(apologies in advance for the long post. Those who don't like reading long posts should probably skip this, lol)
Had a pretty big day in this TT today.
I had a bunch of sessions for the previous week where my lap times seemed to completely stop improving. My best lap was 59.500 way back on like December 12th, and then went for like 9 days where the majority of my completed laps were around 1:00.0-1:00.3, and occasionally a 59.9 or once in a blue moon a 59.8.
So, I finally decided to go back and re-try some of the previous tunes I had cycled through beforehand, just to make sure the setup I had settled on was really the best one for me, and to make sure it wasn't a situation where I incorrectly assumed it was, when in reality it was just that I happened to be improving on the actual track itself during the process of trying out different tunes, and thus mistakenly thinking I saw improvement in some latter tune that was actually slower for me than some earlier tune, if that makes sense, lol.
Anyway, sure enough, looks like that's exactly what happened, because as soon as I switched back to an older previous tune, which I had stopped using due to thinking it was slower for me, I was shocked to see my average completed lap times immediately drop by a good half second or more. Was running a steady stream of 59.6-9.8's, and occasional 59.5's for a full session. Had a bunch of laps where I was ahead of my 59.5 best-lap pace, but blew it in the final corner. Also red-lapped a 59.4 and a 59.3 somewhere in that session. Then put in another short session a few hours later, and finally beat my 59.500 best lap (just barely) with a 59.4. Then ran another 59.4 a few minutes later to beat it by another few thousandths of a second.
Took another break for a few minutes and decided that since my arms weren't in too much pain yet, and my 1st and 2nd sector times were consistently matching my previous all-time fastest times for those sectors, I figured I was kind of "in the zone" and should try to take advantage of the muscle memory while it was there, and put in one more 20-30 minute session and see if I could get a big drop in my best lap time, for once and for all.
Glad I tried one last session for the night, because I ended up dropping to 59.3 and then 59.2 and finally 59.1, all in the span of about 20 minutes! Was getting a new best lap record about once every other lap.
Obv still not exactly amazing times compared to some of the sicker dudes on here, but, I'm still feeling pretty pumped since I feel like I learned a lot today as far as having a better understanding of how to mess around with tunes and settings to get the car to function exactly in line with how I'm trying to drive it, and seeing how sudden and huge of an impact it can make on improving my times. I kinda feel like some of the stuff I learned today might end up being useful in all the future TT's I drive in, not just this one. One of those "profound" moments, as they say
Alright, I'll stop typing now before CoryClifford's eyeballs explode