Auto Blip, Lift and clutch

[Vadim]

Hey fellas.

After some 4 months of rfactor I can keep the car in a straight line, sometimes play with auto blip on, mostly off.

Rev matching seems to help laptimes, feels rewarding.
Not planing to go for auto lift, since this would double the pedal operation (economy, fanatec is expensive)

But, I wonder, how many of you do heel and toe with manual clutching?

Besides the fact that it is a professional attempt of simracing....does it help laptimes or other specific things while driving?

The technique itself seems tricky but worth to get mastered.

[Sulla Looming]

I don't use auto blip, lift or clutch....i use a pad. On many mods ( i think ) any level of assistance comes with a small weight penalty.

From what i've seen and heard from many other sim drivers they don't really heel and toe as you would in a real car anyway. This is sim racing and you do whatever makes the car do what you want it to do. For example some mods the idle of the car is sooooo powerful that braking with the clutch in stops the idle pushing the car along and your braking distances are way shorter than if you did. Also gearboxes don't break here so you can just do as you please and not worry about the levels of torque you are putting through the things. I'm used to doing what i do with a pad and i often blip away like a crazy fool but without any clutch whatsoever i am actually pushing the car along quite a bit and is one of the reasons my braking is so crap. It's just a PC.

I struggle to heel and toe in most cars but i can do it really well in BMW's for some reason, where the throttle is floor hinged. I've always done it by braking with my toes and blipping with the right side of my right foot. It's the best way to be in real life because once mastered it makes everything so much smoother....silky smooth Do you remember learning to drive in the first place ?....how mechanical and clumsy you were to co-ordinate your feet with your gear changing hand and your steering. Now it's automatic...is same with blipping.....first step...start doing it. Many people do it and either push the car forward a bit in a lurch or still get a bumpy drag off the engine when they get in the gear. It's like catching a tennis ball thats been thrown straight up and lifting your hand to catch it without making any real impact on your hand. Mmmm lol.

[Risto Kappet]

Intresting, what exact weight penalties do we use for those 3 aids?

[Frank Oreskov]

Earlier I have driven with left-foot braking and there I neither used auto-lift or -blip but did it manually. I can't heal-and-toe very well at all, and I haven't had any use for it in real life (although I do know a Peugeot 206's pedals are much better suited than a Mitsubishi Lancer's, and that's with the same toe-and-toe technique as Sulla, not real heal-and-toe).

In the Williams hdv I can see the following values for aid-penalties:
AutoLift=(0.00,0.005)
AutoBlip=(0.00,0.005)
As far as I remember then it's a percentage of the car's mass added to the fuel-tank position. I couldn't find anything about auto-clutch. It has however been pointed out previously in this forum that rFactor doesn't simulate the gearbox that well, for instance you can shift gears without using the clutch and while on full throttle (the later is impossible in real life, or at least extremely difficult in real life). I wonder if rF2 will have a better simulation of gearboxes, for instance H-gate, sequential and with or without synchromesh (dog-action) as well as simulated semi-automatic where lift and blip aren't aids but a simulation of the actual gearbox like F1's have now as well as the latest GT-racers.

Frank

[Sulla Looming]

I'm not sure i used to know where they are...i think it's mod based not game, so it varies from mod to mod.

I once test ran a mod under dev ( all remaining nameless because there were arguments over this point ) and the modder insisted that because using whatever aids gave the driver an advantage ( when in general they don't because they remove a factor of control from your hands ) they should recieve a pretty severe penalty, it was also he said to encourage 'real' driving . Simple test is....turn on the aids....and making use of the so called advantages....can you reproduce the lap times gained while not running these aids with their advantages. Nah, nowhere near ! The penalties where a snobs punishment for not being a 'real' driver...in a non real silicon world I'm talking about the aids you mention here not TC or ABS.

As far as i have seen the penalties, if any, are tiny....but as small as they are....they nag at me so i never use any aids

@Frank there's no such distinction between real and non real heel and toe...it's just a term. Try heel and toeing in a small footwell of a single seater....some cars you cannot do it....so you brake with your toes and shift the heel out to the right and blip with the right edge of your foot. Saloon car drivers tend to be split even between both methods...depending on the pedal box layout. The distinction between real and non real forgets it's the end that counts, not the means. There's a good vid out tehre somewhere of Walter Rohl ( name spelt bad im sure ) driving an Audi Quatro rally car, mid 80's, he brakes with the heel of his right foot and blips with the toes, equally you can brake wth your toes and blip with your heel or side of foot. You set the height of the pedals to suit The likes of Walter dance on them pedals but then again the whole car is just an extension of such people.

[Sulla Looming]

Hahaha my memory fails me, he blips like me !!!

[Kat]

Heal and toe-ing in a sim car is DEFINITELY harder than in a real car. To HnT properly you rely on the brake pedal not moving much and allowing you to pivot round it onto the throttle.

'Proper' driving of the '79 should be slight lift on upshifts ( no clutch needed ) and either a trailing throttle or HnT on down shifts. It's a dog box so revs don't need to precisely match unlike a syncro box, you just need to have no load on the transmission.

[Frank Oreskov]

every time I see that video I can't believe how close the spectators are, and they are actually on the middle of the road. I definately understand what someone, maybe Rörhl, said at the time: You can't think that these are people, otherwise you simply can't race (referring to the fact that any sane person would slow down understanding the risk of hitting someone is immense).

Also, I love that straight-5 sound! I've heard the Volvo straight-5 sounds similar (also used in late-model Focus ST and Mondeo 2.5 turbo-models).

Back to the topic of driver-aids then I'll never forget seeing visiting a forum where I saw a topic where a poster talked how he always drove for real with a clutch-pedal and H-gate shifter, and he raced modern F1's!

One of my old favourite car-games is a PS2 game/sim called Enthusia, it has a very nice physics, especially for a PS2, fantastic detailed and authentic visual models (including hazard lights when pausing the game and seeing the car from chase-cam and even the DMC-12 had the correct lights (the outer parts are actul just reflexes and not transparent glas). And that game gives you the choice to drive with aids on, off or like the actual car has! I think that's a great detail, and one I haven't seen before or since. It also has an automatic transmission that when lifting the throttle automatically up-shifts for relaxed crusiing like a normal automatic (or so I've heard, I've never driven anything but a manual H-gate). I wish there were more games/sims like that.

Edit: Oh yeah, by "real heal-and-toe" I was being literal, I meant that you had the top of the foot on the brakes and used the heal on the throttle, I do know that both techniques are used in racing.

Frank

[Sulla Looming]

Means to the end is all...the means don't matter. You don't need to heel and toe any car dog or synchro unless you are clutchless changing DOWN the box, double declutching is history unless your box is broken or you're driving an ancient Luton box van hahahaha, there's nothing complicated about any of it, it's just a means to an end, the means don't matter. The mere mention of heel and toe seems to bring out a mystical fog. There's no proper way to drive a car that doesn't exist....if the sim gods looked down and punished those that drove 'incorrectly' in this virtual arena there would be some severe upheaval in the order of things around here and i for one would be taken out at dawn and shot !