For your practice runs:
(1) Go to LOAD, then load my setup that says "All 50s for setup".
(2) On the Car Setup page, click on Engineer's Advice up near the top of the screen and make a mental note of what he says.
(3) Go back to Car Setup and set your initial values based on the Engineer's Advice. If it's "medium", leave it at 50. If it's "low" or "soft", put it somewhere 0-34. If it's "high" or "firm/hard", put it 66-100.
(4) Make sure your Experimentation slider (the very top one) is maxed out to 100.
(5) Select the proper tires.
(6) Do your first run.
(7) Adjust your settings based on the feedback received. You will find that most experienced players use a 16-8-4-2-1 method. So, if you originally had a slider set to 25, and you get feedback and the proper setting is higher (25-100), then you move the slider to 41 (a gap of 16). You do your next run and you get feedback again showing that setting is 25-41. Set the slider to 33 (a gap of 8), and run again. Keep cutting the gap in half. If you don't get feedback, just leave the slider where it is and run again.
(8) Once your runs are complete, or you have everything spot on, then post your setup in Team Talk. Note that you need to post the bands, not just your current setting.
A couple of notes:
- The settings that the Engineer recommends are an average for both front and rear. So, if he says low tire pressure, the average of the two settings will be somewhere in the 0-34 range. But that might mean front tire pressure is 16 and rear tire pressure is 48 - rear pressure looks medium, but the average of the two is 32, so the Engineer says it's low.
- If brake bias is "loose", that means it's towards the rear (50-100). If it's "safe", that means it's towards the front (0-50).
Posting setups:
If you decide to buy Kool Tools, it has a function that will automatically post your setup in Team Talk. Until then, you just have to manually post it. Kool Tools will also show you your teammate's settings, so it makes it easier to dial in the setup.
There are 2 reasons it's important to post the setup here:
(1) If either (or both) teammate does not have KT, it allows them to work together to get the setup worked out.
(2) If the weather changes between practice and the warmup, the setup gets thrown off. You've probably seen that happen - you'll get front wing down to 17-20 in practice, and then you come back to the warmup and now it's showing 12-46. If you have the setup posted to Team Talk, then you don't have to start all over again to finish the setup.
Typical settings:
Here are my Driving Style settings:
Overall Speed/Pace:
94
94
(If I was in a faster car, like a Ferrari or Red Bull, I wouldn't run those quite as high. But I almost always have them >90.)
Aggression:
67
67
Use of Tyres:
0
50
(I haven't settled on a good number for the Wet tire slider setting. I could probably go higher than 50, as the Inters and Wets seem to last quite a while.)
Mechanical Sympathy:
43
(I rarely go above 50 with this in any of my games.)
Pit Stops
71
100
(I always run the team setting at 100. Occasionally I'll get a disastrous pit stop that costs me an extra 10-15sec, but most of the time the team nails the stops. My setting for the driver is probably a little high, I might try bumping that down to ~65.)
Race Start:
100
(I always use 100. It seems to pay off for me more often than it bites me in the ass.)
Tire usage:
For practice and warmup I normally use the harder tires, again so that I can save the softer tires for qualifying and the race.
Race/pit strategy depends on the number of laps, the tires that we're given, and where I end up qualifying. Typically I run the softer tires in the race, but if I qualify poorly I might run the harder tires so that I can do fewer pit stops and try to make up positions by spending less time in the pits.
One thing that helps with tires/pit strategy is to go to the Driving Style page and set your dry "Use of Tires" slider to 0. That's particularly helpful if we're running the Super Soft compound, as it helps make them last long enough to be useful.
Basics:
A couple of things to get started:
(1) Our cars should both run the same setup. Before qualifying or the race (after I've done my testing runs), on the Car Setup page click on the LOAD button and then click on my name. That will transfer my setup to your car. Note that in the Hungary race my setup was at 99.6%, but yours was at 81.3% - imagine how much better you could have done if you had used my setup!
(2) For practice and warmup, your Thinker driver characteristic means that you can put the Experimentation slider (the very top slider) all the way up to 100%. You will never crash or have a mistake on a run, and you'll get better feedback. (The same thing is true of Charisma - I always chose one of those two driver characteristics, because it makes it much easier to dial in the setup.)
Please let me know when you've read this stuff, and let me know what questions you have.