Losing positions on pits

[Dreamevil_666]

I'm pretty new to F1 and racing games in general, and I'm enjoying mastering the nuances of the game so far. The strategies of fuel and tyre wear, patience when overtaking, etc have all been fun to learn and I'm grasping these well and making progress.

However, one thing that consistently destroys my runs is my pit stops. I consistently drop to the rear of the pack, no matter what the circumstances are or how fast the stop is.

I've been gaming long enough that I typically assume that I must be doing something wrong rather than a flaw in the game. I am getting frustrated though, be cause I feel like all the effort I put into a good start to the race gets thrown away when I pit.

I've tried pitting somewhat late as a strategy to get the most from my tyres and have decent grip late in the race. Naturally this means I'm pitting aroung lap 8 in a 14 lap race. Since that makes me among the last to pit, I've tried pitting earlier... with the majority of drivers and even a little early just to see what would happen.

In just about every case (90% I'd estimate) I end up losing a ton of positions. The race that I was just running that finally frustrated me enough to write here I dropped from 5th to 19th.

I don't see that I'm getting penalized, and I'm just not getting how I could lose 14 places on a seemingly quick pit stop where I didn't get held up and the time was good.

Any thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks!

[N Quarter]

Only thoughts I can think of, is Tire Wear. You need to keep in mind that Tire Wear does not effect the AI, so while you are staying out longer, your Tires are decreasing with your Times either slightly slower, or averaging around the same, while the AI have no loss of Wear, but are increasing their Lap times.

So by the time you go in for your Stop, and the AI which have already stopped have had several Laps going much faster than you to be able to drop you down so low.

[SilentHorizon]

This where race stragety pays off. Even if you loose a couple of places while doing a pit stop, the other cars will eventually have to pit stop and you'll catch up. But this only works on the 25% and higher races, don't pit stop if you can on the 3 and 5 lappers.

[Will1954]

I was experiencing the same problem..go into the pits in first place, come out in 8th. What I did was to change the pitstop strategy to call me in one lap early on all the pitstops. Seems to work as I usually pit with no other cars. What I noticed is that the cars are divided into 2 groups. When you pit one lap early you will see half the field go in the next lap and and then the rest the lap later. This is mostly true if you only run 25% races. I'm running 100% races now and have noted that the first pitstop usually goes like that but then some teams may run a harder tyre for the next stop, others a softer compound so it does get out of sequence a bit later in the race. Hope this helps.

[Dreamevil_666]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. It's mostly 25% races (14 laps in career mode) so it's pretty much one pit stop per race. I think maybe I'm causing my own issue somewhat by trying to pit late and stretch life out of the option tyres. I've been experimenting and I expect I'll learn a trick or two after a while.

In any case, I'm enjoying the game a lot and have even been following F1 for real now that I know a few things about it! It's always been my favorite style of racing, but I never had occasion to get caught up on teams/drivers, etc.

[SilentHorizon]

One thing that I always do, and it pays off, is pit stoping early. You'll get the best performance out of the race with good tires. If you try to stretch tires, especially options, over 2 laps then you will start to loose lap times.

Plus, even though it does look better pit stopping late, you'll still have to eventually pit stop.

[Dreamevil_666]

I've learned that same lesson too HBZK100. Also, I'm noticing that as my skill improves I've been doing better at maintaining good lap times but without beating up my tyres so much now. Naturally that makes my pit strategy more flexible and I can more easily choose when to pit rather than feel like I'm just at the mercy of the tyres.

[SilentHorizon]

Nice.