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GTE - PRO tire performance

Miroslav Davidovic

Miroslav Davidovic

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Hey,

I was thinking about this the last few races and thought it might be worth at least a healthy discussion.
First thing, the tires are awesome and very well done. Not even to talk about the rain and inter tires. Great stuff!

But :) (it has to come, right? :p ), the performance over a stint could be better for the medium sets and the hard sets.
As I have figured we have an avarage of 0.5 performance loss on the mediums and 1sec on the hards.
I am not talking about the Viper BTW just in generall, so please don't confuse this as a personal performance fight. It is about to get things interessting and allow people to run different strategies with the option on the podium aswell.

As it is now I think it is fair to use a lap time of 2.00.00 for calculations. (Spa, Silverstone, Sebring, Sepang etc.)
Now let's take a look at this.

2 min = 120 sec
One average stint is about 25 laps

120 * 25 = 3000 sec = 50 min

Let's assume a good driver is able to double stint the mediums that would be then for softs

6000 sec = 100 min

and for mediums we add just 0.5 sec for 50 laps, that would be then 25 sec more and we would have
the tire change covered in the pits, right?

But that sadly is not the case in my opinion. The drop of the performance with the medium and the hard tires is just to big IMO. It is either the wear that should get improved or the tires should perform better.

IMO something along these lines would be OK

Mediums instead of 0.5 sec slower, 0.25 would fit much better.
Hards instead of 1 sec, 0,5 would fit. (thinking also about going over three stints with them)

So whilst the simple maths works in theory I think in practice it isn't the case currently as it was ment to be.

Personaly I do not care much about it TBH as I will pretty much allways go for the softs lol but here and there I really think it would give me options on strategies and my team mates aswell. And the thrill to fight against other people on different strategies would be great as I am sure some would use it.

As it is for now there is no fight between tires and strategies really.
And even if some people use mediums or hards, I doubt people are double stinting really and not even talking about three stints on hards. They really just get undrivable for the most part and call for errors and what not. Just really not worth it. Pace drops extremly.

I mean some people do it as far as I know but they are left out of any hopes for podium and not to speak about wins if we are realistic. But this is endurance racing and it actually should be possible and rewarded if people are able to take care about their material. I actually would love to see a dude tripple stinting his tires and being infront of me in his third stint and I have to performe my A.... (Sorry i can't express myself in an adult way, so sometimes I use swearing - but luckily the forum corrects me) of to catch him as he did aswell to keep his tires alive. Would be great, no? But currently this is not working and I think there is room for improvement.

I mean no rush or it can stay as it is aswell, I am fine, but we can at least exchange opinions and experience on this, right?
 
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:D

Nah, nice to hear seriously. We have allready a pretty awesome enviroment here for racing and a few little clicks here and there would make it even better. We are getting to a point where people fight over things just like they do in real life for the same reasons :D
 
I agree with Miro, we need more tyre strategy. As they are now the only real option is running the soft tyre and changing at every stop. Double-stinting mediums or hards isn't even an option. Speaking about GTE only of course.

I've been told that Sepang is harder on tyres than Sebring or VLM tracks in general. But I'll believe it when I see it :D Though I really hope that it will bring the other compounds into play.

Some may have noticed that we did use hards and mediums at Mid-Ohio. We have differing opinions within the team whether all the tyre decisions made that day were actually good ones :D
 
I talk about LMP2 tyres, but I´m reading your posts and it´s more or less the same.

The pace of each tyre depends a lot of the set of the car, the pressure, camber, etc... is not the same the pressure of soft than hard for example.
We have checked all the tyres, and mediums are 0.5 secs faster than hard and soft are 0.5 secs faster than medium, but the degradation is bigger. Other factor is the rubber of track, track temperature, etc...

In our race experience, we won at Sebring due to tyre strategy, because we put soft tyre all the stints, but we was very carefull at the first stint when there was few rubber on track. We prepare the set of the car for this kind of tyre.
You can put hard tyres and do not change in 3 stints, but your pace at each stint will be slower than before, this is normal, you fill the deposit fuel and the tyres are not 100% fresh.

Jimmi would be possible to have in live timming the kind of tyre that have a car? this would be amazing.
 
I'll just echo what everyone else is saying because I tested this in preparation for Sebring. It isn't the initial performance difference on the first few laps. It's that even on the Hard tyre once you've taken it down to say 92% or 90% wear remaining (so wearing just by 8 or 10%), the drop in lap times is considerable. Meanwhile the Soft compound maintains its performance well throughout a stint and doesn't drop off much unless it's abused.

Put more simply, a Soft compound at 65% remaining shouldn't outperform a Hard tyre at 90% remaining or there won't be any real choice in tyre use.
 
