Well... First of all, I want to apologise for quitting the race early.
I was mad, so mad with that car I couldn't be focused enough...
Didn't expected anything for quali. First mistake was the obliteration of
@Totalrose on the corkscrew during his first flying lap
. Still managed to get P4. Not that bad if we consider this was my first ever race on this track on GT Sport.
The race went outrageously bad. I was constantly fighting against the car and obviously the spin was inevitable. Then it's just the butterfly effect that takes place. The car spins, so it wears out the rear tires, which overheat at the same time so the car becomes even less stable and spins again a few turns afterwards. I prefered to finish my race into the pits instead of being a mobile chicane for everyone, as I've lost all motivation at this point...
It's wierd because I experienced the best and the worst with this car accross this season. I really wanted to understand what's the main issue. I took a few hours to analyse every replay from every race and I think I finally know why I struggle with this car :
This video is composed by 4 different laps. The first two were my fastests laps from Round 1 and 2 and and the two others were my fastest lap of Round 4 and my last lap before pitting.
We can see several things here :
- Yes, it's possible to go fast with this car, I can't deny that.
- The main reason why the 458 was good at Monza and Spa was because the weak tyre degradation on those tracks. We all know this car eats the rear quite fast but the shape of those tracks permits to the car to exploit his potential longer. I'm not saying that the car is easy to drive on fresh tyres. It's still required finesse on both tracks.
- The 458 hates slow corners. Especially when trailbraking is a thing. Usually when I drive an FR car , I like to have a positve brake bias so I can "throw" and rotate the car into the corner. The thing with this car is the fact that she rotate too much. You can see my inputs on the video at 3:09 when I needed to countersteer a little and for a whole lap from 6:19 till the end. The comment sense at this point would be to play with the brake bias but I've done every race on -5. That mean the car can't be more stable than this. It was also a big issue at Brands and Laguna, especially when tyres started to fade off.
- The car also have problems with curbs. I have the casio chicane from suzuka in mind. During that race, I remembered closing in to @Lost Sheltie and losing 3 tenths at this exact point because the car couldn't pass that curb without loosing stability (most FR cars can easily pass that by smashing the throttle down).
If we resume, this car destroys his rear tyres, tries to kill you at every braking zone, doesen't like to turn at low speed and have issues with curb. You may ask at this point : "Why telling us all of this? It's sounds like a rant". Is this a rant? To be honest a little bit. But if I wrote this, it's because maybe some of you guys have tips to help me to drive this car. Some people were able to qualify on World Tours with this. That means theres a way to keep this car straight.
Quite a long post eh? Thank you if you took the time to read everything.đź‘Ť