u/NoakesyCoaching

Hey All,

Like usual, I've written a short article sharing my thoughts and experience on a given topic in sim racing. My goal with these articles ultimately is to help give people a bit more information about the hobby we all love, while also hopefully making for an interesting read.

If you don't know me, I'm Tom, and I've been working full-time for the last 2 years on a sim racing coaching business. My thoughts in this mini essay draw on the 700+ hours of coaching I've done in that time. Just to say that the things I'm sharing in these articles aren't pulled from nowhere, but come from everything I've seen during the last 2 years coaching hundreds of drivers, of all ability levels.

Quick Wins for the Spa 24h

These tips will be aimed more at the beginner/intermediate level driver, with the goal of making some of the trickier parts of Spa more consistent and less sketchy than they otherwise would be over the course of your stints. They will also find some free lap time, but in the case of a 24 hour race that is secondary. Less off tracks up Eau Rouge and Raidillon and less snaps at Blanchimont will be worth more than than the few tenths you can pick up from these tips. As a quick aside, describing driving changes like this isn't always easy to visualise, so at the end of this article I’ll have a link that lets you visualise (on desktop at least) the tips discussed below.

Quick Win 1: Making Eau Rouge/Raidillon more comfortably flat

The off-track at Raidilon should be easy to avoid, but if it feels like a lottery every time you take eau rouge, or you find yourself having to add more steering than you would like after the right hand apex, then the two mistakes you’re likely to be making are;

1: Not taking enough curb on the first left hander (bottom of the hill): You can take a lot of this curb and really open up the right hander. It’s harder to take enough curb if you are apexing too early, so experiment with shifting the first apex position slightly later/more angled to the left, and see how much curb you can take/how much you can open up the right hander.

2: Apexing the right hander too early: Especially if you find yourself panicking/adding steering after the apex of the right hander, for fear of the offtrack, it's likely that you are taking too early of an apex for the right hander. Taking a later apex here doesn't mean turning in that much later, or any more suddenly, just not trying to rush the car to the inside. The later you apex the right hander, the earlier you will be able to unwind the steering on exit without taking the off track.

Quick Win 2: Treating Bruxelles as a double apex

Bruxelles is the long, off camber right hand hairpin is a corner that I often see drivers taking incorrectly during coaching sessions. The natural mistake here is to treat this corner as a really late apex, which has some truth to it, because you want to make sure you can work the car back to the right before the upcoming left hander, and the late apex does help achieve this. But it comes at the cost of travelling a much further distance, and massively overslowing on entry vs taking a more v’d off double apex. If you find yourself feeling lost in the mid corner, knowing you’ve overslowed/want to get on throttle, but realise that it is still too early to do so, then it’s likely you’re making this mistake. A double apex here still allows the second apex to be late, but it allows you to bury more braking within the corner during entry, preventing you from overslowing in the mid corner.

Quick Win 3: Having a consistent Entry Into Blanchimont

Blanchimont is a corner that, depending on conditions, setup and tires, will potentially be flat. But even when it is flat, it will likely still be sketchy, and the car will want to snap to oversteer. Obviously it goes without saying that it is not worth risking these snaps during an endurance race, and one of the easiest things you can do to help give you more confidence in this corner is to make sure you use as much track as possible on entry, as consistently as possible. It is very easy to accidentally leave some margin to the white line on entry, and to leave an inconsistent margin on entry. The risk here is that you can’t take the corner the same way if you arent opening up the corner an equal amount. If one lap Blanchimont is just about flat, and the next lap you take 0.3m less track on entry, you will at best have to lift, and at worst be surprised mid corner to find that this time around, it isn't flat. 

To solve this, you want to determine where the off track is, by aligning the white line to a visual reference on part of your car. Perhaps when the white line hits a kink in the bonnet, that is where the off track occurs, and therefore that is where you aim to align the car on entry. You don’t want to fixate on this reference, but rather, be aware of it in your peripheral vision. If you can’t find a visual reference, then a (slightly sweaty, but effective) solution is to just move one of your overlays so that the edge of the overlay aligns with the white line.

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Hopefully these quick tips will help some drivers out. If you want to see visually how these tips impact the driving, I’ve put together some examples. In each case, the red car is making the mistake and the blue car is implementing the quick win.  The viewer won't work on mobile, but hopefully it will still be useful :).

