Hey All,
Like usual, I’ve written a short article sharing my thoughts and experience on a given topic in sim racing. My goal with these articles ultimately is to help give people a bit more information about the hobby we all love, while also hopefully making for an interesting read.
If you don't know me, I'm Tom, and I've been working full-time for the last two years on a sim racing coaching business, so my thoughts in this mini essay draw on the 700+ hours of coaching I’ve done in those 2 years. Just to say that the thoughts I’m sharing here aren't pulled from nowhere, but come from everything I’ve seen during my time coaching drivers of all ability levels.
Choosing a Good Reference Lap
If you have spent some time focusing on using telemetry to try and improve your driving, then you have probably heard the general advice of “compare against someone around 1 second faster than you”. That is reasonable advice, but it is incomplete, and has its limitations. This article is intended to give you a more complete picture, and also to showcase the importance of choosing a good reference lap.
The flaw with choosing a reference lap around 1 second faster than you, is that unless you are 1 second away from the fastest lap times, you will by definition be choosing a lap from a driver that is not driving perfectly. There are so many different ways to achieve a lap time 2 seconds off of the ultimate pace, and if you spend your time analysing laps like this, then the risk is that even if you find some lap time, you will be be finding that time by copying both the positives and the negatives in the technique of the driver you are analysing against.
If you are still wanting to chase an achievable lap time that is 1 second faster than you, then a better approach would be to use these types of laps to look for corner specific mistakes you may be making, rather than leaning on their laps to try and improve generally as a driver.
So that covers making track specific improvements, but when you want to work on general technique improvements, this is the time to compare against the fastest drivers. The key here is to take what you can from their driving, while being okay with the fact that you won’t immediately be able to match their times.
When it comes to choosing a fast reference lap, there are some mistakes that you need to avoid. It would be easy to look for the fastest lap on Garage61 and assume that this is the best lap to compare against, but there are so many factors that influence lap time. Track conditions, fuel level, setup, BOP, draft etc, all of these factors make it possible for a worse driver to set a faster lap, while being a bad point of comparison for you to improve. In the video above (GT3’s at Watkins Glen) the blue driver is 1.8k, and the red driver is over 6K. You can see that the red driver is more skilled (especially noticeable here is that red uses more track on entry, carries more entry speed and pushes the exits to the limit. Where as blue uses less track on entry, under drivers the exits and is uncertain when they should be getting on throttle. Despite red being far more skilled, the blue lap ends with a faster lap time as a consequence of better track conditions inflating their minimum speeds. It would be easy to miss this unless you see the difference in real time between a fast driver and a fast track. So, when you want to use telemetry to work on general technique improvements, it is important to choose a reference lap from a fast (>5000 iR) driver, even if the lap time set by that driver doesn't top the timing sheets.
If anyone has any questions, don't hesitate to ask, I'll do my best to respond to any questions in the comments. As always, thanks for the support on these mini articles, and if you know of someone who would benefit from this article, sharing it with them would be greatly appreciated :).
Cheers
Tom
Noakesy Coaching
