rec.autos.simulators

I was looking at the new team redline website and greger had won a
valencia challenge in gtr2,setting a pole quali lap of 1.25.9xx and a
fastest race lap of 1.27.xxx

my best time trial lap at valencia is in the 1.29.3xx range and the
valencia ghost that came with the game, which is ***y fast, is in the
1.27.7xx range which is why I find it mind blowing that these guys can
beat that with a race setup. unreal.

so anyone know how they do it? I need to start watching more replays.

Do you think Johnny Herbert was content to be 1-2 secs of Michael
Schumacher's pace just like we are 2 secs off alien pace?

I have analysed replays of "alien" racers and found they are just faster
everywhere, I had hoped to find I lost .5 sec in a particular corner but
no, they were 5-10 mph faster all around the circuit.

Whilst practice makes a huge difference to get down to a decent time the
  aliens have a genuine talent just as top class sportsmen in any field.
We shouldn't take that away from them, it can't simply be copied.

 From my own experience with GPL I plugged away for years in F1 and
found over 1 sec at most tracks returning to F1 after a season in F2. I
think part of the learning process is unlearning your braking and
acceleration points.

Just as Roger Federer is at the top of his sport, so are the best sim
racers.

Cheers
Tony

I did a 1:27.6xx in the Lambo doing the time trial. It just takes some
practice and a little bit of setup work. What I would like to know is how
are the record holders getting in the 47's?

2.  They are better than you at using all the capacity of the tires.
In particular they blend acceleration/deceleration and cornering well,
*** the car at the edge of the traction circle at all times.  This
is the most difficult thing to do, requiring knowledge, hand-eye
coordination and great motor skills.  Some of it is study, some is
talent, some is physical attributes.

3.  They setup the car better than you do.  But this is less important
than the above.  And their setups are based on their driving style,
they may not be the fastest for you.

In some cases, they have become experts at left foot braking and taking
advantage of "weaknesses" in the game, like Grand Prix Legends. The
differential can be setup very loose on the coast side, but by moderating
the throttle while heaving braking, they can vary the looseness of the
differential, giving better oversteer control during corner entry. Not
that these guys wouldn't be fast anyway, but the left foot braking
decreased lap times by another 1% to 1.5%. For Grand Prix Legends, keeping
the cars oversteered in the turns increased the maximum cornering speeds.

Still these same players do well with the ISI based games, where a near
10 degree working slip angle doesn't exist as it did with GPL.

They were faster than the rest of us when they were still running 85/30
diffs.  The later settings were just a way to squeeze out more speed in mid
to high speed corners, admittedly at the cost of making the cars extremely
unforgiving.  Some just have good enough car control that they can get by
with it.  Which is why they're still quicker in ISI sims, and all the others
too.  Give Huttu for instance, any sim, with a crappy setup and a POS
Thrustmaster wheel with sketchy pots and he'd still be faster than 99% of
us.

Like Tony noted, some guys are just naturally quicker.  Tough on the ego
perhaps for the semi-fast among us who base their self-assessment on pickup
races, but there you have it. Telemetry will tell where the differences are,
but the fact that the motec telemetry files are separate from the replays
ISI-based sims makes it harder to get good comparisons than it once was.
Used to be you could just DL a bunch of replay laps from a range of guys and
toss them into GPLRA or NR2003RA to get a clear view of exactly where the
differences were, but there isn't a similar prevalence of motec data out
there.  The Redline guys tend to include it, but dont seem to have any GTR2
files up yet.  No doubt sure that'll change.

But of course knowing where they're quicker will not make any difference -
we might learn enough to close the gap a bit, but they will still leave us
earthlings in the dust... ;-)

I was looking at the records he set just the other day and was thinking the
same thing! Is he some overweight computer nerd with coke-bottle glasses or
what? This guy should be racing real cars with his talent!

Unfortunately, I heard he's a dead ringer for the young Sean Connery.

4 hours a day. that's intense.