Pushing Too Hard
Solve overdriving
When do we push too hard in sim racing?
When we oversteer?
When we understeer?
Or both?
I’m currently using a Moza R9 wheelbase, and the base is telling me exactly when I understeer or push too hard into oversteer.
My Simagic P1000 with haptic motors is telling me when the ABS interferes, and I know to ease off the brake or use less steering input to stop the car while braking.
Very nice, spend 2k on gear, and you’ll be fast.
Not exactly.
I’m not gonna lie,
Expensive gear made me more consistent—it does make a difference—but I found something valuable to help figure out when you overdrive your car, aka pushing too hard.
Entry-level wheelbases give you limited FFB, and it can be very hard to spot when you’re overdriving the car.
With this app from Race Element, you can spot what your tires are doing.
When the balloons get big, you have a lot of wheel slip, meaning:
The tire is being pushed to great limits to perform direction changes, creating heat.
When the front balloons turn blue, you’re understeering. The wheels start sliding, and you're using TOO MUCH steering input, or the speed is too high to allow the front tires to rotate the car properly.
When the rear balloons turn red, we have oversteer and the rear tires spin.
In my driving, I actually see this a lot. Now, if they flicker red or blue sometimes, that isn’t so bad. But if you have corners where you see blue and red all the time, you can get info from this that maybe you couldn’t see before.
This is just a small part of the RaceElement overlays that you can use. They also have a great radar that helps you get a better understanding of your positioning on track with cars around you.
RaceElement is a great app because of its low CPU usage, and the overlays are very high FPS.
I asked the founder of the app what makes RaceElement special:
"The fact that the overlays (40+) are not using the GPU but just the CPU—and very low amounts of it—contributes to the fact that most HUDs that require it can run at 60-70 FPS/Hz without stealing precious CPU power away from the game.
Second, the app is currently being converted to support multiple simulators (AC and iRacing so far), meaning we can use the code for a HUD for multiple simulators.
Third, the HUDs are not only visual but some also provide, for example, a Twitch chat bot or even FFB for the Active Triggers of the DualSense (PS5) controller.
Aside from that, for the HUD tab, the app is open source, so other people are able to contribute to development and learn. The authors of a HUD are shown when you hover over them in the left-side list."
I’ve been using this app in my live streams, and sometimes I go back to check how my driving was, also using the tire slip balloons.
I’ve also been using these to figure out how to change my car setups.
I’ve been using the slip balloons to determine what needed to be changed in my car setup pack for the Lamborghini Click here for the lambo pack
The RaceElement app has a lot more features, so check them out Go to Race Element
Cheers,
Arnout