Formula-Retro drivability

Just prior to this members our our group ran the bt44 esp for over a week and all was better. this update killed the front grip at the time.

worsened.

We all know the length of time its taken to have improvements and then heck a regression like as above on occasion.

Change in this case maybe the overall changes that have improved a lot of cars but regressed the mentioned here
It sounds from what been said that usa is/maybe similar regression

We all here have done many miles in these things some more than other and also others that have posted on this and other threads for a year and more. Including some that gave up posting and the cars, as I almost did back when I made the posts above. v1.1.2.5.
I was talked out of giving up (thankfully and the c9 was a diversion) because the problem, loss of front grip due to update was rectified in next update. I cant comment on you gents current findings yet, but do hope we can all discuss as before and if there is an issue bring it to RS attention. last I tried before usa pack was much better overall than all before. so will try in near future given what you all mentioned. We all have opinions and findings, a consensus is almost unheard of, anywhere .. but more feedback from more people even if opposing will surely shed some light. Then devs can look deeper.

 

Im open to being wrong, that's why I shared, to see if I was crazy or not. I just didnt expect to get told that I just dont know how to drive these cars, when, clearly, I did last week. Like I said, many cars feel way better than before. I just think the low aero grip formula cars feel way worse.

In any case, it's possible the other F-Retro cars handle better than the Lotus? But the thing is I found the same pattern in the Lotus 79 and 49 too. Just impossible to get the tires up to temperature, and they were very sluggish aand reluctant to turn. But I didnt find that in the F-Classics or FV12 or FV10 tests I did. The Lotus 79 in particular was a very well-balanced car the last time I drove it a month ago.

 

I have only tried the Lotus 79 at one track (Interlagos) and one weather condition (heavy cloud), but I also found the default setup very odd compared to its behavior in previous weeks. The front end grip was substantially reduced, the tires seemed to stay too cool and to lose heat unless I scrubbed them very unrealistically (e.g., putting the car into a spin in order to heat the tires), and reasonable setup tweaks were not enough for me to bring the balance back into ballpark.

I assume Reiza will note these issues and make some class or car-specific tweaks in the next update. I seriously doubt the cars are currently behaving as intended. They have always had minor issues, but at the moment feel much less realistic than they did a month or two ago.

 

Nice example of driving-exploit (00:05 for example) since drifting through the hair-pin OFF-throttle and going late on the throttle, so after the apex when the car is almost straight is exactly the technique I NEVER saw in real racing outside Rally or drifting. I drive like the real driver, early entry and power oversteer out at the apex or before. This is slower, but authentic and when your style doesn't work anymore, it's just more realistic physics since those vintage drivers would've used your style as well if it was possible, but the front-end had probably not enough grip to slide the tail around off throttle.

 

Maybe add more steering lock then? But I can already turn them way past where they are able to grip. And to reiterate. I did 10 laps. Not 3-4. I also started a race where they were warm and they were back in the light blue range (mid 50s) within 3 laps. They did handle a little better on the first lap, though, so I think the temps have something to do with it. Im just not sure what else I can do to make them actually work. I cant get the front tires to grip enough to get any loads into the rear tires in corners.

 

I respect your opinion but it didnt really answer my question, and sorry to derail from Retro-F but I feel like it is related.
I still dont understand why Ginetta felt great with 0 viscous lock and when the option was removed, it sunddenly became bad again after the patch? Shouldnt it revert back to 0 lock if it was removed? And its the same with retro-F , you go fast and understeer, then once you get below 90-80kmh you suddenly oversteer. An honest question now - do you think this is how cars should drive? I have driven some race cars at a limit including a lower spec formula and none of them did this, ever, not even my sporty daily does this. I feel a similar behaviour in some other cars like GT1 and Group C.

It affects a large amount of content and to me it is kind of a big deal on how the cars feel that it makes me not play the game apart from helping with the custom file. Not that anyone should care of course, but its kind of a shame after how good AMS1 felt and its one of the reasons I havent bought any DLC yet, Reiza could have had another customer spending a 100 on Season pass

 

I am just driving the car the way that it has to be driven in the game. If you think that's unrealistic, the problem is in the tire model. It's trail braking. The car does not turn. If you were driving a real car you would do whatever you needed to do to make the car turn into a corner.

In any case, this is standard trail braking. Is it realistic for these cars? Probably not to this level, but it's the only way to get the car to rotate. The amount of understeer they have isnt realistic either. I've been in this thread since the Retros came out because I am concerned about hte level of understeer they have. When you fix that, they'll have much more natural corner entry characteristics. Frankly I think corner entry has always been a mess on the retros, with the corner exits being complete bliss.

Again, geared diffs helped tremendously.

@CrimsonEminence Geared diffs are always locked. Each axle is geared to the other. So saying they arent unlocking is completely accurate. They can only allow differentiation when differentiation forces on each side are present and opposite, but if one wheel moves "backwards" 180 degrees, the other must move forwards the same amount. They are always locked and geared together. You can adjust that with the bias ratios how eager they are to clamp off and on throttle, but each wheel is always geared to each side. I think there's something about the way they behave on corner entry that allows them to differentiate at the right time to allow turn in to feel more natural than the clutch diffs do. I dont know why, I just know they felt better and the car behaved much more reasonably. I think its just because one wheel moving backwards meant the other moved forward, so they actually promoted rotation in some cases. I think ideally the clutch diffs would work much better for these cars in the real world, but in the game the algorithms all combine in aggregate with the geared diffs feeling better, even if they shouldnt.