On Sebring, we did a combination of a single stint on softs and double stints on meds, and felt these strategies were very similar when looking at 2 stints.
In rFactor 2, the tire wear is not the biggest factor in tire grip; the thermal degradation is. Running your tires hot for a long time will have a lot more influence on grip than the pure tire wear.
 
IMO the tires in LMP1 are decently balanced. However I agree with what Matt says about the grip of the tires. Softs at 50% felt better to me then hards at 80. We didn't see a significant drop like that with the mediums, they seemed to feel decent even around 50%.If the tire wear is higher at Sepang Mediums might not be good for a double stint and I see much of the field on hards again so I don't feel like it's completely unbalanced.
 
Sebring is really low on tyre wear, in the previous races it was impossible to drive on softs. And in my opinion it's logical that 50% softs still give better grip than 80% hards. The softer tyres gives you more speed, but it also means you have to switch tyres during every stop. The hards are slower but give you the possibility to continue without a major drop in times, but you won't be quicker.
 
Robin de Jong said:
Sebring is really low on tyre wear, in the previous races it was impossible to drive on softs. And in my opinion it's logical that 50% softs still give better grip than 80% hards. The softer tyres gives you more speed, but it also means you have to switch tyres during every stop. The hards are slower but give you the possibility to continue without a major drop in times, but you won't be quicker.
Click to expand...

I don't necessarily disagree what what you're saying in principle, regarding 50% vs 80% performance, but it's the highlighted bit that doesn't appear to be the case on the GT cars. The Hard compound does suffer a major drop in times, and quite early, at around 90%. If you try to double-stint them then they begin the second stint at around 80% and are at least 1 second slower than they were when fresh. So now you're close to 2 seconds slower than you would be on a fresh set of Softs, which means it isn't even a worthwhile consideration to try and double-stint them if the time savings on your stop is ~27 seconds. With a stint range of 25 laps you'll still come out well ahead after two stints if you just go for the tyre change.

These are approximate times I'm throwing out, based on memory from my testing, so they may be off a bit and more importantly other drivers might get different results. This is one of the hardest things about tuning tyres is that driving style in rF2 has a major effect on wear and temperature, but my comparisons are "within myself," which is the only reasonable way to talk about it. Comparing between drivers when judging compounds relative to one another usually isn't effective.

It should be clarified again however that the conversation began about, and my comments continue to be about, the GT cars specifically. I suspect the LMP tyres are entirely different or, even if they aren't, the difference in design of the cars leads to different tyre performance. I just got here so I can't be sure but there doesn't seem to necessarily be an issue in the LMP classes. Those classes at Sebring (particularly P1) started on a wide variety of compounds (all three) and used a variety throughout the race. Load the replay and page through the GTE-Pro field and you'll see everyone in contention started on Softs and ran them the whole race.
 
Tyres are not completly different - they do have the same dropoff, but there is 2 real factors here
- Driving style
- Tyres reacting on different cars.
 
OK, good to know. If one confines the discussion to how the different compounds perform relative to one another for a given driver then the factor of driving style can be largely eliminated. A decent test driver, pushing to the same level on one compound versus another, is using the same driving style and therefore a reasonable comparison between the compounds can be made.
 
Matt Sentell said:
I don't necessarily disagree what what you're saying in principle, regarding 50% vs 80% performance, but it's the highlighted bit that doesn't appear to be the case on the GT cars. The Hard compound does suffer a major drop in times, and quite early, at around 90%. If you try to double-stint them then they begin the second stint at around 80% and are at least 1 second slower than they were when fresh. So now you're close to 2 seconds slower than you would be on a fresh set of Softs, which means it isn't even a worthwhile consideration to try and double-stint them if the time savings on your stop is ~27 seconds. With a stint range of 25 laps you'll still come out well ahead after two stints if you just go for the tyre change.

These are approximate times I'm throwing out, based on memory from my testing, so they may be off a bit and more importantly other drivers might get different results. This is one of the hardest things about tuning tyres is that driving style in rF2 has a major effect on wear and temperature, but my comparisons are "within myself," which is the only reasonable way to talk about it. Comparing between drivers when judging compounds relative to one another usually isn't effective.

It should be clarified again however that the conversation began about, and my comments continue to be about, the GT cars specifically. I suspect the LMP tyres are entirely different or, even if they aren't, the difference in design of the cars leads to different tyre performance. I just got here so I can't be sure but there doesn't seem to necessarily be an issue in the LMP classes. Those classes at Sebring (particularly P1) started on a wide variety of compounds (all three) and used a variety throughout the race. Load the replay and page through the GTE-Pro field and you'll see everyone in contention started on Softs and ran them the whole race.
Click to expand...
We came to the same exact conclusion when testing whether double-stinting hards or mediums was a competitive option. All three of use came to the conlusion that it's not an option at all. The only reason we chose to go for harder compounds at Mid-Ohio was wear rate and specifically on a less rubbered up track. There was never a plan to double-stint them as that wouldn't have made any sense.
 
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