As a brief aside, the tool that is showcasing these examples is a new analysis tool I've been building. I'm happy to remove this part if it goes against self promotion rules, but if anyone wants to analyse their own laps, its free for spa through to the end of the 24h, and it would be great to get some feedback on what can be made better :). If you're intrested, you can learn more here: https://perfectlap.net/

Finally, best of Luck to everyone competing in the 24h!

Cheers All
Tom
Noakesy Coaching

Hey All,

Like usual, I've written a short article sharing my thoughts and experience on a given topic in sim racing. My goal with these articles ultimately is to help give people a bit more information about the hobby we all love, while also hopefully making for an interesting read.

If you don't know me, I'm Tom, and I've been working full-time for the last 18 months on a sim racing coaching business. My thoughts in this mini essay draw on the 700+ hours of coaching I've done in that time. Just to say that the things I'm sharing in these articles aren't pulled from nowhere, but come from everything I've seen during the last 18 months coaching hundreds of drivers, of all ability levels.

When (and How) to Start Focusing on Racecraft

The main point I want to make in this article is that whilst racecraft is something you can always be improving, how you actually go about improving it should change depending on where you are as a driver. The two mistakes I see a lot of newer drivers make are either treating racecraft as something they should be actively working on from day one, or treating it as something they don’t work on at all. Both of these mistakes can lead to a lot of frustration in races, which sucks, because if we aren't able to enjoy races, then why are we racing in the first place?

So, why are these two approaches a mistake, and what should you be doing instead? The answer depends on how comfortable you are in the car. 

Racecraft When You Are Just Getting in to Sim Racing

Early on, when it still takes a lot of effort just to drive the car and put together consistent laps, you don't really have any spare mental capacity to also be thinking about setting up moves, judging gaps, and managing the cars around you. At this stage, the main gains you can make as a driver are going to come from understanding the car you're driving, understanding where the limit is, and learning how to exploit that limit to go faster. That's where the lap time is, and that's where the main focus should be. That doesn't mean you ignore racecraft entirely though, it just means you treat racecraft improvement passively rather than actively. Instead of going into races trying to make smart, premeditated moves, you focus on driving the race cleanly and consistently. Then afterwards, when you watch back any incidents you had, not primarily through the lens of figuring out who was at fault, but rather to figure out what you could have done differently to avoid the contact in the first place. 9 times out of 10, even if the incident was the other drivers fault, there would have been something you could have done differently to minimize the risk of contact

That is the biggest needle mover for racecraft improvement in the early stages of your development as a driver, and learning from these mistakes will put you in a strong position to make progress.

Racecraft When you are comfortable with car control

Then, once you're more comfortable in the car, when you're able to place the car where you actually want it on track, rather than being a passenger to whatever path the car ends up taking through the corner, that's when you can start actively thinking about racecraft. Now you have the spare mental capacity to start setting up moves, experimenting with lines, getting creative with how you defend and attack. Now racecraft becomes something you're able to actively training, alongside the other improvements you're making to your driving.

The reason I think it's worth pointing this out is that trying to be too smart, too early, against drivers who are themselves still struggling to keep the car under control, almost always ends badly. But on the flip side, completely neglecting race craft and dedicating too much time to hotlapping puts you in a really tough situation, where you’re faster than 95% of drivers around you, but crack as soon as you’re put in the position of having to battle wheel to wheel.

So the takeaway here is that racecraft does matter, and you should always be working on it, but how you work on it should change depending on your level. Early on, focus on the car, drive cleanly, and learn passively from your incidents. Later, once car control is no longer the limiting factor, that's when you start actively practicing racecraft as its own skill.

Obviously there's plenty more that goes into improving racecraft, but I'll leave it there for now.

If you think this article could help someone out, it would be awesome if you could share it with them, the wider the reach of these posts the easier it is to justify taking the time to write them each week :).

I'll include a link to my website for anyone wants to check out my courses and coaching, but I'm happy to remove this if it goes against self promotion rules!

Cheers All
Tom
Noakesy Coaching

Online Courses and Driver Coaching
www.noakesycoaching.com

Hey All,

Like usual, I've written a short article sharing my thoughts and experience on a given topic in sim racing. My goal with these articles ultimately is to help give people a bit more information about the hobby we all love, while also hopefully making for an interesting read.

