Tip from the Track - Week 1

Posted by: GeneralELive

Written by Eric "General E" Earley, Forza 2 Professional for the Carolina Core

Hey guys, all of us at the CORE thought it would be great for the racing community to help the up and coming drivers. Each week Mark and I will be working together to write a comprehensive feature introducing racing techniques and tips that are very important in the road to becoming a top racer. We also plan to get input each week from other CGS racers on if and how the Technique of the Week helped them improve. We will be covering many different topics. Some topics will be common knowledge to most of our readers, but for others it may shine a light on a new technique. If one week's tip isn’t new to you then just wait for the next week, one little adjustment to your racing technique can make all the difference. Through learning and implementing these racing techniques you too will have all the knowledge needed to race for a spot on one of the Championship Gaming Series franchises.

Carolina CORE Tip from the Track – Week 1:
#1. Learning to drive the manual transmission.

Well there it is, probably the first and most important thing to do to improve every part of your racing skills. Learning to shift the car yourself with manual gears is probably one of the harder techniques to learn, but the payoff is far greater than the sacrifice.

To fully understand why manual is better than automatic we must first discuss each individually. When driving a race car with an automatic transmission (AT), your car will automatically shift to the next gear at its RPM limit. You don’t have control over what gear you are in through the corners, you are at the mercy of the RPMs of the car. With that being said on almost every track in the game there is at least one turn where the car will be in between gears. This happens when the optimum speed through the turn puts the RPMs right at the RPM limit of one of the gears. With the RPMs at this limit, the car will not always end up in the correct gear causing massive speed loss down the straight-aways. When driving an automatic transmission you never know exactly what gear the car will go in through the turns which causes the driver to not have complete control over the car.

Everything the AT does wrong, the manual transmission (MT) fixes. With a manual transmission, you have complete control over the car on every point of the race track. You can pick and choose what gears are appropriate for each turn and straightaway. A perfect example of this is with the CGS car/track combo TVR/Tsukuba. With an automatic transmission the car will run each of the hairpins in 1st gear, however with the manual transmission you can place the car in 3rd gear around each hairpin. Running the car in 3rd gear will take off more than 1 second. I decided to get a couple CGS guys together (OPTX-Sackamonjaro, 3D-Comebackdan) and run 3 laps with the AT on Tsukuba, the results tell the whole story.

The Average of our best individual laps combined with MT: 51.298

The Average of our best individual laps combined with AT: 52.534

That is quite the difference, having full control of the gears through the turns allows you to come off the turn in the best gear possible. The best way to figure out the correct gear to be in is to watch the replays of the top times for the given track you are doing. Once you see which gear each turn should be taken in, the rest is just monkey see, monkey do. When switching to manual gears you will also find that the car will be much more stable through the turns, and the car will be slightly faster on the straight-aways. This occurs due to being in a more suitable gear for the turns and being able to hold the gear slightly longer before shifting. CGS drivers' thoughts on MT compared to AT:

Optx - Sackamanjoro
"I have always driven manual, but I would never consider auto because you have no chance to drive the race car smoothly through the corners."

3DNY - Comebakdan
"I started driving manual in Moto GP and the difference between MT and AT is the amount of control you have over the car. MT allows you to come off the turns in the best gear at the best RPM."

With all this good stuff being said, I need to address the level of difficulty to make the change from AT to MT. For the average person, it will probably take between two to four weeks to fully adjust to the change. It depends mainly on the determination and dedication you are willing to put in. Once you have a handle on the car and an understanding of your new skill, I guarantee you will see an improvement of at least .5 tenths of a second a lap and it could be as high as 2+ second for some of the new racers. Driving a MT is the starting point in a road to success; many of the tips over the next couple months will only be possible with a MT. I encourage and even challenge everyone reading this that is driving AT to go out and make a conscious effort to drive MT. The benefit will be greater than you can believe.

Thank you to Sackamonjaro and Comebakdan for their part in this week's Tip from the Track. Next week we will have a new technique with more input from other CGS racers.