Ladies and gentlemen, it’s finally here – Delta 2.0, your very own performance engineer!
The Coach Dave Delta app, which you all know and love, has just received a monumental update. Just in time to ring in the New Year, we’re adding another fantastic feature to the $9.99 Delta subscription – Real-Time Tracking.
Real-Time Tracking
We’ve introduced an innovative real-time tracking feature, complete with a sleek user interface. This allows instant access to all your lap time data, enabling on-the-spot improvements.
With the initial launch of Delta 2.0, real-time lap tracking will work with ACC and iRacing, providing a plethora of stats to analyse your laps. Let’s delve into how it all works.
Like the original Delta, upon launching the app, it waits for you to load into a session. As soon as you leave the pits in that session, it automatically starts tracking your laps and feeds that data directly back to Delta in real-time.
How It Works
Tracking in Delta 2.0 starts the moment you leave the pits and continues until you return. Once you return to the pits, that data is collected as your first stint. You can see real-time tracking of your laps and analyse your performance from that stint.
Each time you leave the pits thereafter, it records as a new stint, continuing until the session ends. This applies to all practice, qualifying, and race laps. If you return to the pits twice during qualifying, for example, you’ll see separate stints. Similarly, if you make a pitstop in a race, you will see two distinct stints.
Note: Coming in an update after first launch will be your session history.
When you quit the race server, your session will be saved, allowing you to review it in its entirety at a later date. This feature is perfect for testing different cars on the same track to see which suits you best in various scenarios, like sprint or endurance racing, or wet vs dry weather.
What You See From Your Stints
The core feature of the Delta 2.0 tracking application lies in the stints you do. Centred in the UI, you’ll find all of your sessions broken down into stints, offering valuable insights into your laps with key data points.
Every lap is broken down to show every sector and how you’re performing in these sectors. You’ll see your overall lap time and its validity, the precipitation amount, ambient temperature, track temperature, and fuel usage per lap.
Deeper into the stint tracking, you’ll get your average lap time, best lap time, and optimal lap time of the stint. Additionally, you’ll see how you’re managing the tires, as every tyre is tracked to show if you’re setting laps in the perfect operating window.
You’ll also see how much oversteer or understeer you experienced in the laps, both at low and high speeds allowing you to tweak your driving style or setup in-session to improve your lap times. Furthermore you also have visibility of your lap time consistency, and fuel usage.
Widget Feature Overview
Session Information
In the top left widget, you will find your session information, displaying the sim you’re racing in and real-time server information including, rain intensity (not to be confused with track wetness), track condition, as well as ambient and track temperatures.
Directly underneath is your session log showing all your practice, qualifying and race sessions. You can switch between these sessions by clicking on the respective button.
Leaderboards
Enhance your racing experience by connecting Delta to your SimGrid account. Gain valuable insights into the top-performing laps set by yourself, friends, and teammates. This feature fosters a competitive yet friendly environment, encouraging improvement and camaraderie.
Moreover, you are able to compare yourself to the very best on SimGrid with the top three overall lap records being displayed too.
Lap Times
Simplify your progress tracking with clear, easy-to-scan sector and lap time displays, highlighting your fastest laps in each stint for quick analysis and improvement.
Lap Conditions
The lap conditions tracker provides key data such as lap validity, track wetness, air and track temperatures, and fuel consumption. This enables you to adapt your strategy and enhance performance by understanding and responding to varying track conditions.
Stint Times
Delta provides a comprehensive overview during each stint, displaying your best, average, and optimal laps. This feature offers a quick and clear indicator of your performance from one stint to the next, allowing for easy tracking of progress and areas for improvement.
Tyre Pressures
The tyre pressure widget shows you each individual tyre and if it’s in the optimal window for pressures. This is displayed via blue for under pressure, green for optimal, red for over inflated (not to get confused with temperatures of the tyre).
Delta’s live tyre pressure feature updates after each lap, providing session averages. This enables you to quickly assess if your tyre pressures are optimal, helping you make swift adjustments for better handling and performance.
Handling
The understeer/oversteer widget works because it reads the angle of the tyre, the yaw of the car and the slip angles of the tyres in the sim and calculates the car being in an active understeer/oversteer state, and it will display a slider graph in real time giving you an average over a stint of the laps you do. The closer the sliders are to the middle of the chart, the more neutral you are driving.
Effortlessly gauge your car’s handling with Delta’s innovative handling widget. It instantly illustrates oversteer and understeer at both high and low speeds, enabling a quick and clear understanding of your car’s dynamics. This tool is a game-changer for setup work, offering unprecedented speed and ease in assessing handling performance.
Driving Accuracy
Underneath the handling widget you will find your driving accuracy widget and it shows a percentage score based on your valid vs invalid laps in each stint you do. The aim is to get as close to 100% for your laps done.
With Delta, you can precisely track your driving accuracy with this widget. It will display in red, yellow and green based on how accurate you are. This key indicator of skill and precision aids in enhancing your consistency and improving lap times, offering a clear path to becoming a more proficient driver.
Fuel Widget
The fuel widget under your driving accuracy shows your total fuel consumption in each stint and that will keep accumulating each time you cross the line adding each lap’s value on top of each other for a total amount.
Setups
Delta maintains its user-friendly setup approach, automatically installing your preferred car and track combinations when you enter a session. This streamlined process is complemented by quick links to Setup Notes, Hotlaps, Popmeter, and Motec Data, ensuring you have all the essential tools at your fingertips for an optimised racing experience.
Fuel Estimator
Delta introduces an intuitive fuel estimator that calculates your fuel needs based on session consumption. Enhanced with quick duration buttons for on-the-fly calculations, the Delta Fuel Calculator designed in an innovative and user-friendly manner, offers a refreshing sense of ease and reliability for fuel management. Fuel estimation accommodates a formation lap and one extra race lap at all times.
App Navigation
In Delta 2.0 you have your sidebar nav menu on the left hand side with some new icons you may not be familiar with.
Just as before you have your home, ACC and your iRacing icons, but now you will see a few new icons to navigate through as well.
- First you have the session history icon, this is where you navigate to see every session that gets saved for you, so you can go back and analyse all of your delta sessions.
- Next you will see the lecture icon, which takes you directly to Never Lift, the new ultimate sim racing coaching course that you get at no extra cost just for having Delta.
- Finally you will see a question icon, this navigates you to your help page where you can find self help guides, discord support and even access to one-on-one engineering sessions.
All that is left now is for you to do is download Delta to access Delta 2.0 and get yourself immersed with your very own performance engineer, have fun tracking your laps and improving in real time with the help of Coach Dave Delta.
Delta 2.0 F.A.Q
For an even deeper dive into the functionality of Delta 2.0 check out the Frequently Asked Questions article where our very own James Parker goes through all of the new features in great detail.