My son has been playing video games for several years now and he's been doing a lot of racing games the past handful of years, but he has been struggling in Forza Motorsport (2023). In fairness, he is only nine years old, and the struggles he was having as of just yesterday are common struggles for players of all ages, even those with years or decades of real life driving experience that haven't raced in reality. I offered him some advice, trying to explain some of the trouble I observed him having at the time. I, too, had went through similar growing pains early into my virtual racing days. When going from more arcadey games like Ridge Racer or Burnout to something more realistic, like Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport, I was at first frustrated by these sorts of issues.
We recently got his racing wheel hooked back up after many months without being able to use it due to a structural failure in the little table the wheel had been mounted to, and he was doing some multiplayer racing with me but kept venting frustration with controlling his car in Forza Motorsport. After completing a race and me waiting for him to finish, I went in the other room to observe him driving to see if I could observe the causes of his frustration and offer some guidance. During a previous race I had forced driver aids off, as I don't run them, but in the next race I changed the overrides to allow driver aids, hoping it would have eased his aggravation, but it did not.
A big issue I saw was him pushing the tires beyond their limits. Specifically, I was hearing a lot of tire squeal. Tire squeal might make chase scenes in movies sound more exciting, but it's a bad sign in a race. Everything a car does is limited by the tire's ability to grip the road, and if you exceed that grip limit you are going to struggle making a turn, accelerating, braking, or keeping the car facing the right direction. In his case, tires were squealing as he went through turns, meaning they weren't able to grip the track and his car would end up sliding towards the outside of the turn, and in this case into walls but would just as well have meant going into grass or gravel traps on other tracks. Smashing the throttle while squealing tires around the corners also resulted in the car trying to spin out.
This is why I don't listen to music while racing in the more realistic end of the racing game spectrum. I listen for audio feedback from my car so I know when I need to change gears (I don't look at the tachometer) or if I'm pushing too hard. Up and coming race drivers would do well to listen to what the car is telling them because it's invaluable feedback. Tire squeal is cool in The Fast and the Furious, but not so much in motorsport. If we're speeding through a turn and we start hearing our tires squealing, we're probably trying to take that turn faster than what the tires can handle and are going to struggle making that turn. On subsequent laps we will probably want to try a slightly lower speed. I get that this sounds counterintuitive but in real life and in more realistic racing games sometimes slower can be faster.
It's not just grip through the bends, though. If we stomp too aggressively on the brakes we can lock up the tires and hear more tire squeal. This time it means the car isn't slowing so much as just skidding forward. Again, this may sound counterintuitive but the tires don't slow the car nearly as effectively if they aren't turning at all. If we hear the tires screeching while we're trying to slow the car, we will probably want to back off on how hard we are braking. Less brake can actually mean better stopping. Modern cars typically have antilock brakes (ABS) which take care of this for you, but if we're racing without ABS then we will need to be more careful about how hard we're pushing that brake pedal.
The brake pedal isn't the only one we may need to be careful not to push too hard. I get that we're racing which means trying to go as fast as possible so it may seem like we're supposed to always be pressing the throttle pedal through the floor but this can sometimes mean asking too much of our tires. If we're accelerating down a straight, we're at a part of the track where we can give it full throttle. However, during a turn or early into accelerating out of a turn, full throttle can mean pushing our car over the limit. In a rear-wheel drive car, smashing the throttle in these scenarios could also result in losing the back end of our car and spinning out. Traction control systems (TCS) can help with this in modern cars, but TCS doesn't guarantee never losing grip and some motorsports don't use TCS. I don't use TCS. Just like with getting a feel for how fast our car can get by with taking turns and feeling out how much pressure to apply under braking, we need to know how much gas we can get away with applying without spinning out.
Again, driver aids like an automatic transmission can help by keeping torque where it needs to be, but I run manual transmissions all the time, and in real life motorsports manual transmissions are everywhere. If our car is trying to spin out we may find that a higher gear could help, as a higher gear will drop the RPMs and torque, which could help us avoid exceeding limits of grip.
When my son was squealing his tires through the corners, I observed and pointed out another problem with this besides the immediate consequence of poor grip and not making the turn. He was heating up his tires, and heating them beyond their optimum operating temperature is bad. If the tires get too hot, we're adding extra tire wear which means they will degrade faster. Degraded tires will perform worse, and we could end up needing more pit stops if we're doing long enough races. Excess heat also means higher air pressure inside the tires, which can deform the tires and change how they flex, both of which can result in poor tire performance, which affects pretty much everything the car does.
One last thing before wrapping this up - don't drift. Drifting is bad. It looks cool in movies and there's people that enjoy drifting but it's not an effective race technique. There's novice drivers that mistakenly believe drifting is faster, and in certain specific instances, mainly in rally races on low-grip surfaces like dirt or gravel, it can be faster, but in most forms of motorsport it's a terrible technique. Not only does it wear out the tires but it's simply not faster, but rather slower. This isn't even up for debate. Mythbusters actually tested this and confirmed drifting to be a horrible idea in a race. Adam, who was a complete novice, was actually able to get around a circuit faster than a professional Formula D drifter, despite Adam's amateur efforts at drifting. When not trying to drift at all but rather racing properly Adam was faster still. What they found was that successful drifting was actually slower around the circuit than lousy drifting, and no drifting at all was fastest.
I know it goes against our natural instincts, but slower can be faster and less can be more. Sometimes less speed is faster. Sometimes less brake can slow us more. Sometimes it's faster if we give it less gas. To the up and coming racers out there, listen to the car. It has a lot to say and it's all important.