How to make the perfect start

[fobban]

Hello. I've recently started racing a lot with the BMW 2007 F1 car, with all help aids turned off (except clutch and launch control), but I have yet to make a good start.

I usually get a top 5 qualify time, but lose as many places when the race starts.

Any tips for making a good, fast start?

 

[NOS Waster]

This is NOT specific to any car in particular. I just found that they are general tips that seem to work pretty well.
1: Have a wheel setup with a clutch pedal. There is NO way around it. If you have a clutch, you will always have an advantage on race launches (except ones where the tires don't spin under WOT).
2: Go into the engine config for the car and find out where the peak amount of power is produced. (should be after 5200 RPM and if the engine doesn't go up to 5200 RPM, then it is as high as the RPMs go).
3: Don't gun it WOT off the start. This will burn your tires and could end up with you facing the other racers' noses.
4: Auto-clutch can cause some wierd things off the launch. shift up to 2nd then down to first, and manually clutch yourself off the line. This will ensure desired results because the computer won't intervene too much. (do NOT go down to neutral after going up to 2nd or it will reverse what i told you)
5: If a car supports it, use launch control.

 

[Noel Hibbard]

If you have a clutch, set the sensitivity slider all the way up. This sounds like the opposite of what you want but what this does is give more pedal travel before the clutch totally locks up. If you have the clutch set to liner (50 on the slider) you only have to lift 3mm or so before the clutch full locks. It is so hard to modulate the clutch with so little travel.

 

[Denstjiro]

How do you use the launch control?
We did a race once with a modern F1 mod (we use classic mods normaly) and i was able to pass 8 cars at the start just because they had no clue how to use the launch control ehehe!

Or how to abuse it......anyways, overide launch control, dont let it go through its sequence untill the last gear. find out at what point (what gear) you need to take over in order to have maximum efficiency. depending on your setup this could be from gear 1 up to whatever.

But more importantly, each mod starts different. i dont know about the BMW mod but for example i realy hammer the tires in GP79, make them as hot as possible for a fast start but with F171 i just need to warm the brakes on formation laps and avoid friction on the tires and that gives me a real edge over those whome warm their tires.
So find out what the ideal way is tire-wise for the BMW.

And finaly, mods are wierd. ignore real life racing cars and what real drivers would do. find out what the mod does.
For example in RF3 the gearing was wierd, you would be faster short-gearing every gear appart from 5th. that was the ideal way to get fast laptimes and fast starts.
in F171 we need to gear up even earlyer then in RF3 and using only 3 gears out of 5 can make you up to a second faster per lap and with starting a very long 1st gear realy helps because the engine stalls between gears and you simply lose time gearing up.

So in order to become fast (starting or racing) its -imo- much more about finding the tricks of the mod. I would suggest taking a race replay and look at what the fast starters actualy do to be fast at starts and try and implement it in your own starts.