I agree precisely with how you described the 'canned spin' behavior. I feel it too. Once it goes, no amount of countersteer has any effect on the rotation. You're coming around and that's that, whilst you hold the wheel in frustration and full opposite lock as you come to a halt looking at the armco. When I picked up the 488 Evo I took it out at the Red Bull Ring I was really struggling with this, especially turn three, but also in turn one. So I had a go at figuring it out. It's there, and can I mitigate or eliminate it?

The cause of my spins is mostly some degree of lift entry oversteer, or feels that way. It's not the rears breaking loose under power, but rotation that starts with the power-off phase. This isn't uncommon or even wrong. But in other sims, you just counter it. Drift. Lay it down and off you go down the straight. Maybe down a tenth or two which you dropped as you gathered it back up. But in RaceRoom, it must complete that spin, penance, I guess haha.

So I guess the behavior can't be changed, so how to avoid that spin in the first place? I was able to more or less tame that 488 with stiffer roll bars. Increased pre-load on the diff and fooling around with the engine brake setting. None of this is going to help with the Crosslé, which is a rather uncomplicated machine and doesn't have these adjustments. But it does have engine braking. It works sort of like a poor man's diff as far as cornering behavior doesn't it?

I didn't have trouble with spins with the Crosslé however. My issues were mostly locking the fronts and entry understeer on those off camber, downhill first gear corners. Fooled around with springs and went back to default and just raised the rear a little to get more weight on the fronts. I slid the brake bias back to like 52/48 and that both helped with the locking and helps a lot with the trail braking you mentioned. What were you running you bias at? I see you've been in RR since 2013, or SimBin anyway right? Maybe you did this challenge a long time ago. Since it's current I reckoned it is recent, but maybe they recycle this stuff and keep all the times. No, the car's new right? Gotta be recent.

After trying that 488 in RR and spinning a lot I fired up AMS2 and it was so clearly better in how the car handles when the edge of traction is exceeded. How you counter it and it goes like you expect. A better seat of the pants thing, and more importantly it behaves as you expect when countersteering.

AMS2 is probably my favorite feeling sim out of the bunch, but the content is coming slowly. I did pick up the 2022 F1 car.

Yeah, the Crosslé is brand new content and the reason I’ve been in RaceRoom since 2013 is that back then I was still contributing reviews and content to SimHQ and RR let me have a reviewer’s (time-limited) Work-In-Progress full copy. I was demoted by RR to being ordinary Joe a long time ago. Back then it was very different to what it is today. On rare occasions I’ve been starting RR up but it was the Crosslé/Charade release that piqued my interest.

I also thought a bit about setup being a possible explanation for the spin behaviour of the Crosslé but seeing that the rear anti Roll-bar was disconnected and the fixed setup not allowing it to be connected, I lost focus, - because I can just about manage to fiddle with anti-roll-bars and brake bias in the setups, but anything more advanced leave me scratching my head. Maybe disconnecting the front arb??

I briefly tried moving the brake bias further to the rear, but since that didn’t help I reverted to stock, default setup. I did spend some time experimenting with the steering lock, ending up with some 550 degrees on the wheel and 17 in-sim I think, making the wheel on the screen and my G25 fairly scynchronous.

Did you also find that you wanted to turn the wheel beyond the in-sim limitation? I kept turning my wheel beyond the steering lock, when regaining the track after my offs.

I’m just amazed at how different our approaches to driving styles are: I never locked the front wheels, in fact I wanted the brakes to be more effective, I thought they were abysmal. So I went for the smooth approach trying to manage the momentum and brake less. And I’m, afraid I’m dependent on the lift-off oversteer to be manageble, to be able to go really fast. I love to balance a drift. It gives me the buzz.

Which is probably good since I wouldn't recommend doing it like me

But yeah, I wonder how much of that is just down to our controls and their settings, ya know? Like for example steering wheel rotation. 900 degrees? Some love it and I couldn't make it around a corner by Friday. I don't know really, but how much of our 'styles' are a product of our controls, or the other way around. If we were actually hot swapping a real race car I imagine we'd all be much more aligned. But with PCs, and sim gear and software settings the soup is deep.




Isn't there a graphics setting to synch this? Maybe not in RR, I'll have to look. I think the issue arises because the car model uses it's factory rotation, but the player can exceed it, causing a mismatch. Could be wrong. Hell, I've been running with 360. Not long ago it was 720. It's a shadowy target.

