Sim racing can be incredibly an exciting but incredibly frustrating recreational activity to be involved in for beginners. The skill gap between new and experienced racers is almost ridiculous, meaning you’re highly unlikely to keep pace with the front runners even if you push your car to the limits. However, there’s more to picking up speed on the track than flooring the gas pedal and braking less.
If you’ve finally gotten on board the racing simulation wagon and set up a stunning rig or cockpit, the first thing you need to do is learn how to get faster at sim racing by putting in as many practice laps as possible. The math is simple – the quicker you are on track, the better you’ll finish.
In this post, we’ll share eight ways to get faster in sim racing so you can not only catch up with other racers in your first few races but pull away from them as well.
8 Ways to Get Faster in Sim Racing
Without further ado, here’s how to get faster at sim racing:
1. Learn and Master Trail-Braking
You’re probably wondering how braking will make you go faster since they’re designed to do the opposite. Let us clarify. A special technique called trail-braking can save you valuable time on the lap on high-speed corners. Trail-braking involves turning your car while applying just 10-20% of your brakes to hit the apex before getting on the power as soon as you can. This way, you can maintain stability in the corners while keeping up the speed so you can get a faster exit. Learning and mastering trail-braking takes time since you’ll be prone to over or understeer initially. However, once you become a pro at it, you’ll start shaving off your lap time at every corner.
2. Adjust Your Field of View (FOV)
Field of view (FOV) controls how wide or narrow your vision is when looking at a monitor. This feature comes in real handy since you’re not driving a real car, and taking the time to set it up according to your requirement is a great way to improve your speed in a race. How, you’re wondering? Let us explain.
Having too wide or too narrow a FOV can trick our brains into misjudging the speed at which a corner is approaching and can result in unnecessary braking. It ultimately affects your overall lap time. To adjust your FOV, head to your car’s driving seat and see how far your face is from the windshield. Then, compare this view to the view on your sim and use the inbuilt calculator to make some position changes. To optimize your experience further, you can match your monitor(s) size to match your real-life driving view.
3. Invest in New Braking Pedals
Braking differentiates a good sim racer from a great one since it’s where most of the track time is gained or lost. Therefore, you need to set up your brakes properly to avoid losing valuable seconds on your lap time by overshooting corners or locking up on corner entry. Moreover, not all braking pedals are equal, so you should invest in a good one. You don’t necessarily need to splash your cash on the best ones in the market. Just don’t get the cheapest ones you can find.
4. Use the Whole Race Track and Driving Lines
Most newbies either don’t know or undervalue the importance of driving lines on a racing track. However, by understanding this concept, they can drastically improve their lap time and finish faster than ever before. This eSport is all about speed and not the distance of travel. As a result, when taking a corner, most people opt for the shortest path without knowing that it might not necessarily be the fastest one. Getting on the driving line is can help you gain more speed through tight corners. So, the next time you’re putting in practice laps, use the in-game race line assist in helping you get up to speed on this concept.
5. It’s Not Just About the Throttle
As contradicting as this may sound, you need to go slow to go fast if you want to win more races. The more you keep your foot on the throttle, the more you’re likely to brake, especially in tight races. What you need to emphasize more than speed is consistency.
By keeping your car out of trouble and finishing each lap consistently, you can find your rhythm, keep pace with the front runners, and slowly make time by accelerating in the final laps.
6. Consistency
Learning how to get faster at sim racing has a lot to do with becoming more consistent. Being slow but finishing the race is better than leading the pack initially before spinning out four laps later. The trick to becoming more consistent is regular practice on the same track with the same car.
After a few laps, you’ll become fully familiar with the track and finish the race without penalties, crashes, off tracks, under/over-steers, etc. You can also use this to slowly increase your lap speed by steadily pushing your car to the limit after a few slower laps.
7. Turn Off Assists
Most new sim racers leave all the race settings at default, leaving all the assists enabled to make the race easier for them. The problem with assists is that learning assists are not too different from training wheels on a bicycle. They’re great at the start but can make you a lot slower by keeping you in your comfort zone. By turning off the brake, turning, throttle, and driving line assists, you make everything as real and raw as possible and get some muscle memory into your feet without relying on the simulator to tell you when or how much to brake or turn.
8. Learn From Your Mistakes
As uninteresting as this may sound, watching back your replays and trying to figure out what went wrong can help you significantly improve your speed, especially if you’re thinking of turning pro. You can learn where and why you lost time and look at your fastest lap to see what you did differently. You can devise several to-dos and not-to-dos during a race using this information.
Conclusion
And there you have it – 8 ways to get faster in sim racing. You can do many other things to improve your overall performance, such as improving your gear, loading cell pedals, opting for professional coaching, and investing in a sim rig. However, the tips on our list require little or no investment.
Like most things in life, you’re going to become as fast as Max Verstappen after a couple of laps. Improvement takes time and dedication, and if you have both, you can quickly learn how to get faster at sim racing.
