Driving vs Tuning

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chaosdd

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chaosdd
Hi All,

I wanted to share a thought about the game:

I see that a lot of people give much credit and attention to fine tuning their cars in order to beat a race, lap faster, etc.
We'll, I'm not a great tuner myself and usually, tune the car on 1-2 tries to adapt it to the track in terms of general set up. I don't invest hell of a lot of time for fine tuning my car in order to extract every last bit of performance and make it easier to drive, beacause:

...what makes much more difference for me than fine tuning the car to perfection is working on my own driving.

A certaing time invested in perfecting my racing line, braking points, consistency, etc., gives me much better results, than the same time invested in tuning. This is of course, if the set up of the car is at least decent and not terribly wrong.

Don't get me wrong, I also thinker with the set ups and tuning to increase performance and have decent understanding of the process. I just find out, that usually, there's much more potential for improvement in my own driving.

Surely, after 10 or 50 laps, the potential for improving my driving will diminish and tuning will become of greater importance, but still.

How's with you, guys?
 
I believe learning to tune the car is extremely rewarding compare to just racing over and over. I raced the Nascar bonus race many times and was really way off with lap times of 6:48+ Then I tried tunning the car and my fastest lap was 6:26.867 almost 23 seconds faster. I can do this race with ease once I learned how to tune the car. I can race any car and put pretty good times but tunning is the way to go.
 
Well, a lot of people go for very hard set ups (generally), which is a total mistake on the Ring. Keep it soft and pliant for that track. Knowing that, I tuned the car and had maybe 90% of the optimal set up from the second try. Then I was able to finish 1st on my second attempt.

So, my point is that if you have 80-90% of the optimal set up (achieved fairly easy), you'll need much more time to nail the remaining 10-20%. This time pays better off in working on your driving (at least to a certain point).
 
chaosdd
Well, a lot of people go for very hard set ups (generally), which is a total mistake on the Ring. Keep it soft and pliant for that track. Knowing that, I tuned the car and had maybe 90% of the optimal set up from the second try. Then I was able to finish 1st on my second attempt.

So, my point is that if you have 80-90% of the optimal set up (achieved fairly easy), you'll need much more time to nail the remaining 10-20%. This time pays better off in working on your driving (at least to a certain point).
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And this is a problem. If we could save setups, we could have a setup for every single course.

On topic:
I believe the best thing is to work on driving a bit, then mess around with tuning, then work on driving, and then work on tuning. I do this and it has started to pay off. I don't normally do it this way in GT5 because I just wanna drive, but it seems that it was a good system for me to use in rFactor and iRacing, so I assume it could help here with GT5.
 
its simple: there is no "or"
if you dont know the track: you suck
if you dont have at least a good setup: you suck

so the anser is: if you want to be "best" rise your driving skill and find an exelent setup. (but im being fine with doing "good" ;D)
 
NOS Waster, I agree with everything.

Pity we cannot save set ups.

There should be balance between driving and tuning, I agree, I do it similarly.

Also, I cannot understand how people search for miricle tunes online to use as granted and expect miricles in their performance. Again, much more time can be gained from yourself usually, if you have at least half-decent set up, of course. Often, it's better to learn from other's driving lines than only from suspension geometry.

I was just saying that the quest for going faster involves at lest as much tuning your driving, as your car.
 
If I learned anything about tuning, it's that you shouldn't start tuning before you can handle your car perfectly, otherwise you end up trying to tune out things that you are doing wrong and not the car.
 
Ken Nitr0
If I learned anything about tuning, it's that you shouldn't start tuning before you can handle your car perfectly, otherwise you end up trying to tune out things that you are doing wrong and not the car.
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Well, this is a good rule of thumb. However, there are some things a car does that are actually caused by a good driving technique. If you try and trail brake in an MR or FR car here, it says "screw you" unless you tune the brake balance controller.

But I do mostly agree with that. It is best to be familiar with a car before trying to tune it to make it go faster.
 
Yeah I guess I should have fleshed that out a bit more.

An example would be not driving smooth and upsetting the car by to harsh inputs (on/off throttle, on/off brakes, steering, apexing correctly based on the corner properties. etc..), and then trying to "tune" that out.

If everything you do is not nice and progressive you upset the cars balance and that causes spins, understeer/oversteer, loss of grip. (Really wish we had a traction circle btw) You can mess with the suspension to try and tune that out, but the car will now be a mess.

Or starting to adjust the brake balance in your example, when you can't do threshold braking correctly yet. You can adjust the brake balance to correct your own error, but the car will probably brake less efficiently now and you end up being slower.

Back when I started in rFactor I'd spend ages learning everything about tuning, I knew what everything did, I started tuning and couldn't figure out why nothing really helped, it was me, I couldn't drive properly yet.

Just wanted to shoot that into the mix to maybe help someone else not make that mistake, work on your driving first, THEN start tuning.
 