If you don't know me, I'm Tom, and I've been working full-time for the last 18 months on a sim racing coaching business. My thoughts in this mini essay draw on the 700+ hours of coaching I've done in that time. Just to say that the things I'm sharing in these articles aren't pulled from nowhere, but come from everything I've seen during the last 18 months coaching hundreds of drivers, of all ability levels.

How to make Risky Overtakes Work For You

There are a bunch of different situations where an overtake could be considered risky, but in this article I want to talk about one specific situation, which is going for an overtake on the inside, into what is likely to become a closing space. For example making a late move to the inside in a situation where the driver in front might not see you and turn in, or a situation in long, double apex corners where a driver has run slightly wide in the mid corner, but is likely trying to work the car back to the inside to take a late apex.

In these kind of situations where you see a gap, but also realise the door is likely to close before you can get significantly alongside, you have two options: either you can wait patiently for a better opportunity to make a move, or you can try to capitalize on the gap to put pressure on your opponent. To clarify, I am not saying that it is wrong or too passive to wait for a better opportunity, and oftentimes that is the correct decision. But in this article I want to talk about how you should approach the overtake if you do decide to go for this closing door. 

The main issue with these closing door overtakes is that you will never manage to get your car significantly alongside before the door has closed. At best, you will get your front wheel alongside the rear wheel of the car in front, possibly pit them onto you, and likely ruin both of your races in the process.

So how can you both go for this move and not cause a massive crash?

The answer is that for these types of moves, you actually don’t want to overcommit to the move, you want to have options. You can show your intention by moving to the inside and carrying slightly more speed on entry to close up to the rear of the car in front, signalling to them that you are planning to make a move. But crucially you don’t want to commit so much that you are not able to back out of the move if the car in front doesn't see you. By leaving both options on the table, you give yourself the advantage. If the car in front does see you, and leaves space, you can now take that space on the inside. Even though you weren't strictly entitled to the space, the car in front has given it to you, so take it. If however the car in front doesn't see you, or sees you but decides to risk cutting you off, then you are able to back out of the move and live to fight for another day. Sure you may have lost a couple of tenths on exit by going for the move, but you have shown the driver in front that you are willing to send some high risk moves, and they will be driving in their mirrors worried that you may do the same somewhere else, making them more likely to make mistakes. Of course, you know the move was not high risk, because you were always going to back out if they closed the door.

If you think this article could help someone out, it would be awesome if you could share it with them, the wider the reach of these posts the easier it is to justify taking the time to write them each week :).

I'll include a link to my website for anyone wants to check out my courses and coaching, but I'm happy to remove this if it goes against self promotion rules!

Cheers All
Tom
Noakesy Coaching

Online Courses and Driver Coaching
www.noakesycoaching.com

Hey All

Like usual, I've written a short article sharing my thoughts and experience on a given topic in sim racing. My goal with these articles ultimately is to help give people a bit more information about the hobby we all love, while also hopefully making for an interesting read.

If you don't know me, I'm Tom, and I've been working full-time for the last 18 months on a sim racing coaching business. My thoughts in this mini essay draw on the 700+ hours of coaching I've done in that time. Just to say that the things I'm sharing in these articles aren't pulled from nowhere, but come from everything I've seen during the last 18 months coaching hundreds of drivers, of all ability levels.

When and How to Lift for Almost Flat corners

First, what do I mean by “almost flat” corners? For the purposes of this article, an almost flat corner is one where you don’t need to brake, nor do you need a sustained full lift of the throttle. At most, they may require less than 1 second of a full lift, or more commonly a partial lift of the throttle.  When it comes to these high speed, partial lift corners, the most important factors for lap time are your minimum speed, and how early you can commit back to full throttle.

If your lift off of the throttle doesn't allow you to extract the maximum amount of grip from the car (more on this later) then your minimum speed will be lower than it could be. Additionally, if your approach to lifting delays your ability to return full throttle, you will lose lap time on exit.

The most common mistake in these corners is thinking that the lift is there to reduce your speed, which it is, but that is not the only purpose of the lift. Instead, lifting off of the throttle transfers weight to the front of the car, giving the front tires more grip, removing some grip from the rear tires, and helping the car to rotate through the entry. This is what I mean by lifting off of the throttle in a way that allows you to extract the maximum amount of grip from the car. If the way you approach lifting doesn't help the car to rotate, you will have a lower minimum speed, and won’t be able to commit so early back to full throttle. So, how can you ensure that you lift in a way that aids your rotation?

