haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere, so forgive me if this has already
been hashed out. In the \Papyrus\NASCAR Racing 4\papy_ai.ini
file look for the following section and statements:
[ driver ]
driver_consistency_to_dlong_lookahead_dev = 0.4
driver_consistency_to_dlat_lookahead_dev = 0.4
Changing the values to 2.0 appears to make the AI look further ahead for
trouble and slow down sooner rather than go full speed into a melee. I
tested it at a few tracks about a dozen times each purposefully creating a
mess and looking at the replays to see what the AI is doing. They do slow
down sooner than with the default values which enables them to avoid the
pileups, for the most part. A few stragglers still joined the party, but
overall I found it to be a good improvement.
I haven't tested it with values above 2.0 or different values for each
variable, so maybe someone can do that and let us know if it works better.
Of course, I have no idea how or if this will affect the AI in adverse ways,
so use at your own peril.
Bondzai