Reading your quote again I don't think this is what you were asking?

Which in turn did mine. And it's a cool combo. Cars like this are fun, great vintage open wheel vibe but with a motor that's reasonable haha.



As such a simple race car, the Crosslé doesn't have as many options to address car handling and balance as most in this sim, that's for sure. My approach is to turn laps with more or less the default setup and see what it needs in the three cornering phases, and then fool around with various things that correct it. You're a veteran sim racer as I can attest so I'm sure you've got your own methods. When I do it I think about balance, and tweak to find it. Your comment about different approaches is interesting in this context, because the driver is a big wildcard in finding balance, since that term means different things from driver to driver. But still, entry oversteer is entry oversteer, regardless of how we got there. And there are surefire mechanical ways to either increase or decrease this behavior. The challenge with this car is those options are so few. Makes it fun, simple cars like this. Frank and I were running some trainer stuff in AMS2 and it's the same deal. Basically, springs and tire pressure haha.

But yeah, find the fault and fix it. It's funny, but last night I was lapping the Red Bull Ring in a 911 Clubsport for the leaderboard ladder and I was thinking about exactly this, and how important it is that a driver understands the difference between his own poor driving and a car that is ill-tuned. It's key to fix the faults, because if you're just braking too late and the car's pushing through the turn you try to dial that out but it really just goes too far the other way and now you're losing the rears when the answer is just to pick a proper braking point. I dunno, but that's what was going through my head .

And yeah, your challenge lap is a tidy one. Nicely done.

I just tried a softer anti roll bar at the front and while it possibly made the car slightly easier to handle, it also made it slower, and the kind of driver I am, I think I'm compesating by pushing harder thus becoming even slower. It is just like if I move the brake bias forward I'll want to brake harder and deeper into corners which just makes me outbrake myself. I think you are spot on in observing that if the driver contines to carry any bad habits into the situation, no setup will really ever solve for that.

About the steering wheel rotation I realize that initially my first step to getting a handle on the car was adjusting the wheel settings to take advantage of every extra degree of rotation I could get and I overdid it to the point that my wheel had greater rotation than the steering rack for the car. I've adjusted it back somewhat now.

Is ther any chance of downloading you lap from the sim so I can have a look at your lines?

Not sure if there's a way to watch others' replays. I'll have a look and see if I can find one and post it if you want to see. I have no storage though and SimHQ has a low size limit. I turned a 2:06.5 for the competition and a 2:06.2 in time trial, even if I felt I never put one together entirely.

ARBs are important adjustments for me in finding balance, but this car just doesn't have the range of options. Softer front ARB should help turn in, but yeah, it's already pretty soft at default, and personally I like it stiffer front and back. More responsive right, responds better to input and not sluggish the stiffer you go. As general comments and not advice for you since I reckon you require none, the balance I go on about is trying to find that setup where the fronts and rears are ready to let go at the same time. Or more accurately, the rears just a touch sooner to get some desired oversteer, but just a little. Controlled oversteer is fast. You mentioned lift oversteer being desirable and I agree. The 'steer with your feet' thing we talk about often. But not too much and that's the art, finding that proper balance each driver seeks. If spinning on corner entry when losing grip at the rear, a softer front ARB would exacerbate this by making the front stick even more and offsetting the balance with the rears, making those rears break lose more easily.

If the rears are breaking loose and causing a spin, the fronts have too much grip or the rears too little. Two sides of the same coin. With limited roll bar tuning on this car maybe springs would be the answer, stiffer front/softer rear to keep so much weight from going forward under braking. The engine braking setting works sort of like diff adjustments and increasing this could help too. Tire pressures also work in the same way as springs, but more finely.

My experience with ACC sort of opened my eyes too in using rake to tune handling. I had always viewed ride height as a simple thing to ensure I had the car as low as it would go without bottoming or to ride the worst kerbs. I didn't think of using it in terms of balance. But it's vital in those ACC cars and I got with it. Raising the front and/or lower the rear would both serve to get weight off the front on to the rear to help with oversteer. My issues with the Crosslé seem to have been rather the opposite of yours and I raised the rear a few notches to help balance the cornering behavior to suit me. Perhaps you might do the reverse and see if it has any effect?

It's all a bit of a black art anyway. But it's one of the things I like most about this sim racing thing, setting up my cars to both suit me and go fast, or that's the goal anyway. I've never felt much satisfaction with using other drivers' setups. But I enjoy the chase of finding mine.It seems to me that many if not most sim drivers pay little attention to this side. But I think it's important even when using downloaded setups. Gotta suit yourself.