The answer is to try and take the corner completely flat, at least in the early part of the entry.

By definition, if a corner is almost flat out, we won’t need to lift off of the throttle until we have already started turning into the corner (although the instinct for many drivers is to lift before turning in). So, the way to ensure you get rotation when you lift off the throttle, is to imagine you are trying to take the corner flat. You first turn into the corner with the goal of making the apex without lifting. Then, when you realise the car will not have enough grip to hit the apex, this is the moment you start to lift. The size and duration of your lift should be based not on how much you need to reduce your speed, but on how much of a lift is needed to transfer enough weight (and grip) to the front tires, to allow you to make your intended apex. Once you are satisfied the car will make the apex, you can then commit back to full throttle.

As a side note, this feeling of the car rotating to allow you to tighten your path through the corner is exactly how it should feel when you trail brake effectively, but I’ll leave that article for another day. As always, I appreciate the support that these articles get, I’d love to hear your thoughts for future articles.

I'll include a link to my website for anyone wants to check out my courses and coaching, but I'm happy to remove this if it goes against self promotion rules!

Cheers All
Tom
Noakesy Coaching

Online Courses and Driver Coaching
www.noakesycoaching.com

Hey All,

Like usual, I've written a short article sharing my thoughts and experience on a given topic in sim racing. My goal with these articles ultimately is to help give people a bit more information about the hobby we all love, while also hopefully making for an interesting read.

If you don't know me, I'm Tom, and I've been working full-time for the last 18 months on a sim racing coaching business. My thoughts in this mini essay draw on the 700+ hours of coaching I've done in that time. Just to say that the things I'm sharing in these articles aren't pulled from nowhere, but come from everything I've seen during the last 18 months coaching hundreds of drivers, of all ability levels.

The Mistakes Most Drivers Make When Learning a New Track

Before jumping into this article, I want to clarify something. If you have your own methods for learning a track, then don't assume they are wrong just because I say something different in this article. Everyone has different ways of getting up to pace, and the goal of this article isn't to get you to change your whole approach, but rather to point out a couple of common mistakes that, if you can avoid them, will hopefully help you get up to pace slightly faster. With that caveat out of the way, here are two common mistakes I see drivers make when learning a new track.

Mistake 1: Chasing the Braking Point Before the Exit

After running a couple of laps to understand which way the corners go, the natural instinct for most drivers is to start dialling in braking points. The logic seems obvious, find the latest you can brake, and you'll have found the lap time. The problem is that focusing on braking points first actively gets in the way of learning the rest of the corner.

If you first try to dial in braking zones, then you'll spend a good few laps pushing the braking later and later, until you start braking too late. Every time you over slow on entry, or every time you under slow on entry, you don't give yourself a chance to practice the actual corner at a proper pace. You'll either be getting on throttle too early to compensate for over slowing, or you'll be running deep on the entry, unable to place the car where you want to through the corner.

If you instead try to dial in the exit first, you'll necessarily need to be slightly under the limit on entry, because you need to be able to place the car where you want to throughout the mid corner and exit. Whilst you won't have dialled in your braking point, you will still have gained information about the entry, because you will know which braking points are too conservative. But in addition to having gained insights on where to brake, You also will have already formed a picture of how to take the corner, where you want to apex, when you should get on throttle, and how much track you can use on exit.

The side benefit of maximising the exits first, is that you will find more lap time by maximising the exits than you will by maximising the entry. That's because any speed advantage you carry on entry only helps you from braking point to throttle point, but any speed advantage you carry on exit stays with you all the way through to the braking zone of the next corner. So the clear winner when it comes to learning new tracks is to first focus on executing a good exit, then build in the correct entry after you already have a clear picture of how the exit should look. This applies to the vast majority of corners, the only real exceptions being corners where the braking zone that precedes the corner is longer than the straight that follows on from the corner.

To be clear, of course you will be dialling in your braking points in the first few laps, but you don't want to focus on them so much that it comes at the expense of being able to place the car where you know you want to throughout the remainder of the corner.

Mistake 2: Changing Your Braking Technique When Adjusting the Braking Point

Okay, so you have dialled in the exit, now you are trying to select the right braking point. You brake on one lap and over slow, so the next lap you brake slightly later, but massively overshoot the corner, why?

