Tire wear realism?

Hey guys.

So I just did an 11 lap race on the 24h Nordschleife layout. I was going to change tires at lap 6 but decided to only put more fuel (so I could see what the tires' limit was).

As it turns out, there seems to be virtually no change in lap time or grip. 11 laps on that layout is about 90 minutes. That level of grip after so many laps doesn't seem possible on soft tires considering they didn't slow down after 11 laps (I could literally go the same speed on all corners on all laps). In fact, my lap times decreased lap after lap.

You can see bellow my lap progression:

Lap 4 = slight traffic slowdown
Lap 5 = no traffic
Lap 6 = Pit entry
Lap 7 = Pit exit + normal lap
Lap 8 to lap 11 = no traffic, but I had 80L of fuel

(The ~1sec difference difference between the fastest and the clean laps is due to driving mistakes caused by driving at 3 AM lol)


Here you can have an idea of my driving skills and style:

Not only is it weird that I can only select soft tires (seems unrealistic, specially on 50ºC tracks), it's super weird that soft tires lasted 11 laps on the Nordschleife without any lap time increase or grip change. Heck, my fastest lap was the next lap after exiting the pits with 80 L of fuel! xD

The only difference in handling was by the last two laps: on some occasions, I'd get some spikes (force wise) to either the left or the right, as if I had hit a curb or a rock. Still, lap times were unchanged.

What do you guys think?

 

the only thing i could see that would counter act the loss of tire grip is the fact that the track isnt rubbered in at the start, thus providing lower grip compared to later in the race.

but later when ur tires have fallen off, the track is more rubbered in, so even tho the tires themselves have less grip, the track provides more, and therefore resulting in better or same performance.

if i drive around in a solo session with 5x tirewear, the fall off is quite noticeable for me, but i dont drive gt3's so maybe thats different for them

i guess the only way to find out is to change tires when refueling and see if u can decrease ur laptime even harder compared to ur example above

 

You didn’t post anything about tire temperature which is a important factor in loss of grip. As example, if I drive the C8R with soft slicks on the Nordschleife, I loose grip after the Karussell because the tires reach temperatures above 100 degree. With medium slicks the temperature goes hardly never above 90 degree and I also don’t loose grip.

 

Without really knowing anything, this doesn't look right to me. I know things can sometimes be unintuitive, but still, this seems too extreme.

I remember Aris once talking about tire degradation and laptimes in ACC and real life GT3s. He said that the tires fall off after a couple of laps, but then the drivers can keep more or less constant laptimes because the tire falloff is cancelled out by lighter fuel weight and the track becoming grippier.

That being said, unless you were starting with a very slippery track that consistently rubbered in over the course of all 11 laps, I can't see this being intended, let alone doing 11 Nordschleife laps on soft slicks without them being completely shot at the end. here should have been slower laptimes after refuelling if we go by what Aris said about real life lap times.

 

Does anyone who's involved in AMS development ever reply to topics like this? This looks like a serious issue that could use some clarification.

 

Do you know if the track is rubbered in on the "Test Day" thing?

They actually cooled down quite a lot since I set the time to go 30x faster, so it went from day to night like 2 or 3 times.
But even in hot days, my tires rarely go beyond 90C.

Exactly, but what happened to me was my fastest lap time right after refueling. I refueled about 85L on lap 6, spent about 12 on the next lap, and then I set my fastest lap, and then set my fastest lap with about 70L. Surely the track should've been rubbered in after 8 laps with 30 cars on the track?

Thanks for the info.

About the tires: what would be the perfect way to test their falloff? I'm not familiar with AMS2 yet (though I'm loving it!) and I'm not sure if there's a way to set the track rubbering in as "full" or "high", then set fuel consumption to 0x and no weather change. This way, the only dynamic factor are the tires.

 

I assume because of the time acceleration you don’t see the temperature spikes between Wippermann and Schwalbenschwanz. I drive the Nordschleife always in real time and special in that section the tire temperature will spike to over 100 degree with, as example, the BMW M6. The loss of grip can be felt extremely well. With the GTE cars switching to medium tires solves that issue but unfortunately that isn’t an option for GT3.

 

Are you saying time acceleration influences how fast tyre temps change on the player's car? That sounds incredibly wrong. Can anyone confirm?

 

if you set time acceleration x30 (or any other number) it also should accelerate the time in which temperatures changing. Track temperature, air temperature or tire temperature. I mean, it wouldn’t make sense to accelerate time just for the weather and nothing else.

 

Yes but the player's car is not moving at x30 speed! This would make some cars utterly undriveable.

 

Isn’t track temperature one of the factors that defines tire temperature? If I accelerate track temperature changes, would that not also accelerate tire temperature changes?

 

Well, the main effect of the track temperature is to cool down the contact patch through heat conduction. If the tyres heating the track surface is modelled and multiplied by time acceleration, it would mean the cars can be overdriven way harder than in real time because any overheating would be immediately cooled down by the 30x track temperature. Which doesn't sound right to me.

 

Air temperature is heating (or cooling) track temperature which then is heating (or cooling) tire temperature. If you accelerate the first two, you also accelerate the third temperature in one way or another.

 

Depends on the setting you started with, but if you start the track in a green or light rubber state than I don't think 8 laps would be enough, even with 30 cars - from my exerience at least, but that could have changed between patches. You can usually tell the state of track grip best by looking at how many marbles are visible on the ouside of corners.

 

I tried the Sprint Race at Silverstone with the default date, clear weather and a 46 C track temperature. Five laps at 1x time acceleration and 30x time acceleration. In both cases, the tyre temperatures were almost identical. So the tyre temperatures do not appear to depend on time acceleration.

 

.....which shows that AMS 2 is defying plausible real world physics

 

Hey guys! Sorry for the delay, I've been super busy at work and couldn't test it yet.
I'll do some testing this weekend.

 

Isn't time acceleration limited to the environment? I can't imagine it has any bearing on the car's modelling, it's surely just to allow day/night transitions without having to drive for many hours. If it applied to everything, then if I did a 2 minute lap at 1x time, then at 10x time acceleration my lap would be 20 minutes (because the clock would race ahead), and if it did this it would be considered a bug.