Pretty straight forward question here, but looking for tips to assess and improve my driving during practice sessions. There seem to be many more services and software catered towards ACC and iRacing, which makes sense, but I’m curious what people are using in AMS2. I often load marginally faster “ghost” vehicles in the time trial mode, and then continue to select faster ones as I begin to match the pace of them. I’ve also read about some AI SIM coaching tools (current free on GitHub and Reddit). Any other tips?
I practice in practice sessions either online or with AI (sorry for the double practice use, well triple now). TimeTrial is a nice game mode, but it will only get you so far in term of actual race craft. Get some motec running and tweak from the basic setup until it feels fast enough to match other players in the lobby or the AI at 110, but more importantly : consistent. Works in most situation so far (only have about 350 hours of experience with AMS2, but thousands in general).
Yeah me too. The obvious thing to suggest here is that it's working, so don't fix what isn't broken. I haven't found a better way of improving. You have to be intelligent in the way you're chasing the ghosts the closer you get to the top - because unless you have a ghost that's a perfect optimal lap then they are making mistakes so you have to sometimes think "Well if I brake earlier here I'll actually be faster around this corner" rather than riding right up behind and pressing the brake the same time and turning at the same time...it's obvious but it's a question of knowing when to copy them and when to do something that's better. But, you said it's working so you must be doing something right. The problems I find it leaves - it's difficult to do a fast lap when there isn't someone in front of you - you know, switch the hud off, empty track. If your time is much slower then somehow you have to transfer what you know you can do when chasing an AI or ghost car to an empty track - but for me at the moment I don't care, chasing ghosts is low hanging fruit (and I get most of the speed I gain) The other problem is setups. I know you can take a setup but I generally tend to be significantly better on cars that don't have setup options or only have a few. In fact, I think the only thing I lack against other leaderboard times on these kind of cars is consistency, i.e I can be faster on every sector of the track than every other time on the leaderboard but nailing the lap where I do that is the tricky part. But where there's an array of setup options I have no idea - and TBH I don't really think anyone else has any idea. I've never seen anything in any sim on youtube for as long as I've been sim racing that gave me the impression anyone knows anything about setups. Like the tooltips - it's just meaningless blather or stating the obvious "Altering the spring rate alters the rate of the springs" - like yeah, we know that. It's like the guy from Kunos did some videos taking a car and a track and doing a setup - he did them in AC and then later in ACC - but his lap times are really slow and then after he changes setup they're average. So how did that help? You could probably do the average lap time with the original setup. The point being his videos were an illusion where his pretext is that he's changing the setup to make the car behave better and thus be faster and showed a lap time dropping but there was no real connection between the changes and the increased time - and he was showing lap times that you've already found yourself just driving - so not really the insight into setups you might be hoping to find out there. So what do we do when chasing ghosts stops working? I dunno yet because it hasn't Not to disparage the people developing these but if they were really good I would have suspected a much bigger hoohah over them. I think you'd probably be better just getting a telemetry tool, analysing your data and seeing if you can find a pattern between you being fast in a sector vs not - especially the laps where it's just a tenth or 2 difference rather than the obvious thing where you fluffed a corner. Finding some insight yourself is more likely than expecting anyone has coded a machine learning algorithm and fed it a few million laps of training data to create something that will do it for us. It's probably the same with setups. The obvious idea is for AI to tell you what to twiddle - but chatgpt is just going to waffle all the waffle that's written about it - and 90% of it is wrong or just useless. If you can get to the stage where you can spot the subtle differences in the cars behavior after changing a setup option then you'll probably start to find tenths over other ghosts tweaking the setup. Because most of the other ghosts are likely doing what we both know works - grabbing a setup from the board and chasing a ghost looking for their more egregious mistakes and overtaking them. The other common thing of course with setups is where people find some edge case in the engine and exploit that - it's like in AC the thing to do was maxing out negative camber. Well they probably find these just by whacking sliders fully left or right and seeing how it behaves. But as I say, telemetry / setups they are rabbit holes that I don't really see the point of wasting a lot of time on yet. Not while you can just load a ghost and beat it. I guess the only other thing sounds a bit zen, but it's really trying to get to the stage where you're just not just chasing blindly but focussed and relaxed and can get more consistent. Be as smooth as you can with every steering input, brake and throttle application and watch carefully how your car reacts - I can't pretend I'm there yet though. A lot of the time it's seat-of-the-pants chasing the ghost and I do 10 laps every lap is probably different. Ideally the faster you get the more you want to repeat what you did rather than just hoping lap 11 gains a tenth somewhere - because the last few tenths are much harder to find.
