I've had the idea of playing a sort of career mode in AMS, doing one championship at the time starting with Karts and moving through the series by ways of RNG. Yesterday I started this endeavor, and the first available Kart championship is the 125cc direct Karts. Those things are amazingly fun to throw around a track, but I find it very difficult to keep up with the AI drivers. I did some races in Karts before with the 9HP and 12HP rental karts in which I did reasonably well. Like all my races, I have the AI set to 100% and medium aggression, and while I can sort of keep up in series like the Stock Cars or the Lancer Cup Car where I tend to finish around 3rd-7th place - if I manage to not crash out that is - with Karts I come in dead last with several seconds gap between me and the next driver before me. So my questions is, are there experienced Karts drivers here, and if so, do you have a tip or two for me besides "practice more"? Maybe something setup related, or handling-wise? Turning down difficulty I would only want to do as some kind of last resort, I'd rather learn how to handle those things. Any help would be very much appreciated.
I am certainly not a kart expert so I'll leave this to other people (that will hopefully give good advices below) but just a thought: I'm using various difficulties for the different cars. For some I need to decrease, for others I need to go above 100%. I may be wrong but I'm not sure 100% correspond to real life really… Once I have found the right percentage for a serie, I can keep it for all tracks: I do better on some, have more difficulties on others, but it works fine. And above all: I find the ais pretty good with a difficulty that correspond to my skills and I fell like I'm progressing more that way. To each his own of course… That said, I like a lot your idea of a career!
I like the idea as such, calibrating the AI difficulty that I am in the mid field without much practice or setup changes, so that I can still get better, or worse But I'd still like to keep that as a last resort, because it does kind of feel a bit like cheating anyways.
I'd like to have other opinions: I was like you at first, then I realized I'm not a champion, and accepted to reduce the difficulty… Then I also notice that I crank it up for some cars so I must progress! Or at least I feel like I do better… Hope you'll get advices for karts too! I have not driven them a lot in AMS; I liked them a lot in SCE. Too many cars to choose, not enough time…
I'm the exact opposite of an expert so take anything I say with a grain of salt. This is my first sim. And I have zero real world experience. But the 125cc direct karts were the first thing I could make progress with so I've put a very many hours into them. I can win on the default 95% AI more often than not now and won a "championship". I don't know if I have much to offer besides the generic "keep practicing" because that's exactly what I did. Getting a feel for the brake was my biggest obstacle. On my G27 with everything default I don't think I ever press it more than half way to get the braking I need. I'm sure you've spun at least half the amount of times I have braking too hard! But finding that sweet spot where you can aggressively brake to the limit helped my lap times the most. Then anything else happened just from practices and watching the AI's lines. Helped me learn things like a lot of the tracks have forgiving curb areas on certain corners you shouldn't be afraid to use. Then I find you can get through more corners than you think without braking at all. I don't know the correct term, but just gliding through them. Easing (or even completely releasing) the acceleration going in and never hitting the brake then getting back on the accelerator after the apex. They aren't gonna flip in a corner and maintainable in a small slide/drift. Get aggressive in practice, nothing to lose but time resetting to garage. I will say they're definitely worth the effort too. I've already got my money's worth just flying around in those things! I love all the endless twists and turns that can be piled in the 50seconds of a lap. Now you got me interested in upping the AI. I'm just new and scared to change settings too much haha. Still got lots to learn in every discipline. Good luck. Hopefully someone with the real world knowledge you're looking for can chime in though.
I am not a great driver either, but I faced similar difficulties with karts in GT6 until I realized I was driving them like a car, when in fact the physics is totally different. A kart allows slides and sharp twists and turns. For instance, you don't necessarily have to take a turn the classic way: going wide, hitting the apex, leaving wide. Sometimes it's faster just to follow the inside line and twist it around. Also, you must be aggressive: side collisions are allowed and even expected in karting. Finally, karts are driven with both feet on the pedals - right on throttle & left on brake to avoid losing RPM. It's a very different technique (which I cannot master). Some of the best F1 pilots started they career in karting and managed to gain the upper hand in a turn by keeping the revs up with the right and braking with the left foot.
I'm no expert neither, but I can tell you what I've found useful: Keep the momentum as much as you can, these things accelerate quite poorly. Be as smooth as you can with your inputs or you'll scrub too much speed in the corners. Use trail braking a lot and release the brakes as if they were the clutch. Think of it as if the brake and the throttle were mounted in a seesaw. Keep the seat warm!
You will not like it but, I will be redundant, practice, days, even weeks, after that I´m sure you will understand, just like an abstract painting, it will come to you more and more (yes, it is abstract for me, hard to explain). What Alexandre Fonseca told is very true, it´s not a car or usual, It´s stiff, it´s blocked axle, and that alone make a huge difference, let alone the axle dimensions and tire PSI, usually 12psi or less, if I remember correctly around 90-100 HPascals. About that, setup, I recommend to use default and only change the tires pressure and final gear related to track and go drive, and drive, and drive more, slowly, dont try to be fast if you can´t manage to stay in bounds of track, even if you need hours slow driving. Again, the speed will come. The resume after that is, you will only keep on Karting if you reeeeally like Kart I believe. Good luck and have fun specially, if you will.
Thank you all so much for your tips and insights. Braking is indeed a hairy thing, and a lot of times at the end of the braking zone I was looking at the oncoming traffic The most difficult part for me I guess is what @alexandre fonseca and @W Calabresi wrote - it drives fundamentally different from a car, and therefore needs to be handled differently. I never really drove Karts a lot in sims, so naturally all I know is car handling. That's the main issue I think I'm having at the moment. And of course, as you all pointed out, it all comes down to practice in the end, like honestly I feel it should be in a sim And I'm sticking with it, because those Karts are just so much fun. At the moment I'm back with the better behaving 12HP Racing Karts and am doing laps around the different tracks to get a feel for the bends and really try to learn the flow of each one, one at a time.
I am no karting expert but it seems to me that to get a decent lap time you need to be able to brake just the right amount to get the Kart turning and just on the verge of locking up the rear without going too far and ending up facing backwards. Probably easier with a load cell brake but one of those things that is probably easier on a real Kart than in a sim. For added realism, they need to allow us to map a button so you can bounce up and down in the seat when you get bogged down coming out of a corner.
