Qualifying Pace

The last few races I've been having an incredibly frustating time trying to figure out what is going wrong. One team seems to be dominating qualifying and the race, but spying on his components reveals that they're much much lower than my car (11% compared to 30 odd %). And my drivers are at least a second off the pace in qualifying. In fact, in today's race, my One driver's fastest lap during the race was 2 seconds faster than his qualifying, how is this possible, I don't think I've ever seen that happen in a motor race apart from wet qualifying session and a dry race.

I don't mind not performing well so long as there's somesort of indication of why, it's almost the first rule of game dev, if things keep happening, even for a good reason, without giving feedback to a player as to why, all you're going to end up with is a frustrated player. if my driver keeps making stupid mistakes, then that's fine, but there should be feedback and a way to apply the feedback to improve (in this case working on mental or something).

I'm just completely at a loss to explain why a team with such an underdeveloped car is able to blitz the field so empathically. We were even on the exact same strategy today. Either this is a bug, or the game is failing to provide sufficient feedback to the player in order for them to understand what is going on.

Also, during one round of pitstops, I pitted 1 lap before another driver and ended up losing almost 15 seconds... in one lap! Unless my team had to replace a nose cone, I can't see how that could be the case.

And since I have a thread open, I notice that while the driver standings seem to order correctly based on finishing postion if the drivers have no points, the constructors standings don't.

I see from your stats that you are a level 3 manager.

As the league you are racing in is password protected I cannot see what level the other managers are at.
It may be that they are higher than you are.

Also cannot compare your staff levels with theirs or view their attributes - The staff of the other managers might have better skills levels than yours and are training them effectively.

I do understand your need for feedback, but I think understanding the game more, as you play it, will be a big help too.
There is a lot of information there - but it can be time consuming finding it all.

Since your in a private league, no one can comment... unless you can post a link to the race result [as no1 can view it without the password]

could be many things, drivers skill, tyre choice, the most obvious for qualifying is going to be what "push setting" you chose for the race or tyre choice, if you choose take big risks on softs your looking at 1s+ from someone on "hold position" regardless or how good drivers are tbh and hards instead of softs your looking at +2s or so again, 

Race itself fastest lap is always faster than qualifying, because theres only 1 lap done for qualifying, during the race the track itself will speed up as it is raced on[+drs & kers can be used]

The other manager and I are very evenly matched in terms of level. Both level 3, so we have access to a very similar staff. There doesn't appear to be any major difference I can notice between staff. In terms of feedback, I'm looking for something in game to explain the difference in pace, everything I can see tells me that we have similar drivers but that the cars are quite a ways apart.

Brady, as I say, in my experience, qualifying laps are almost always faster than race pace.
Take Australia this year:
Pole Time: 1:24.922 Lewis Hamilton
Fastest lap in the race: Jensen Button: 1:29.187

We were both running softs. Are you saying that the push setting for your first stint effects qualifying? That's ludicrous, surely a driver would push as hard as they possibly can during qualifying independantly of what happens during the race? I'd be interested if a dev could confirm that.

As Brady was saying, in this game, race laps are usually faster than quali laps, that's just how it is in this game. 

I'm not sure if you subscribe, because if you don't, and don't view the 2D and this other person does, then that is where their advantage possibly lies. If not, it could be their staff (not necessarily meaning the level of the chief designer and tech director, as it could be the amount or level of the staff they hire beyond that).

The only thing I can sympathise with is the qualifying pace. In races, I'm usually fast, but even with equal (or sometimes better) cars, and equal or better drivers, I always lack in qualifying compared to the race. This has nothing to do with the push level or tyre compound either - I'm just slower most of the time in qualifying. 

For instance, in my Championship winning season, despite having the best car for the best part of half a season, I only managed pole once or twice, and this was with drivers that were level 11/12 at the time, compared to those who were level 9/10. Plus, if you look at the graph, my drivers look a whole lot better. So there must be something I am missing.

