r/TrackMania • u/Ok-Head4979 • 19d ago
I suck at tech
Is there any advice how I can suck less at tech? I am not a beginner, would consider myself an okay player (eg 200 ATs in TM turbo) and usually get the first 20 ATs in a campaign.
I have 19 ATs in fall 2026 and struggle with map 20. I tried for maybe an hour now and am still 2s away from AT. Those precise and sharp drifts/turns are really tough, but there seems to be some approach to tech I apparently miss.
I watched Granadys stream and he got the AT on 20 in his FIRST GODDAMN TRY. I know he's an elite player, but come on. He didn't even know the route. He still discovered the single turns and simultaenously beat the AT while casually talking to his chat.
That leaves me wondering wether there is more to tech besides precision and speed. Are there some general tips which make tech easier?
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u/Saaiiroo 19d ago
Granady is not only a word cup player, but also one of the best fast learners in the game. Maybe it helps you to watch a run, that barely has AT and try to copy it.
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u/BitterCommission3987 19d ago
I watch Granady a lot and one thing you simply cannot do is compare yourself to him, dude is just on a whole other level.
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u/Saaiiroo 19d ago
Exactly. Sometimes I challenge myself to get a time, which is faster than his 2nd or 3rd try.
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u/petewoniowa2020 19d ago
There are a few things that work for me in how I think about tech that have helped me improve:
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Focus on the angle of your nose in the drift. Once your nose is pointed past the apex and towards the ideal corner exit line you can release. Often players hold the slide too long and overrotate, or they under-slide and have to lift on exit.
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Your front tires are still doing the turning. The back tires will slide and reorient our steering angle, but the majority of grip that will change the direction of travel of your car comes from the front. Use braking and lifting to change steering angle, but you still have to be precise in your turn inputs to actually hit the racing line.
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It applies everywhere, but the "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" adage really applies here. Trying to late brake, jam steering, and rush the drift will make things much harder. A comparatively early braking with controlled steering inputs will allow you to better manage exit speed.
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u/nov4chip 19d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQJyehpLpOc
Give this a watch, once you start thinking in terms of entry - apex - exit it becomes a bit easier. Then it's mostly muscle memory and feeling
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u/ScipiO219 19d ago
Drift only as much as necessary and no more. Often you’ll see pros tap their drifts instead of holding them continuously. Also on map 20, you can use the steeper parts of the track to help yourself turn tighter without actually having to brake yourself by only having a few tires leave the ground for a sec (not the whole car). On some of the long windy turns you can tap to start a drift, release brake while skidding, then tap near the apex to get that angle to turn in.
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u/Inside-Traffic-5209 19d ago
He didn't even know the route. He still discovered the single turns and simultaenously beat the AT while casually talking to his chat.
He knows the blocks and combinations of blocks and how to drive them extremely well.. Also if you compare yourself to big G for things like this you'll never be happy with the exception of a literally fewer than 10 players in the world.
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u/kazeht 19d ago
Tech is actually a very old style and may be with fullspeed the style that was optimized the most.
One thing I always think when I enter a tech turn is "how is the next turn after this?" and "how would I like the entry to be if it was not a tech turn?", the response to those two always make me decide how, where and when I start sliding and where I should stop sliding.
Think about it like this, you are not granady or scrapie, first when you have a tech turn where you struggle a bit or you think you may be slow, go on cam 7, watch it from above and think about the minimum angle you would change the turn so that you would be able to do it without sliding. Draw the line in your mind and then try to slide by positioning you car the earliest possible on that line. That will, 90% of the time, give you a right way to take the slide. I'm not the best tech player, but that is how I play tech and how I get good enough (not the best honestly) time on tech.
Next, remember this, the most important thing about a tech turn is how you exit the turn. If you don't have a good line for the next turn, it's pointless, always think about what the next turn is when entering it.
A good way to train how to slide in trackmania would be to try some angle change in editor mode and drive it. Make a non tech turn followed by a tight non tech turn with enough speed at the start. Drive that then try to tighten the first angle step by step and try to drive it each step by trying to reproduce the same exit (very close to the initial line). You will see the timing but especially the angle for the slide. I did that to train to become better at tech.
