Unfortunately you can't just take those same settings and expect the same result at the next round. Just did what I thought would be the next full race at Interlagos and this happened:
But then the McLaren's had to go and ruin everything by not pitting. 
Race was 33 laps and about 55 minutes long, so I guess I will add a few laps and see what happens.
The new Dunlops tire change was a good one. I think we all noted that the 1.65 tires had less grip than the 1.66 tires, but IMHO, the vehicle weight changed. In 1.65. you could tap a car and it would slide off track like everything was covered in ice. Now, you can slam a car pretty hard, and it feels like you hit something heavy.
I've found that you can run really high ARB rates. 8-10 used to give somewhat negative results in the street cars, now it's mostly positive.
The one thing that I have noted is that Reggie will dive into a corner to "defend" it. It most sucks at it. With 1.65 it was extreme and Reggie would launch itself into nowhere land. With 1.66, it just runs wide. Still, I find Reggie will not try to retake a position the way Sophy does.
I’m still seeing separate AI vs AI battles with Reggie. In my videos, Reggie was exchanging positions with me and not giving up at certain points. In the YM race, I was trying to send it to see how the programming handles it and it wasn’t working out for me. Patience worked better than old school GT1 & GT2 moving AI out the way.
Unfortunately you can't just take those same settings and expect the same result at the next round. Just did what I thought would be the next full race at Interlagos and this happened:
Sucked, but that happens in racing. Leave the door open too far and someone is bound to put their nose in there. I did sort of do the same thing to him the lap before (without contact) and I guess he wasn't too happy about it.
Also, I pit from 11th after the spin and essentially came out of the pits in 3rd place. I analyzed the replay afterwards because I wanted to make 100% certain that the AI cars were not slowing down during and after my pit stop, and they were NOT. What I discovered is that I come screaming on to pit road at over 200kph and the AI cars slow for the curves to around 130kph, then speed up to 150kph before the pit lane sequence takes over. So I will try to match that next time...
Since a good game needs to cater to humans of all skill levels, there needs to be a way to dynamically deliver AI skill. They CAN tune it up to beat all humans, as demonstrated initially*. Other games use a difficulty slider to let the player determine how they want things, whereas GT uses the rubberband convention.
There's a lot to break down here, so I will try to do it in chunks to give you the best answer.
I am assuming that you had the boost on. The boost is designed to keep the cars close to you. It's not racing you. It's keeping other cars close to you. Ergo, when you get a massive lead, it tries to correct that inconsistency in it's directive as quickly as possible. Why does it do this? Because you asked it to with the boost feature. That's why boost weak feels so good. It feels like racing because it keeps the other close.
But, remember, if you had the boost turned out, this "artificial" result is what you requested from the game.
So, what I do is create slightly faster cars rather than massively faster cars. I came to this by trying to avoid the rabbit and found that my races still avoided the boost (for the most part). It makes sense that the rabbit doesn't need to be ridiculously fast, just as fast you can be, kind of like racing some people online. I've mentioned a few times that 5-10pp tends to do it, but you might want 15pp
It's not really subpar as much as it's slowed down to be equal to the vast majority of players who are atrocious at the game. Even with the boost turned on, a decent player is still about 1 tire spec better than the AI. You could always turn off the boost, and then step down several specs on the tires for your car.
Yes, because:
So, Sophy needs the boost in order to be fast. Meaning, it's cheating, or it's slow. No other choices. It can't be fast without cheating.
But GT7 does have difficulty settings. Both in the main settings menu and in the custom race settings. That means there's no reason for Sophy to have only two states, slow or cheating. If you set it to professional with no boost, just let it be fast. To a reasonable extent, of course; it doesn't need to be like the initial GT Sport demonstration where it spent most of the time on the Nordschleife with two wheels on the grass.
It's tough to answer because what they gave us was slow or not slow.
Valid point, and I think we all want to have the option to turn it up to MAX. I would love to have the setting to make it as fast as the top A+ drivers. I want it to be like a Sport Mode race where, each race, I have no idea what I am going to face.
I agree 100%. What they SHOULD do is give Sophy the will to win and then assign a varying degree of competency, if you will, to simulate other drivers. Let us pick the range (from DR D to DR S) with the most difficult being a field of DR S Sophy's.
Ya, the PP Sophy was dumbed down far too much and they chose a terrible direction for the pack. PD's weakness is, and has always been, single player game design. It's a good game almost by accident.
Setting Boost to 'Weak' is the best thing you can do. But depending on your skill set, even doing that isn't enough to make them competitive. Then you end up having to put your own car at a disadvantage to make the racing closer, and that's a whole different rabbit hole...
You can also increase the competitiveness of Sophy by tuning the cars to be their best. For example, if you take a car and set the roll bars to 10 and compare the lap time to a car with roll bars set to one, there is almost 1 second difference in the car. There is often a lot of time available in the car if you try to squeeze the most out of it.