Agree 100 percent. I've got the season pass and zero regrets, and as usual, the stuff this game gets right is mind blowing. But the problem is what it gets right changes so dramatically from month to month. I know they've said this is the last of the major physics updates, but that's why Im so disappointed with why the F-Retros are suddenly so difficult to turn. It could be some weird combination of glitches and track settings and track that made for an extreme edge case for me, but I shouldnt be able to pick a random track and car with a default setup and it literally be undriveable and impossible to get the front tires warm. The fact that the front tires didnt get warm DESPITE all the understeer is kind of mind blowing. They should have been soaking up heat as they were sliding and overheated in no time.

Anyway, I'll give it another go tonight after trying some other things. I'll try in TT mode instead of a practice/race session, since at least that way the tires will start at temp. Maybe in that scenario it will be easier to do a proper A/B test of physics before and after, and maybe Interlagos just doesnt have enough high speed corners to warm the tires. But I still think that's a huge red flag.

I wont be buying any more DLC until it's fixed. And the whole thing has kind of soured me on the game, since I cut my teeth on Grand Prix Legends and love driving the older stuff.

 

I am not going to wade into the deep end of any of this, but I will say the following:

• There are often multiple changes implemented in the cars during updates, and it is sometimes surprising which element actually affects the cars feel and handling...it's not always the one we think it is, which may be the case if the Ginetta actually had an "unattached" viscous adjustment in the UI all along
• I have driven real race cars (probably more than most here) and many high-performance road cars, but wouldn't even pretend to understand all the nuances of the old F1 cars from the 70's with their very odd configuration (half drag strip racer; half "modern" open wheeler with some aero)
• I actually agree that these cars are not quite where they need to be...but am anticipating tweaks coming from Reiza now that the major physics "building blocks" are more stabilized
  • There are a few other series that are in even worse shape
  • But as noted above, more series than ever before have hit the "sweet spot," so I have faith that care and attention will come to all series sooner than later

 

Do whatever you like, but I don't know any real driver that drives like you with RWD-cars, because it's more a FWD-technique. The slowest point of a corner is always at the apex or before the apex with RWD, but never after the apex. If your style would work IRL, they would do it, but it is slower. That's why Jimmy Broadbent is slower as his Jem teammate that is doing it properly. He carries too much speed through a corner for the sacrifice of exit speed. I was watching the hole 24h Nürburgring last weekend with an onboard-stream and no professional driver does this, not even in qualifying.

 

Then I think due to the nature of how geared diffs work, when they do differentiate, they encourage rotation better than the current implementation of the clutch diffs. Is it more accurate? last spring I definitely thought it was far more accurate in terms of feel. Obviously none of us have messed with in a year or so, so Im just operating based on memory now. But I remember doing the Ostkurve at Hockenheim with a loose coast and tight power bias I could get the car to lift off oversteer just right in ostkurve, and then get right on the throttle as soon as it was pointed the right direction and feel the thing lock down again. If you did it right it was so smooth and effortless, just the tiniest of throttle blips car woudl turn effortlessly, back on the throttle and it would go where you were pointing. It just felt right.

 

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That would make a lot of sense, I know a lot of the "units" changed and are now hidden on the setup menu, so who knows if the ranges they're in are normal.

 

I haven't tried the Retro Gen 1 retros---those may still be fine---but I did try a variety of intuitive setup tweaks in the Lotus 79 and couldn't get it working in what I considered a realistic way. (And that's despite the fact that the car, to me, felt pretty well balanced at launch, although perhaps a bit *too* grippy.)

My best guess is that the devs implemented some car-specific "tweaks" for handling problems in an earlier build, but the same problems those tweaks were meant to address have now also been addressed by the physics changes at the global level. Until the car-specific or class-specific tweaks are adjusted or rolled back, we currently have two solutions to the same problem. The two changes at once might contradict each other or at least put us into a very weird region of the setup/physics parameter space.

For example---and this is only meant as a hypothetical example; I am not arguing that this is what actually happened---some of the retros used to continually overheat the tires. Maybe the devs were trying to fix that problem so we could do longer races, and the quick, band-aid solution they implemented was to shift the car's acceptable tire temperature window to an unrealistically high range (that way, even though people were overheating the tires compared to real life, the car would still behave reasonably well even if all of the temperature values were high). With the new physics changes, maybe the tires are behaving more naturally and aren't overheating. Ironically, though, until the temperature range window is reduced back to normal, we will now struggle to heat them up enough to get them working correctly. (Again, this is all a hypothetical example, but I suspect some type of issue like this is happening. We either need another car-specific tweak to fix some of the global changes, or we need to roll back a tweak that was implemented in a previous build that is no longer working correctly given the larger changes that have been implemented.)

As I said before, the current build is a huge step forward for a lot of cars. I think the V12s in particular drive very well at the moment. On the other hand, the changes are causing some unfortunate problems in other classes---at least the Lotus 79, and probably the vintages as well. Hopefully the devs will go through each of the classes in the coming weeks and figure out what needs to be patched, adjusted, or rolled back. At the moment I don't find the Lotus very enjoyable, but it used to be one of my favorites in the game.

 

Formula Retro both classes Got a little better with 1.2
Formula Vintage still has little feeling from the front wheels in the FFB