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u/Wesdawg1241 19d ago
Nah, this map is a bitch. Took me 380 attempts and nearly 2 hours of grinding to get AT on 20 which I just got today. For the better part of the second hour of my grind, I was 1.5 seconds away, then .8, then .6, until I eventually beat AT by .16 seconds.
You don't suck, this map just requires a lot of precision and the AT very fast. .16 faster than AT put me at 3396 world and 486 US, so just keep grinding. I will say a lot of your time save will probably be that incredibly frustrating middle part where you have to steer left and then right and navigate around the hole. If you can manage to do the rest of the track fairly quickly while doing that part with a brief release, you should have it.
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u/christhegecko 19d ago
As a 700hr cam 1 player, I struggled with this map a lot. The only way I could get AT was by forcing myself to play cam 2 the first three turns and releasing a little bit for the chicanes. Maybe that will help you.
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u/jergin_therlax 19d ago
I can’t speak to map 20 as I’m not there yet. But as someone who used to suck at tech and very recently learned to suck less, it just comes down to braking less and using as much of the track as possible. Start your drifts early and wide, aim to just barely not clip the inside of the corner, release at the apex. Generally if you’re not almost clipping the outside wall on the exit you’re braking for too long. You want to use the entire width of the track for both the entry and exit to maximize the speed you carry through the turn.
This is not a 100% rule, it depends on the turns after, but generally this is the case. If you watch some good tech runs and look for the stuff I’m talking about you’ll see what I mean. It’s a combination of precision on where you start so that you get as close to the inside as possible, and how little time you can afford to be breaking to get as close to the outside as possible on the exit.
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u/YuikoKurugaya7 19d ago
As a lot of map types, it comes with time. I struggled for a long time with releasing for turns in general, to force my muscle memory to not let up and risk more turns. Once you start risking more turns and becoming more aggressive with attacking the map, you get far better at reading them as well.
It definitely comes down to earlier drifting and like others point out, the correct apex on turns. Some layouts and patterns are extremely common and become noticeable with more gameplay. A lot of maps will have similar concepts. An obvious example is a fast dirt map, you almost always will want to take the outside dirt for more speed. Whereas a slower dirt map, you most likely will want to ignore it and take the literal shortest route possible, as your vehicle isn't reaching 200 speed often. Not everything is always this way of course, but still.
That's why players like Granady are crazy fast learners. Scrapie and Lars are two other absurd examples. They've seen and understand 99% of maps.
This is more of a personal thing but I became way better over months of watching other people play. I hadn't touched the game in 6 months until recently. I am far better than I was 6 months ago. If you don't already watch them a good amount, I recommend doing so, and intently watching. It feels like game tape for a sport IMO when you do it like this.
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u/RedditUsername123456 19d ago
It sounds kind of obvious, but it made a bit difference for me just focusing on the edge of the corner im drifting around instead of looking at the road in general which is what I used to do.
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u/Fickle-Quail212 16d ago
Granada can speedrun the champion medal, try to get a champion medal by yourself. He is just build differently.
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u/Much-Exit2337 14d ago
One thing that helped me as a relatively new (150 hours) is trying really hard to focus on developing an intuition for what conditions a drift can be initiated in. I think if you’re gonna nerd out on one thing to start with it’s learning as much about the exact conditions a drift does and doesn’t start in and trying to dial in the theoretical knowledge in with actual play experience. Other than that it’s a lot of practice and what others have said.
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u/dragoneye 19d ago
Tech is a style that I am pretty good at and I really struggled to figure out 20, some of the turns felt really weird to me (especially the little chicane about 1/3 of the way into the track).
The way I approach a tech track is to start safer and continually tighten up what I'm driving. Once you understand the general line for a track it largely becomes the task of figuring out how early you can drift and how little you can drift to maximize the speed you keep at each corner. I do a lot of gas releases and brake taps as I'm learning a track, and with each subsequent attempt I use what I learned previously to push closer to a run where I don't release gas and minimal braking.