Default v custom setups?

[DarkFire]

How good are the default "stable" car setups in the game? I'm trying to practice individual time trials with ghost cars from the fastest recorded laps for a given circuit in a given car. It's surprising because I see the ghost cars disapearing off in to the distance at speeds far beyond that at which the default setup cars are controllable. Does having a custom setup make *that* much difference? For example, I enjoy driving around the Nordschleife in the GT-86. I can manage around 8:43 but the record is way down at something like 8:31. Do I need to do some serious setup adjusting?

[Mahjik]

Yes...

Setups on a long track like Nordschleife can easily make several seconds of difference. They make smaller differences on shorter tracks.

[Wylie28]

The setups on most tracks really only help instill confidence. Make them so when you drive the car it does EXACTLY what you expect. But on tracks where you stay in higher gears most of the time (Le mans, Nordschleife) you want to adjust gear ratios to increase your top speed.

You can adjust them for other tracks, but unless you are near perfect in execition of your driving it won't make a significant difference. You are better off just using the time to actually git gud rather than hassle with finding the perfect gear ratio setup. (especially since any mistakes likley render your gear ratio setup wrong)

[OMG 77]

Stable is slow but stable. most of time understeer loads of shty understeer.
Use loose and tweak it a little if needed. If its to loose I take off a little rear toe and a little rear roll bar and that's it. Use stable only on The Porsches and tweak.

[OMG 77]

Wtf sorry old habits I've finished with this game only play few hours now so need to stop commenting on these things. Bye for real this time :-)

[DarkFire]

Thanks for the advice everyone, much appreciated.