Smilies setup question.

[Lord English]

Is it possible for an excellent smiley setup to NOT be an optimal setup? I'm currently racing in Doha and I'm struggling down in 17th whereas I have just done Singapore and came 6th. The disparity is disconcerting.

[Tig_green]

In a race or in quali? Tactics play a big role.

I've had a three purple smiley setup few times and it has been 98-99% so I have not managed to get 100% yet.

But perfect smiley should be perfect setup. There might be other reasons for the disparity. That said, setup system is not perfect or 100% transparent.

[Aenarion]

It sounds like you're talking about race performance, which is not a good guide to car performance. It's easy to win a race with an inferior car as the AI has awful tactics. Qualifying is a better measure of absolute performance, and even then only if it's dry and you get several laps in.

Also remember smileys are not the most important thing, the percentage is. 97%+ set up should give you good performance even if you don't have any purple smileys.

[Lord English]

Well my issue was that in practice I got pole by 0.2xx secs., qualified 6th (no quali. tim) and by the second lap of the race I was down into 18th (lvl/ 3 race & trye trim, no accidents, full condition parts) and only managed to pull back 11th. I found tt confusing that the performance was so varied.

[Aenarion]

When I started playing I had a similar experience - consistently qualified well but dropped back horribly in the race. Over time this reversed as I got more used to race strategy.

At the risk of stating the obvious (some of this I didn't know when I started) you should make sure your cars start in engine overtake mode (red). Also if you have choice of tyre, start them on the softest tyre you plan to run (so if you're planning one stop with soft-medium, start on the soft). If you're in a series with energy deployment, use it the moment it becomes available in the first couple of laps to overtake and defend. With this last point you can gain a lot of places (or lose them if you don't deploy energy).

[Lord English]

I appreciate the advice but, as an avid F1 fan, I know at least that much!

[Fritz]

I noticed you mentioned practice. Ai teams just coast on neutral/medium (yellow/yellow) during practice so if you (playing optimally) used attack/overtake during practice to go faster (i.e. more laps=more knowledge=more levels) you will be outpacing them by a lot.

For quali and race, be aware of things like traffic, quali/race trim and tyre bonuses, fuel weight (race only) and potentially track grip can mess with lap times and make a driver relatively faster/slower than normal. The same applies during the race. Each session has its own conditions that can generally give you and idea how fast you are overall but depending on your specific situation you could be misrepresenting your driver's real pace and expecting too much out of them in the real race.

If I had to guess, I'd say you are on red/red during practice making you relatively way faster and achieving pole. During quali you might have good timing to get clean air on your hot lap and/or quali trim for extra pace. However, come race day your drivers could get a bad/delayed launch at the start, have no race trim, and could be massively overfueled which is slowing them down further. I'm probably wrong but you can see my point, how circumstances affect your pace across the race weekend.

[Lord English]

Yes, I am running red/red during practice though I did not know that the AI simply coasted through it. Thanks for that information.

You seem very well informed so I'll ask here: does tyre pressure effect grip as it does the real world (less psi = more grip)?

[Tig_green]

I'm pretty sure all it does atm is give you better or worse setup in terms of %.

Track grip doesn't have proper effect either (in vanilla).

[Prasiatko]

Nope tyre pressure doesn't affect grip or tyre temperature contrary to what you'd expect from real life.

[Lord English]

I appreciate the info guys, thank you both