After getting all golds with the pad shorty after release, I finally managed to fluke the right combination of stick jerks and button mashes, and got diamond on Monza this afternoon... but it wasn't easy. Despite consistently being 2-3 10th's up after Curva Grande, most laps were binned at the 2nd chicane... if not there then Lesmo 1, and if I made it past there, Ascari
Eventually I managed to get a good T1, with a half decent Roggia, lost everything at Lesmo 1, got a narrow lead again out of Lesmo 2, didn't screw up Ascari, and despite seeing LH pull ahead half way through Parabolica, got a better exit and beat diamond by half a tenth at the line.
Being A+ with a wheel at least meant I knew what I was supposed to be doing (lines etc)... unfortunately I'm probably scraping in to B at best with the pad, so actually doing it was completely a different thing
I've also had another go at some of the other tracks, and I'm only a few 10ths off Diamond at Maggiore, DT, Brands and Willow (haven't been back to Suzuka or Nurb GP yet)... on all 3 tracks I can do OK in the 1st 2 sectors, but putting a 3rd sector together consistently enough is a bit challenging to say the least. It's the usual thing with TTing... 10% of laps I get a good T1, 5% of the laps I get a good T1 in I get a good T2, only to screw up T3. The chicane at DT is particularly frustrating.
Respect to those pad users who've diamonded all of these
One thing I learnt as a decidedly rubbish pad user...
We all know the car is an understeering POS. And the temptation is to crank up the controller sensitivity to try and make it feel more responsive... I know, I did this myself. But if your finger dexterity on the stick is as bad as mine this is counter productive. If you can't make accurate small inputs on the stick more sensitivity just makes the car twitch, and each twitch scrubs off speed... I learnt this from countless runs through Curva Grande, and eventually ended up using a sensitivity of 2... got to try to be as smooth with the stick as a wheel user can be.
Oh, and I used BB -2... despite being a massive trail braker with a wheel, I couldn't manage it with the button on the pad, so just did all my braking in a straight line.
For now I'm going to say that's it for me unless I get my wheel over here (I'm confident I'd diamond most relatively easily with a wheel).. though I'll probably get dragged back to it at some stage... TTing is a compulsion for some.