The mistake here is that when you are trying to find the right braking point, you only want to change the braking point, not your approach to braking. If on one lap you are braking at the 150m board, and feel it is slightly too early, then the natural mistake is to push the braking to, say, 130m, but then you feel panicked that you are entering the corner too quickly. The consequence is that you brake harder, potentially activating abs or otherwise having a less efficient braking zone, and massively overshoot the corner.

You can't assume a braking point is too late if you didn't approach the braking in the same way that you did when you were braking earlier.

The takeaway message here is not to panic when picking a later braking point, instead deliberately brake with the same technique you would use at any track you are already up to pace at. Only then can you correctly determine where the correct braking point for a corner is.

Obviously there is plenty more that goes into learning tracks, but I'll leave it there with these two mistakes for now. I'm curious to hear from you guys how you approach learning new tracks, and whether you feel like you were making either of these mistakes yourself.

I'll include a link to my website for anyone wants to check out my courses and coaching, but I'm happy to remove this if it goes against self promotion rules!

Cheers All
Tom
Noakesy Coaching

Online Courses and Driver Coaching
www.noakesycoaching.com

Like usual, I’ve written a short article sharing my thoughts and experience on a given topic in sim racing. My goal with these articles ultimately is to help give people a bit more information about the hobby we all love, while also hopefully making for an interesting read.

If you don't know me, I'm Tom, and I've been working full-time for the last 18 months on a sim racing coaching business. My thoughts in this mini essay draw on the 700+ hours of coaching I’ve done in the past year. Just to say that the things I’m sharing in these articles aren't pulled from nowhere, but come from everything I’ve seen during the last 18 months coaching hundreds of drivers, of all ability levels.

Judging When to Brake when Racing Side by Side

Overtaking is one of the most dynamic elements of racing. You can spend hours learning a new car, run hundreds of practice laps to get up to pace, but racecraft is something that you can’t prepare for in the same way. Every battle is slightly different, and the most effective way to learn racecraft is to, well, race.

It’s the dynamic nature of overtaking that I want to talk about in this article, because in some of the more racecraft focused coaching sessions I’ve run, there are a subset of drivers who have a “favourite move”, one that they have decided they will execute on before they have assessed what is happening through the corner. That could be always going for a late move up the inside, always trying to set up a switch back on exit, etc. The specific “favourite move” matters less than the fact that the decision is pre determined, rather than being dynamically assessed in the moment.

This pre-determined approach to racecraft also extends to braking, so I want to talk about deciding when to brake while you are going for a move up the inside. Hopefully you already have some overlap before the braking zone, and now you are trying to judge when to brake. Again, unlike memorizing braking points while hotlapping, this decision should be dynamic. If your approach is to always brake later than the car you are battling, then invariably, at some stage, they will brake too late for the corner, you will brake even later than them, and at best you will both miss the corner, and at worse you will make contact and be in the wall.
Alternatively, you could brake at a pre determined braking reference, but this will result in you having less control over where you are relative to the car you are fighting. Pick too early of a point, and you won’t have any overlap during corner entry, and you’ll lose the position, brake too late and you again run the risk of running past the apex and making contact, or being beaten by a switch back.

So, how should you think about braking? The answer is that you should always be trying to brake just slightly later than the car you are battling, enough that you have your nose slightly in front during the entry, but crucially, the dynamic element of this decision is that you should always have a cut-off point, a point where you know you can't brake any later without running wide through the corner. this doesnt have to be a physical reference though, instead, It helps to "drive the other person's car". If you think they have waited too long to brake, and they won’t make the corner, then you can brake earlier than them, safely make the corner, and let them run deep. This dynamic decision making applies to all parts of racecraft, i.e. if your favourite move is a switch back, you should instead always be willing to instead hang it out around the outside, if you feel like the car on the inside has over slowed on entry, as they may be intending to park it on the apex and prevent your switch back.

Hopefully this article makes sense, after having typed it up I've realised it's a topic that maybe lends itself more to a video format than a written one, but nonetheless I hope it will help some drivers who find racecraft to be one of the more challenging elements of driving. 

As always, I appreciate the support that these articles receive. if you have any thoughts on future articles you’d like to see from me, feel free to leave a comment, or drop a message in my discord server!

I'll include a link to my website for anyone wants to check out my courses and coaching, but I'm happy to remove this if it goes against self promotion rules!

Cheers All
Tom
Noakesy Coaching

Online Courses and Driver Coaching
www.noakesycoaching.com