2023 Season Grand Prix Megathread

I agree with you, i made a post a while ago stating such things. It wasn't received very well. 

I just want F1 23 to be accurate, and more fun to drive on, making the cars faster in accurate ways (on corner entry, mid corner in medium to high speed and better more accurate traction in slow speed corners) is the best way to do that, cars are faster in real life so that should be properly reflected in the game. 

@NuvolarixIn theory? Easily.. AMR are a bit faster than that though (in qualifying) imo..

Just need tyre temps properly implemented and the tyre heating plays a major part in the performance, RB seems to have slowest heating (like Merc last year) then AMR, Merc and Ferrari strongest heating..

That will lead to slower quali but on race pace the lower heating will be faster in comparison (speaking of Red Bull, Ferrari the opposite of course)..

Then next tyre wear basically the same order, also leading to different gaps in Q compared to R..

That would be the realistic and proper way to implement it, do i think it will happen? No, sadly not as it takes advanced tyre temp management via pressure and brake cooling and a proper AI training to deal with different track temps - use different tyre pressures and brake cooling..

I fear we will get the same boring Q and R are the same pace as always.. Even though they could simply add different modifiers for Q and R for the tyre grip..

@Nuvolarix sorry, missed you tagging me! Had the page loaded up previously so when I made my post the site brought me to the next page immediately 🙃

Nah, unfortunately I find the "toolset" of the game kind of too crude to render a proper representation of F1 performance. What I mean by that is that you can make a team be overall this much slower or this much faster in the game, and make it so it somehow mirrors what we see in the championship tables, all the while completely missing why teams perform the way they do and how they achieve that.

Major culprits being tyre model being too simplistic and perhaps even dysfunctional, and how the game deals with grip. The latter is quite the broad category so it doesn't really help when I put it like that, but at least the game has been making progress towards a better physics and handling models:

• Now we've got "hitboxes" actually matching the 3D car model so that when the car bottoms out visually, it actually hurt your ride - whereas before you could run over kerbs with ridiculous impunity;
• Different aero components have different lift-to-drag ratio (how much downforce they produce vs how much drag they cause)
• A load sensitivity curve for the tyres now with 12 data points instead of... What, 4? We used to habe a painfully low number so there was just so much you could do with the handling model.

They're still too crude though. Bigs props for Greco to pulling this on F1 22, it's a damn shame we won't have him fully realizing his vision.

As it is though, there's not enough factors to pay with (the "toolset" I referred to) to get a proper differentiation of how the teams perform and get those lap times. Specially between quali and race trim, they all the same - tyre model and physics/grip just don't give you enough canvas and crayons to paint F1 properly.

To keep it all still very dumbed down:

• Performance. Teams with good performance can come in hot in a corner and lean on their car without getting too unbalanced and having one axle or the other breaking traction. The more grip you have, the harder you can push;
• Tyre degradation. Teams with good tyre deg can keep on pushing at 100% or thereabouts for longer as they don't abuse the tyres that much.

A car can have high performance and good tyre deg, high performance and bad tyre deg, and basically the same combos for low performance.

One way to compensate for bad tyre deg would be to increase your overall grip, but mainly by running with more aggressive wings to generate more downforce. Huge caveat: inevitable drag penalty. Teams with bad tyre deg will try to protect them from overworking by running higher pressures, so they don't flex and twist as much, and compensate for it with higher wings, but they simply cannot have the same overall performance throughout a whole race as a team with highly efficient lift-to-drag ratio (like Red Bull this year).

Then comes Pirelli and out of a sudden reduce the minimum tyre pressures for a given event, like we've had in Bahrain this year. Great, right?Teams can run their tyres softer and thus have more grip and more performance?

Well while more grip can generally mean better tyre degradation as you don't get it to scrub and slip so much, Pirelli allowing *lower* minimum pressures will probably just widen the performance gap as high performant + good tyre deg teams can keep on operating at a higher rate than those that chew tyres like cheap bubblegum. As in, Red Bull can run with lower pressures and still have better tyres at the end of the race than Ferrari.

How can you put that in the game? Right now, you can't 🙃