I really appreciate your input and suggestions Derek, both have inspired me to experiment a bit with the setup. Softening the rear springs made the car more docile, again at the cost of precision and speed and I felt that this solution led to me running out of track, since the car didn’t respond as quickly on steering input.

I am now back with the default setup, but with a new appreciation for its virtues.

And I imagine a very vocal French driving instructor berating me: “M’sieur, you are certainly not to trail-brake or drift the car ici! Vouz must learn to be smooth; slow in-fast out. Comprend?”

No worries, it's nice to have some discussion around here.

In light of that I hopped back in to RR and spent more time fooling with chassis setup and see if I could go any faster. Some stuff worked, some stuff didn't, and then I have to consider all of my own mistakes as we said. I managed to find a little time, dropping the laptime to 2:05.3 in the leaderboard challenge. The replay archive in RR is a bit of a mess, but I think I found the right one. However it isn't stamped with any laptime nor is that displayed in the replay. All it says is 'all time best'. I watched the replay and I locked up three times haha, but I guess it was a good one. Good enough for 23rd on the boards, but the car's new so give it time.

Unfortunately I can only attach image files or pdf's here.

In general terms I altered the default setup with a slightly softer front spring to help bite on turn in, which I was struggling with --entry understeer, especially in those slow corners. I am also running the engine braking at 2, which is several clicks south of default. Again to help rotate the car when throttle off. I fooled around quite a bit with ride height at both ends, and am running a forward rake, raised slightly at both ends. 5.4 and 6.2 I believe. This should set a touch more weight on the ass end than default, but is higher overall. I have the brake bias at 51/49 haha and still not sure that's enough. Any farther and it might swap ends when I touch the pedal! Still locking them up but it's just me being bad at it.

The Crosslé 90F at Circuit de Charade (might be a puff of brake lock in there somewhere ) Is this the same track as Clermont Ferrand that we used to run in GPL?

Well done Derek! Your times are impressive.

I've managed a slight improvement but my consistency is neither here nor there.

Circuit de Charade is a shortened version of the classic Clermont Ferrand we know from GPL. I think there might also be a version of Charade in GPL but can't remember. Wiki page

Thanks. yes it is the site of that track, but not that track. A new track. Well, it's a good one, especially for this class of car.

Maybe Frank will catch wind of this and give this combo a go. He isn't a big fan of RR, but this is the sort of stuff that would be straight up his alley.

My theoreticals are in the 2:04s but I can't put one together. Overdriving.

I wish RR had a better replay system so we could easily identify and share individual laps. One big replay file with no lap time information is not a lot of fun.

You mention a theoretical lap time, is there a tool or how do you calculate that? A Replay Analyzer would be cool, if such a thing existed for RR.

I use Crew Chief to help me indentify the track limits. Very cool piece of software.

I use the default gearing and only use first for the hairpin but am in doubt if I would benefit from using first gear in other parts of the lap.

Overdriving is my biggest problem. I try to tell myself that I must prioritize and maximize exit speed but then I start breaking later and harder into corners and my exit speeds drop and my laptimes suffer.

When you do leaderboard challenge mode you can see this. Turn a few laps then come in. Click the little circle next to your laptimes and it shows the theoretical along with sector times, but only from that batch of laps I think.

Yeah, RR is long in the tooth and it shows compared to some of the other recent titles. I like it because the leaderboards are permanent and there's good content with all the cars and tracks.

AMS2 has a number of the modern touches that RR could benefit from. One of those that I really like is you can select up to four ghosts for hotlapping. Like your PB, vehicle record, class record and fastest friend. Four ghosts is cool.

Crew Chief is good, yes agreed. Don't always remember to start it though....

Got it. My current theoretical lap time is a 2.06.15. My best so far is a 2.06.4. That turn one is killing me!

Nice lap!

Yeah, turn one is a tweener. Still not sure if it's faster to take in second or third gear, though so far my fastest laps were third gear.

You talked about gearing before and you can't actually change this on this car right? I'm dropping to first gear on all the slowest corners, maybe three of them? I'd have to run another lap to be conscious of it I guess. Manson, Champeaux and Marlboro for sure (I looked at a track map to see corner names.) This car could sure use fifth gear haha, but that's one of the quirks that makes it fun.

