Driving Tips & Tweaks Section:
Last updated - 12 July 2004
GPL Driving Tips; GPL Tweaks; GPL Links;
Buy a Steering Wheel:
Buy a Steering Wheel:
First tip, Go and buy a steering wheel. You'll generally be faster using a wheel than a joystick or the keyboard. (Although there are one or two notable exceptions out there?) Second, if you are new to GPL, don't try to drive fast. What? I hear you say. Well GPL is unlike most other sims in that it is VERY HARD to master. You will crash a lot, You will find it hard to keep the car on the track, You will get frustrated. Why? because you are driving too fast, thats why.
Start off by just trying to keep the car on the track, do not try to drive fast at all. Try this for about ten laps. After those first few laps you will be getting a feel for how the car responds to your controls. You will also be (subconsciously) learning the circuit. Once you are reasonably familiar with the car and track, try and do one lap where you stay on the track for the whole lap. Now go out and just try to beat that last lap, BUT! you must keep the car on the track at all times. Keep doing this, just trying to better your own fastest lap, no-one elses, no World Records, just your own lap record. Every lap, try to brake into each corner a tiny bit later, try to accelerate out of each corner a tiny bit earlier, you will be amazed how fast you will become after a relatively short period, you will also have learned the circuit in a fairly short time too.
Learn to balance the car through the turns with the throttle. At the entry to a fast corner, where it's not necessary to brake, (eg: turns 1, 2 & 3 at Watkins Glen) release the throttle slightly as you turn in, this throws the car weight onto the front tyres, reduces understeer & the car will turn in a lot sharper. As you exit blend in the throttle until you are flat out. Provided you don't spin the rear wheels, you should be facing the racing line as you exit the turn, but you should also be carrying more speed since you're already on the throttle before the turn finished. This extra speed will be carried all the way to the next braking point.
Use all the available circuit. When aproaching a corner, you must be on the outside edge of the circuit. The more space between your tyres and the edge of the track, the slower your maximum cornering speed will be and your laptime will also reflect this. When you hit the apex the car should be as close to the inside edge of the track as possible. The deeper you are at the apex the later you'll be able to power out of the corner. The same goes for exiting corners. Let the car drift right to the edge of the track on the exit from a corner. You can always accelerate faster in a straight line than in a corner so the straighter you can make a corner, the faster you'll be able to enter, and exit it.
Try not to lock the brakes (I still do this a lot!) It's hard not to, but it's slower than not locking them. If you lock the brakes, and yet still make the apex, then you could've braked a fraction later, without locking them, and therefore gained some time. When the car loses grip under heavy braking, the car will want to start to drift wide and eventually go into a spin. Even if you release the brakes slightly so the wheels aren't locked the car will continue to drift, resulting in a very sideways car and a slow exit from the corner.
Always brake, then change down through the gears. Not the other way around. Changing down before braking or as you brake can cause the car to spin. Brake down to (or just slightly above) the entry speed into the corner, then change down to the correct gear, then accerate through and out of the corner. The racing line should be slightly more conservative than the qualifying line. You need to complete every lap in a race to get to the finish, so take the long term view that going slightly slower but finishing, is better than going faster (for a few laps) and spinning out completely and not completing the race. The dark "groove" that appears in the game is not neccessarily the fastest line around the track. Try to be ouside the groove before you turn into a corner, inside the groove at the apex of a corner, and outside the groove at the exit of a corner.
Try not too get too much wheelspin. When your into a nice 4 wheel drift and the wheels start to spin, don't hold it flat out, Back off just a little, enough to stop the wheelspin, but not too much so as to lose the nice drift, and then ease the power back down gently. While the wheels are spinning, you are almost certainly not gaining speed, and possibly losing some, and risk spinning out completely?
When trying to learn a new GPL track, first try to get the line right, this is where most speed is gained and most speed is also lost. Then work at trying to increase the cars exit speed from the corner, and then lastly, after many, many (probably hundreds of laps?) work on trying to brake as hard and as late as is possible, this is where the least time is gained and also lost. Line, corner exit speed, and braking, in that sequence.
Why is it that corner exit speed is more important than late braking? Because the cars speed down the straight is determined by the cars exit speed from the previous corner. The car spends, say about 70% of its time going down straights and only about 10% of its time braking. So the advantage gained from a good corner exit greatly outweighs any advantage from a late braking corner entry. Also, consider that the corner exit speed is determined by what the car does earlier in the corner, if the car has arrived at the corner on or past the limit of traction because of a late braking move, then the car is going to find it hard to take the rest of the corner well. We all know that it may feel fast to brake late and deep into corners, but the stopwatch will usually strongly disagree.
GPL TWEAKS & TIPS:
SMALL MENU SCREENS IN GPL?
To get rid of the small GPL menu screens, you need to change the GPL Override setting to =0 in your Glide.ini file in your GPL directory. This is how it should look.....
[Glide]
GPL Override=0
Go to: The US Pits Webpage: and get the openGL patch.
This will allow non 3Dfx/Rendition cards to work (eg: TNT/TNT2/GeoForce, etc). You may then get a bad flickering in the mirrors. If you are using the 3.53 TNT/GeoForce reference drivers, enable the "Use Block Transfer" setting to fix the problem (in control panel/display options). If you are using the 2.08 drivers, this fix can be applied to any driver version by simply changing the value of the "FlippingControl" setting in the registry to "0". Depending on the driver version, this setting can be found in:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\RIVA TNT\OpenGL], or
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\Display\0001 \NVidia\OpenGL]
When doing a fresh install, the settings won't appear in the registry until an opengl game is run at least once.
YOU WANT TO INCREASE THE LENGTH OF GPL REPLAYS?
Some people are unhappy that only a certain amount of replay information can be stored by GPL. This is caused by GPL setting a maximum limit to the amount of memery used specifically for replays. You can however, override this and increase the size of the replay memory allowance. NB: To do this you need a minimum of 64MB RAM. Place the following into the core.ini file found on your GPL folder (Back up this file before you tamper with it!)
[Replay] ; number of Kbytes of memory you want to dedicate to the replay buffer ; default value is 2048 (no setting here by default) replayMemoryOverride=49152
Sometimes GPL turns on driver aids if you have changed from one screen to another. It then keeps doing this no matter how many times you reset or turn off the driver aids? The solution is to delete the controls.cfg file (Backup this file first!) from gpl/players/player_name, then after you recalibrate and re-assign your controls this should not happen anymore.
Go to your GPL directory and find the Driver.ini file. Backup this file first!. Change the "global_hype_scaling" value to 1.20 (This equates to the AI drivers at roughly 80% potential) or whatever value you feel happy with? A higher value than 1.00 slows down the AI, a lower Value than 1.00 speeds them up.
(Sometimes caused by a warp or clock smash) and you want to change them or reset them? To change your fastest lap records do the following: Go to the GPL,players, player_name, player.ini file, and edit the entries, (the times are given in seconds, so a one minute and twelve second laptime would appear as 72.000 seconds ). To change your fastest track record (this is the record that is on the track map page), go to the GPL, tracks, track name, record.ini file, and edit the entry.
Some Internet Links to GPL related websites: (See my UK GPL section for UK GPL League members websites).
The Paddock Website:
The UK GPL League Homepage:
An Excellent GPL Driving Tips Webpage:
Bart Westra's GPL Website:
The Apex GPL website:
The Fastlane GPL Website:
Eagle Womans Simracing Website:
Colin's GPL Related Page:
GPL LAN Events Page:
Link to rec.autos.simulators (RAS) Newsgroup:
My UK GPL League Page:
Back to My GPL Page:
Back to Homepage:
