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Page 2 - Investigate the mod

First of all we should understand what is happening as the tires wear. Every mod in RFactor can be different depending upon how the creator designed it. We are interested in two things
We only ever need to check that information once for any car.

The the best way to check that for any mod is a little program called CarStat. In Carstat you select the mod and the car you are driving, and it directly reads the mod files extracting lots of info about the car. It shows weight, power, torque etc, but also what we need - it shows how the tires wear. In GP79 there are only two tires - Michelin and Goodyear - and basically everyone will be working with the same data (it doesn't change significantly by car).

To find this info;
Load the program, and from file choose "Open Vehicle Selector"
Then select the mod, and you car. (e.g. GP79, League Edition, Fittipaldi)
Now look at the "Tirewear 2" tab.

To explain the info, see below the chart from a Fittipaldi. Along the x-axis is the amount of WEAR the tire has left. The y-axis shows how much of the original starting GRIP is available. We can also see how much grip SOFT tires have in relation to HARD tires. As you can see the two tires WEAR in exactly the same style (pattern of the graphs is the same), but SOFT tires will give about 1%more grip than ard tires at any given level of wear.



The tires of course start with 100% wear available, and with 100% grip. These values then basically begin to reduce as soon as you drive down the pitlane and begin putting heat into the tires. We can see that as the tires WEAR, the amount of GRIP available stays very stable for a LONG time. As you can see from 95% wear remaining until only 12% wear remaining, actually the grip does not reduce very much. THAT is the area we need to race with, using that long period of stable GRIP until reaching only 12% of WEAR remaining.. As we can also see from the chart, when we drop below 12% wear remaining.....things get very bad! The GRIP drops off extremely sharply.

Tire wear relates to how hard you work the tires, and this work translates into high temperature. The more you slide the or spin the tire, the higher the temperatures, and the faster the tire will wear. We can see from Carstat (see below) that GP79 tires give their best GRIP at 100 degrees - if you are much higher than this the tires will wear more quickly. If you slide a lot, temperatures will rise and the tire will again wear more quickly. When tire wear drops below 12% WEAR remaining,you can see that the available grip falls very rapidly. That means you slide more - which means the temperatures go up - which means you wear more - which means you grip less - which means you slide more - etc etc. Basically you enter a vicious cycle, which loses a ton of time, and ends in a puncture when the tire reaches zero percent wear left.


So in terms of tire wear we have

Finally click on the "Tires" - here you can see that the optimum temperature for my tire is 100.0 degrees. So when setting up the car I need to get the tires as close to that as possible. The farther below or especially above that temperature I am, I will lose grip.

So now we know how the tires work, and know how to check that information for any mod. What we now need to know is how much WE are wearing the tire, with our setup and for the coming race.

So, let's look now look at how we measure how our driving wears the tire. Driving and setup.