Hi all i have a few hours in this game now and I enjoy it alot..(although still can't understand that if an AI goes in the gravel trap they drive on it like its tarmac... anyway thats a different chat) My question is Why is it that I set my car up in practice (including the amount of fuel i will use for the race, setting etc changing nothing from the practice set up) and I get my mojo working but as soon as the race starts the car 'feels' completely different. (i get the weather might play a part. I am using Direct drive steering wheel and pedals with FB so I can tell if the car handles differently which it does!
Weather, track temperature, and the amount of rubber on the track are all going to have an affect on how the cars handle. If you're running a Single Race, by default the track should be set to Default Progression in all three sessions - the way this works is that it builds from the rubber level of the previous session, so the start of Practice will feel very different to the end of the race in terms of grip level. Cold tyres and brakes also make a difference. Certainly in all the hundreds of races I've run Practice -> Qualy -> Race I haven't noticed any differences that can't be explained by these factors.
I’ve done plenty of offline races, and I agree with you, but it doesn't happen on every track or with every car. Actually, I notice it every five or six races: I’ll do practice and qualifying, and then come race time, the track feels completely different.
Conditions conditions conditions they make a massive difference, IRL drivers constantly talk about how the handling changes from session to session. Ams2 is propably the only sim that makes proper justice for this aspect of racing. Amount of rubber, dirt, temperature of track and air aswell as humidity, wind power and direction all play a part. Also time of day affects the track as the sun position and cloud cover determines how the track warms up so in morning different parts of track will be in direct sunlight than in afternoon. Lets say you have a long high speed corner, when it's blasted by the sun it's easy to overheat the tyre surface while when it would be covered by shadows it will be much more gentle and you can push more. One thing to note is that when you leave pits in practice tyres will generally have lower pressure and temperature than in race start so it takes a little different approach to get em in the window. That said there have been bugs along the years that sometimes would give the player some botched up tyres so I wouldn't rule out the occasional funky factor.
I think there is some issues with the rubber / track state presets, even with heavy rubber it feels more like green/light rubber even though visually it's rubbered. Also the tire wear is much higher until enough laps have been driven on the track first (which happens fast if you have a lot of cars doing laps, so even 10 minutes of qualifying before race considerably improves the track state come to race). This is no new issue, some veterans of the game have noticed and reported about this in the past. I did some testing on this not that long ago and there is a clear impact on tire wear compared to track that has been driven by cars on the track enough, it's almost like double when you first load and go to the track no matter what track state was used. It's also hard to notice grip difference between the rubber track state options, which is another reason why I suspect the presets don't work that well. (could be also some other thing, like track is always initialized dirty or something... nevertheless, there is much higher tire wear at first no matter track state and it's hard to find pace difference as well between the track states, at least on initial laps).