Last night I went retro. Not quite Jens' Goodwood Festival of Speed retro as it has a LCD display and some buttons on the wheel. But I spent a couple hours in the McLaren MP4/6, Senna's title-winning ride from 1991 in Automobilista. What a fookin' screamer. I took it out to Spa 1993 with the old Bus Stop, and I was back in Grand Prix 2 or something haha. What a delight. It's a Honda V-12 and this thing is wailing banshees. Oh man, the cars sounded so good then. Also did some laps at Interlagos and Portugal's Cascais for a leaderboard event. Absolutely love driving this car. As a Brazilian developer, Reiza obviously likes to pay homage to Senna and the cars he drove, and there are a number of McLaren F1 cars in the sim.

But the MP4/6 is pure bliss.It is the last car to win a Formula 1 title with a manual gearbox.

The photo mode in AMS2 is funky.

Wiki says the MP4/6 was the only car to win the F1 Championship with a 12 cylinder engine in Vee configuration. Those 12 legged monsters sounded great. The MP4/? In RR felt pretty ok too I thought, from my brief outing.

Did you catch the videos on its grandfather, the MP4/4? There are several hours of excellent entertainment on the JayEmm YouTube channel.

On Charade, as mentioned, I only use first gear in Marlboro, all other corners I take in second, so I’m amazed that you can get the speed to get to third. Wow! Maybe that is why I was confused by a video I saw of a 2.02 lap on YouTube; I couldn’t figure the gears.

The left-hand kink to Manson had me fooled for a long time before I figured that the tighter line was faster, even with a big lift. This car track combo really is technical!

Lovely screenshots Derek.

I don’t think you can change the gears in the Challenge but must confess to not even having tried to do so.

Thanks. Sometimes you try on a car for size and it just feels like it fits like a glove.

Now that I think about it, a glove is just as likely to not fit as any other article of clothing, no? What an odd idiom or whatever it is.

But yeah, I like this car so much I think I'll run a championship if I can put together a reasonable schedule. There are a number of similar F1 cars, McLarens, like the MP4/5B and down the line so maybe I should give each of them a run out.

No, I hadn't seen the video Jens, but thanks for the heads up.

About Charade... yeah, it's the sort of track you can find your own groove. It's old school, the tarmac feels old, when they laid it down on the ground as it was, rather than camber in the turns. I doubt I'm running an ideal line, and anyway in any given six laps I've probably run five lines ya know? It's a difficult track to be very consistent. The section after Manson, I think called le Golf, is one of my weak spots, but it's so important for lap time to come out of here at top speed. You want to get on the throttle as early as possible before the long straights, but it's so easy to get it a little wrong and lose those critical tenths all the way down the straight. This track and car combo has really got that vintage mojo.

Found a nice spot of time in the Crosslé by experimenting with softer springs. Dropped both front and rear by two or three notches. I can't be more precise, because after running a new PB by some distance I went to save my setup and hit load instead of save! Derp. Tried to remember any changes I had made since last saving and not sure I got it right, as I then went and hit the competition again but was four tenths slower. Turned a 2:04.4 in time trial.

And yeah, I paid more attention and I am dropping to first gear at least five or six times through the lap. My gearing is default because I can't alter it. If I could I'd make the gaps closer instead of having first and second so tall and then third and fourth so close I reckon. But yeah, I drop to first for turn two, the righthander, and then again climbing the hill to the left, and then again in the chicane before the straight, and then in the hairpin at the bottom of the straight, then the hairpin after the next downhill straight, then the one to the right and the final turn too. That's six I think. Yeah, a shared replay would be good in place of that description lol.

The Crosslé/Charade combo looks really nice and I´ m sure I would like it a lot.

Haven´ t installed RaceRoom right now and didn´ t touch my PC for any racing action during the last months. Pretty much gave up on it after Derek´s and my attempts with Automobilista 2´ s online features.

Recently caught the rally bug again and gave WRC Generations a try. Good game but noth that much of a difference to the predecessor WRC 10 apart from the new hybrid cars.

Ended up buying the latest World of Outlaws - Dirt Racing game just before christmas and enjoying it tremendously on my PS5 to my surprise.

Didn´ t know much about dirt racing except doing a few practise laps back in iRacing years ago. But the excellent career mode and the intense on track action got me hooked.

Playing with my old G29 wheel without any assists really feels like a workout sometimes.

Here is a short video of my last race of the season with the 360 Sprint cars to give you an impression how it looks and drives: