eloPingu wrote:How are you supposed to drive this car?
When do brakes lock? Only after x amount of time braking or does -speed and or -turning also affect brake locking?
When do you loose grip? The amount of time you lock does it also affect how much grip you loose, or is one small puff all grip lost immediatly.
Braking and steering? On old F1 car this was the way to go. Only braking in straight line recommended?
How to freaking approach da corners
The wheels lock up after a certain period of sustained braking. It's not affected by steering — it might have been cool if it was, but the game's handling system doesn't provide that feature. Losing grip is instantaneous the moment you lock up, and it doesn't stack if you keep braking. Another thing to note is that the car brakes harder at higher speeds, because of the downforce effect.
What this means is that it's perfectly fine to brake and turn at the same time, but in slower corners you have to start braking before you can even think about steering. The preferred way is to have a phase of sustained braking until just before the wheels lock up, followed by braking in short bursts if you need to slow down even further, meanwhile turning into the corner when you need to. Ideally you would want to keep the brakes near the limit of locking up all the way up to the point where you can start accelerating, but that's insanely difficult to do because you get no feedback in any way until it's too late. Even the fastest guys will usually have some form of unwanted coasting into a corner, because the alternative of accidentally locking up hurts a whole lot more.
One very important thing to keep in mind: it's far, far better to brake too early than it is to brake too late!
If you overrun the apex due to locking up and/or braking too late, you cover more distance and sacrifice a load of corner exit speed, so this is something you want to avoid at any cost. Instead, if you brake a bit early, you can simply adjust by coasting for a bit, greatly reducing the risk of locking up and making it relatively easy to clip the apex on the inside. If you then manage to nail your acceleration point without having to make any throttle corrections coming out of the corner, it's still a perfectly solid line even if you lose a bit of time by braking early.
T pretty much explained you everything about the braking. There is also one additional parameter the car got by last version - it's downforce. At higher speeds your car is getting the additional grip "from air resistance". This means that in most fast corners you should actually test if this effect can help you to go trough without a braking. The typical turn of this sort is semi-last corner in current (Avantura) track.
and Mike couldn't really keep up with me, I decided it could be interesting to go for 3 stops and come from behind like I did in the test race. Except this time, I felt like I was always completely in control. Still, well done to Mike for defending the lead with everything he had with 7-8 laps to go, but between my fresh tyres, his eco driving, and the drafting effect that makes overtaking relatively easy especially with the faster car, it was always going to be problematic for him to keep me behind.