1st point .... in real life they do free practice, then 3 stage qualifying so the track will be covered in rubber and times will increase as more laps are done, in game only 1 lap is done per car in qualifying, so in relation the track will still be relatively slow.... once 32 cars have done 50 laps+ round it will be much faster [lap speeds will generally get faster every pit stop if weather conditions stay the same]

2nd point... Yes and IMO its a kind of trade off because theres not a "in depth" qualifying [all drivers do the lap in exactly the same conditions with low fuel] to a point this is "unfair" if i am outqualified and then help up for x amount of time [until drs is activated {and kers cannot be used until fully charged] by someone who is running twice as much fuel as me

Long term, hopefully they develop a similar qualifying to real life [i've no idea how complicated to do it would be, but this would solve a lot of peoples issues

@Jamie as far as i've learned so far certain "skills" are important for qualifying and a different set for the actual race had a quick look at your drivers though [especially the woman] and she does look much better than a level 13 tbh and should easily out-qualifying and beat drivers even if they had a ~10% better car than you [as happens in my league] or does it come down to the "mystical" talent skill which only you can see

EDIT... Forgot to add there is a guide coming along with the Q1 patch [Tuesday i think] that you will find useful

Thanks for the responses everyone.

@Jamie I doubt it's the number of staff since they seem to primarily concerned with developing and fitting parts to the car, which I'm definitely far ahead on. I'm a subscriber, I've been present for the races, he hasn't :) But the problem seems to be mostly that I lack qualifying pace, I have reasonable race pace but seem to end up being stuck behind other drivers. As I say, I'm not sure what exactly I'm missing, but that's what's so frustrating, nothing seems to indicate where I need to focus to improve it.

@Brady The track gets more rubbered in during the race in real life, but they still come no where near to qualifying times, engine modes etc are different. I dunno, perhaps the user guide will shine a little more light on it, or a dev could give us a little more insight.

Thanks very much for the response Jack. It would be great if the race strategy didn't effect qualifying pace, but for the moment at least I know where I might be losing time in qualifying. Although I still find it odd that such an underdeveloped car would have such better pace than mine, even given the difference in the push value. I imagine balancing all the various stats in order to get a realistic race must be quite a difficult process, but I would have thought that car development would be one of the more dominant factors.

Thanks again for the response, and I look forward to future enhancements, since for the most part I've very much been enjoying the game.

I haven't been able to develop KERS yet, still only a few races into my first season. So that wouldn't explain why my Quali lap was 2 seconds slower than my race fastest lap.

Just a quick thing i forgot earlier on, if you running 2d you should be constantly changing how hard you push to keep tyres at the optimum temperature {try to keep them grey} blue is cold and red is hot, as soon as your tyres go dark red you will start losing massive amounts of time.

If you are constantly overheating your tyres or on a bad strategy, having a better car will make no difference at all...

You race lap will ALWAYS be faster than qualifying lap (as explained above) but the lap records are massivly faster because kers was used for a whole lap [about 5s gain over a normal lap time]

Grey tyres? Really? I thought very light pink would be ideal?

Also, what they said. If you are going to use 2D you always want 5/5 "take big risks" for qualifying. Especially when you're on soft tyres, the speed difference is huge in qualifying.

I subscribed for that very reason. It's just so much faster being able to do so imo.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. My qualifying pace was definitely improved, although still a few tenths off this other guy, which I'm still trying to understand. He also completely blitzed me in the race by about a second a lap, even though I was managing tyre temperatures and his were burning bright red, we were both on same tyres as well. So there's clearly still one or two things I need to understand. Much better car and similarly skilled drivers, plus managing tyre temperatures, I should at least be able to keep a similar pace, if not better.

It depends - Look at my last race. 100% length, Silverstone, 8 degrees.

I had both my drivers on 5/5 push hard (since I was using 2D I could back them off in the race), 36L softs for first stint, so they both qualified on the same strategy.

One of my drivers qualified on pole with a 1.19.4, and the other qualified 7th with a 1.20.1. Now 0.7 seconds difference is huge.

Both of their stats are very similar, and they usually qualify within .1 of each other, so I have no idea why there was such a big gap this race. That said though, the slower of the two is still only a level 5 driver and the other one is a level 6 driver, so there must be a big difference in pace between the two.

I guess what I am trying to say is that even if the drivers look similar in stats, there can still be a huge difference in pace - Like my two drivers for example.

i believe that drs and kers are only used in races though, hence the race laps being quicker than quali

A few tenths in qualifying is nothing...  our top 12 yesterday were within .5s . Could be drivers health, or the fact that some skills are more important for qualifying than other skills, so he may might just have a better drivers

I'm pretty sure that when tyres are dark red, if you do not have 2d they do not lose as much time as they should, although this should be addressed with the patch today as even free users will be given some race controls

If you want more detail on your race etc, then pm me letting me know what time you race at, and send me a link to your race so i can watch it live