Does the traction control have a problem?

As beta testers have been telling us for months, with patch 1.6 you lose the tail more quickly.

This happened to me a few times today too. (Gtr3 gen2 Mercedes, Barcelona)
First I looked for faults in my driving style, then in the setup (almost default) and finally, out of curiosity, I turned off the traction control completely.

And then I realized that I noticed these dangerous situations much earlier and better and was able to intercept the vehicle every time. I'm neither the best driver nor do I have particularly good knowledge of car mechanics. But I feel much better when I'm in Difficult situations arise when the TC is switched off. It's crazy somewhere that I drive safer without TC. Of course the vehicle wants to break away much faster without TC, but you can feel when the time comes and you can take action.

Can anyone confirm this or try it out?

I almost suspect that the TC is starting too aggressively or maybe even stalls for a fraction and starts again before I lose the rear.

(This is not a criticism of Ams2, I love this simulation)

 

But you are correct, the meta on LFM at the moment is TC off because its soo much faster

 

There seems to be a TC fault back from PC2 days apparently. Been watching a prominent Youtuber Race on LFM since 1.6 update and the Hypercars were somehow turning off TC before Race start. Happened quite a bit. Not a good look if it's that old a fault eh!

 

I think if you whack the TC to 10 then it behaves perhaps how you'd expect assists to behave if TC was an on/off toggle in menu for assists. You can plant your foot at the apex and there's practically zero drama.

You still have to slow the car enough of course. You can obviously go too fast, understeer off the track and steering inputs can unsettle and cause spins. But even Nelson Piquet jr would find crashing difficult on 10.

For this I used a GT3 car.

On zero. We all understand no assists. Your inputs, good or bad, go unfettered to the car and it does what you'd expect (or at least what I'm used to)

Values in between it's difficult for me to comprehend what the TC is doing and what it isn't. Perhaps that's why it feels strange? No doubt there's some technical thing about what it does in terms of how much wheel spin or degrees of slip angle it allows at each level 0-10 or whatever, but I don't have a good sense of how that relates to feel driving the car.

I don't think the game is flawed though because it's imitating real life - these cars have the assists.

I suggested to someone in a different post to try driving the cars without TC. Perhaps the reverse works too. Stick the TC on 10 and work down. Or stick it on 0 and work up. Do a few laps and feel the difference. 10 and 0 are kinda obvious I think.

Just now all I tested was 0, 10 and 6 so I didn't really get any sense of how much difference each notch made.

Once my brain thinks the car is getting unsettled it goes straight to 'zero assists' mode and I'm feathering the throttle and not pressing the brake pedal fully. Even if TC 5 or whatever meant I could be heavier I have no sense at all of what that means.

Similarly I move the car around with my feet using the brake to nudge the nose into the apex, getting the car to turn with throttle. Presumably part of the reason for TC having levels is to let you still do this to some degree or other but still have some protection from spinning from too heavy application? If that's the case, again, I really have no sense of how much TC 1 or 2 or 7 affects it.

In my small brain assists are either on or off and I prefer them off. Well, ABS is better on, but I'm forcing myself to drive without it.

Even if the car has ABS on occasionally I've found myself driving laps as though it weren't before I notice on the speedo.

The downside is, perhaps, when you switch back after hundreds of corners with 'just stomp the pedals' because now you have no (or less) subtlety in your inputs. Although it's perhaps no different from driving one of the slower cars and then switching to something that's a RWD beast which will spin with heavy throttle inputs in a straight line - you soon get used to it.

 

I also got caught out on a TC/ABS not working in a MP Race in the G58. Had TC/ABS in Prac, Qual, but upon entering Race they were not active. Totally blew my race, and killed all the fun. It appears to also be random, since I tired several times to replicate, but could not.

 

As soon as I find some more time I'll test it out further. The whole weekend was full of the construction sites of normal life.

I mainly drove with TC 4-5-6 and had a spin every 5 laps and felt I had no chance of feeling it on the steering wheel early on. Then, with the TC switched off, I drove smoothly through the 20 laps without any distress. 2 times in a row.

To be honest, it was even more fun to feel the car's purity. There is no real problem for me. Because I mainly drive for fun.

 

I have been playing the game quasi-non-stop for the past 2 weeks now, enjoying the new update. It clearly improved the game, but it also started to draw my attention to electronics behaviors. There is definitely something up here... While I am excited at the prospect of having IMSA and potential future extension of that, there is a dire need to look at how the electronics are working in the madness engine. This post highlights that very well.

I have been hovering between GT3s and LMDhs mainly for the past 2 weeks and I can only echo Xenix74's feedback. TC behaves in a very unpredictive manner and will often result in loss of control instead of the opposite, as described, without any notice, as if the car gets stuck into a TC loop and never gives control back. Only settings that seem to remove that component are TC0 and TC10. Anything in between is questionnable.

It might very well be a limit of the madness engine as it was not developped at a time where electronics were so advanced, but the lack of customisation level for the TC is noticeable. Almost all other sims are now providing fine tuning of the TC, while here we just have a single number to work with. It is also concerning that after over 2 years of development the tooltip is just wrong in-game :


I have really been enjoying 1.6 so far and AMS2 became my goto sim, which I could never play for more than 2 hours consecutively before that patch without getting annoyed by the previous tyre model. I slowly steer away from any modern content for the last couple days though, as it just feels bad and unpredictable. Older Formula cars, group C and group A feel way more authentic, which again is a shame with the IMSA partnership...

Will the electronics be looked at for future version of the game ?

Edit : I am no Lukewhitehead nor the best driver out there (and on gamepad, so for most it will only be a sacrilege that I even express myself on the topic), but I just went out to do a quick test and got top spot at Imola with the Chevy GT3 using max TC, something is up...

 

Unfortunately, I haven't found much time in the last few days/weeks to be able to test it properly. But this morning I had a few practice laps in the GT3 & GT1. To be honest, for me personally it is much easier to rescue cars without electronic TC from difficult situations than the GT3. I really don't know if I'm making fatal driving mistakes here. But it's strange that I feel safer without TC at high speeds. At low speeds the TC works without any problems, but at high speeds I feel this critical point far too late to be able to intervene.

 

I think there is a combination of issues coming together to create this situation. I started digging into setups, after spending about 250 hours with the game to get a hang of its "basics".

The whole suspension/aero platform is unstable for most GT3s. The only one that feel "ok" is the Corvette when you just crank it to the maximum stiffness. Level of stability you can't achieve on other GT3s by any means other than just raising the bumpstop to about 5 mm below their desired ride height, they just don't allow stiffness value to go that high otherwise. But doing so create a whole other series of issues, as I learned today that bumpstops are more akin to basic packers in AMS2 (i.e. they don't have any sort of progressive absorption, just a pure and abrupt stop in suspension travel, which is fine so long your track is flat).

So you end up, without force brute via those packers, with cars that have a very floaty/boaty rear end, perfect recipe for instability at high speed. I do have the exact same issue, losing the rear without any warning in 3rd to 4th gear. Lower is fine, higher is fine. No level of TC helps to compensate that, I know it will just happens at some point "randomly" (still trying to see with telemetry if there is any indication, but that's a huge task...).

Hypercars also have the same issue, BUT and it is a big but, you can ajdust the diff ramps to avoid such sudden loss of grip, which, of course you can't on GT3s, discs and pre-load can only get you so far.