Ken Nitr0
Yeah I guess I should have fleshed that out a bit more.

An example would be not driving smooth and upsetting the car by to harsh inputs (on/off throttle, on/off brakes, steering, apexing correctly based on the corner properties. etc..), and then trying to "tune" that out.

If everything you do is not nice and progressive you upset the cars balance and that causes spins, understeer/oversteer, loss of grip. (Really wish we had a traction circle btw) You can mess with the suspension to try and tune that out, but the car will now be a mess.

Or starting to adjust the brake balance in your example, when you can't do threshold braking correctly yet. You can adjust the brake balance to correct your own error, but the car will probably brake less efficiently now and you end up being slower.

Back when I started in rFactor I'd spend ages learning everything about tuning, I knew what everything did, I started tuning and couldn't figure out why nothing really helped, it was me, I couldn't drive properly yet.

Just wanted to shoot that into the mix to maybe help someone else not make that mistake, work on your driving first, THEN start tuning.
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No complaints there 👍
Good advice.
 
Probably we should have a mecanic part in GT5. People who can setup cars and prepare them and people who drive them. Just like the real thing.
I'm not into tuning either, but sometimes I need it to win a race. I'm not a great driver either, but I enjoy driving more then tuning. Just my 2 cents.
 
btw +1 on having tuning setups, maybe even be able to gift them or set them to share so other people can copy them down if they want if they don't want to get into the whole tuning thing.

Writing stuff down on paper and A/B'ing some setups gets old fast.
 
I believe the best thing is to work on driving a bit, then mess around with tuning, then work on driving, and then work on tuning. I do this and it has started to pay off. I don't normally do it this way in GT5 because I just wanna drive, but it seems that it was a good system for me to use in rFactor and iRacing, so I assume it could help here with GT5.
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That is exactly what I do now, I normally wont even start tuning until I know the track well enough to run pretty consistent laps. After that, I think that my driving continues to improve in small increments while my tuning both improves the car and helps compensate for my shortcomings.

I think that for the top drivers, the ones who are fast, madly consistent, smooth, etc. There probably is one "best" tune, and they are all close enough to each other that it works for most of them. For us mortals, that "best" tune probably varies a bit and it's up to us to find a good tune for the car and tweak it to suit our styles and smooth our our rough spots.
 
Ken Nitr0
Yeah I guess I should have fleshed that out a bit more.

An example would be not driving smooth and upsetting the car by to harsh inputs (on/off throttle, on/off brakes, steering, apexing correctly based on the corner properties. etc..), and then trying to "tune" that out.

If everything you do is not nice and progressive you upset the cars balance and that causes spins, understeer/oversteer, loss of grip. (Really wish we had a traction circle btw) You can mess with the suspension to try and tune that out, but the car will now be a mess.

Or starting to adjust the brake balance in your example, when you can't do threshold braking correctly yet. You can adjust the brake balance to correct your own error, but the car will probably brake less efficiently now and you end up being slower.

Back when I started in rFactor I'd spend ages learning everything about tuning, I knew what everything did, I started tuning and couldn't figure out why nothing really helped, it was me, I couldn't drive properly yet.

Just wanted to shoot that into the mix to maybe help someone else not make that mistake, work on your driving first, THEN start tuning.
Click to expand...

I think thats true up to a point, assuming if the car came correctly "setup" to start with. The example with the brake bias, in GT5 the cars came 5:5 which is not realistic to begin with as no one in their right mind would setup a stock vehicle like that. Or in case of the rFactor, many cars came with "default" setup that may or may not be developed.

Personally I just try to get it close. In GT there are little you can use to really fine-tune the setup as the data acq function is not exactly robust. There are a few things I usually change when having a car with full adjustability, depending on tires, ABS usage and speed.
 
I think a lot of people do not bother with tuning as they are only interested in the win, buying power seems easier. It does not help that you cannot save tunes, nor can you customise the tranny by individual gears.

However tuning is an art form in its own right - I can tune a little but no where near the level or ability of some GTPlanet users. Tuning can make a big difference, not just to your lap times, but to your enjoyment.

I recommend that at some point everyone tries a customised tune. Use a stock car, try it out, set it up with one of tunes in the GT Tuning section, and then try again - it is quite an experience, you will be amazed at the difference.

Once you add your skills to tuning abilities (or if you are like myself goto the GT Planet tuning section) you can have a lot of fun online against your friends.
 
When you guys say tuning, are you only talking about the customizable stuff like the suspension, LSD, etc? Because those truly are artforms. But if youre including stuff like slapping on turbos/exhaust/weight reduction, well of course that will make you faster but there isn't really any art to it.
 
I like to tune cars until some certain extent.

I prefer investing on suspension, tires, differential, etc.

Power is an almost no go for me. Its way more pleasurable to win AI by 2 seconds after 10 laps with a underpowered but balanced brick than buy power, make mistakes and still win.
 

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