Advanced tips and tricks

Understanding the auto throttle

The underlying physics of the cars use complicated realistic equations modelling grip separately across all four wheels. For anyone who's raced or driven a car or kart on the limit you'll realise balancing the car on the throttle and steering is a non-trivial task, but at the same time one that soon becomes second nature. I would describe it as like learning to ride a bike, at first you'll be falling off all the time, but once you get the hang of it it'll become second nature and you don't need to consciously think about it.

This second nature balancing of the car is done for you in the game, both the actual steering input and throttle level are automatically adjusted to give the car a neutral balance. You need to be aware of this to get the most out of the car, with sound on you'll hear the throttle lifting as you slide the car, the more aggressively you slide the rear, the more it needs to lift to get enough grip to stop you spinning.

So keep it smooth, don't put too much strain on the rear of the car when you want to be accelerating out the corners, try and do as much of the work as possible on the corner entry leaving all the rear grip available to put the power down and get you out of the corner as fast as possible.

You also need to understand how the automatic application of opposite lock works. If you're not steering at all the system will choose to use as much opposite lock as possible and as little throttle lifting as possible, keeping the car pointing in the same direction, but also letting it keep sliding sideways towards the outside of the track, whilst giving maximum acceleration, often this is just what you want.

However sometimes you'll need to stop this slide and keep the car tighter into the inside of the track. When you start steering the system will come off the opposite lock and instead compensate by lifting the throttle more to balance the handling of the car, this will help stop you sliding out wide, but at the expense of acceleration. So aim to take a line that allows you to come off the steering as early as possible and get a good clean acceleration out the corner.

Cutting the corners

As was mentioned in the tutorial, cutting corners effectively is a complicated topic, you need to understand a few fundamental basics of how the physics work to know how to deal with this issue most effectively.

The harder you're cornering the more weight will be loaded onto the outside wheels, making these the more crucial wheels in terms of grip, this means putting the inside wheels onto the infield doesn't lose as much grip as you might expect. As a general rule putting the inside front wheel on the grass in a 90 degree corner or on the exit of a 180 degree corner is nearly always a good thing. Putting both inside wheels on the grass is sometimes good, sometimes bad, something you'll need to learn how to figure out for yourself.

The important point to understand here is the cars are all rear wheel drive, as you exit the corner you'll need as much rear grip as possible as the rear wheel's are both putting the power down to accelerate out the corner and of course griping the track to stop the rear end sliding out. So you need to balance out how much time is gained by cutting the corner and how much is lost by losing valuable rear grip as you accelerate out the corner.

It was mentioned previously that putting the wheel on the inside of the exit of 180 corner was a good thing, you should be careful about going onto the grass earlier, typically you need all the front grip you can get early on in a corner to get the car turned around. This is not always the case on some of the wider faster 180 corners, but is generally a rule that holds true.

Be extremely careful about cutting a corner so much you're outside wheels also go onto the low grip infield, as the outside wheels are the loaded up ones giving most of the grip so you will experience a very significant loss of grip. In some cases, particularly in traffic it might worth doing this to squeeze past a slower car, but generally you'll find it doesn't pay.

Some 90 degree corners with a wide infield can be treated as a special case, here you may able straight line the infield, aiming to do the bulk of your turning before and after cutting the infield, so as you're not turning while on the infield itself the loss of grip doesn't matter so much. We'll come back to this in the advanced tutorial.

There's two types of infield, mud and grass, grass offers less grip than mud, so be extra cautious about cutting onto the grass, also bear in mind the difference in grip between the track and infield, tarmac has higher grip than dirt, which in turn has higher grip than mud. So going from tarmac to grass gives the highest loss of grip, whereas going from a mud track onto grass or a dirt track onto mud gives a relatively small loss.

Don't go onto the outfield

Some of tracks you'll notice have low grip run offs on the outside of the track, you should never be aiming to go onto these, but sometimes it can't be avoided, particularly in traffic. These hurt your speed a lot more than the infield because the outside wheels are the ones loaded up giving most grip. Also you'll typically be going onto the outfield on the exit of the corner, just as you most need full rear grip to accelerate onto the straight, but once you've found yourself on the outfield don't panic and swerve back onto the track too quickly, the lack of grip means it's best to be gentle on the steering, so ease your way back onto the circuit carefully.