set power diff really low, and set coast diff quite high, then reduce it until my car starts spinning on braking.

[Michal Ringes]

they can really do only 1 hotlap after many attempts ? well that is really quite big understimation of the skill and time involved. Also there is experienced drivers and Experienced drivers, even if you drive for few years, you will have very hard time keeping up with someone who has driven milions of km's chasing world records, especially in those cars they like a lot (also they can do more than 1 lap ).
The reason begginers have problems with those setups is mostly pretty simple, they are used to very understeery setups with too much aero because at first glance those are easier to drive and control, and when they get properly set car they just feel it oversteers too much and reacts too fast and are not able to handle it because they are used to something totally different (but in fact its the driver who is just driving the car wrong, getting way too agressive, givin too much gas, or turning way too abrupt and such). Also understeer really kills speed, car that is not turning is never going to be fast. That combined with some mistakes that begginers tend to do a lot(braking too late for example) will result in massive time difference (you gain 0.05s when beggining braking, you cant turn the car, you loose 0.5s midcorner because you have to slow down way too much, you are on super wrong line and you have to turn a lot more to get the car trough the corner, and on the next straight you loose another 0.5s because you are slow exiting the corner). Also there is nothing like perfect setup for a car, this will differ wildly depending on the way you drive (well there are some extremelly broken cars where some absurd setups will get you clear advantage, f310 for example)

[Tim Cullingworth]

-ABS is not usually very important, maximum (= value 1) is mostly fine. try reducing if you want the car to turn in better on braking.
-Traction control: Some cars manage corners a lot better if you allow a little bit of slipping. Value 1 usually means understeering car when on throttle. Experiment!

One thing to be aware of, is that AC uses 1 on ABS and TC to mean the most active setting and the higher numbers to mean closer to off.

As for using other peoples setups, I had a racer kindly send me his setup, only to find that it was almost un-drivable as it was so twitchy. It later turned out that he was using a game controller, and I was on a wheel.

[Donnchadh MacGarry]

they can really do only 1 hotlap after many attempts ? well that is really quite big understimation of the skill and time involved. Also there is experienced drivers and Experienced drivers, even if you drive for few years, you will have very hard time keeping up with someone who has driven milions of km's chasing world records, especially in those cars they like a lot (also they can do more than 1 lap ).

I think what I meant more was that the absolute record pace can only be done once, the fastest and best guys can still go incredibly close to that pace for many laps in a row. Also in some cases the setup might be designed to only last a very short period of time, like using max turbo on the 80's F1 cars. I haven't driven the Lotus 98t except for a few casual laps a while back, but I seem to remember seeing on the forums from a past series that using max turbo would cause the engine to break within a few laps. So a hotlap setting for turbo couldn't be used in the race setting even by the very best drivers for example. I could be wrong on that of course.