Learning a new track is one of the most valuable skills in motorsport. In real racing, track time is limited, and every lap counts. In sim racing, you can do thousands of laps to build familiarity – but if you have a structured process, you will get to a competitive lap time faster and retain what you learn more effectively.
James Baldwin – professional racing driver and Coach Dave Academy partner – has spent over eight years refining how he approaches a new circuit in the sim. In this guide, he breaks down the exact process he uses, including how Coach Dave Delta sits at the centre of it.
“It’s one of those things where I’ve just sort of done it without thinking about it. But I’ve tried to really bash my brain together to think about what process I subconsciously use to learn a new track as quickly as possible.” – James Baldwin
Step 1: Set Up Your Resources Before You Drive a Single Lap
The biggest mistake drivers make when approaching a new track is jumping straight into the car without any preparation. Before you leave the pits for the first time, you should have everything in place that will help you learn faster. Think of it as preparing your toolkit – the more organised you are at the start, the less time you waste figuring things out mid-session.
Here is what James sets up before his first lap on any new circuit:
Find a Reference Lap
The reference lap is not just a time to chase – it is a complete dataset you can compare yourself against. Delta provides a reference lap set by a Coach Dave pro driver in the exact car and track combination you are working on. This gives you a target time and, more importantly, a full set of inputs you can measure yourself against from your very first lap.
Match the Conditions
Telemetry comparisons are only meaningful if the variables are controlled. Before heading out, match your server conditions as closely as possible to those of the reference lap – air temperature, track temperature, wind speed, and track state. Delta displays the conditions used for the reference lap, so you can align yours accordingly. It does not need to be perfect, but the closer you are, the more the data comparison will tell you about driving rather than conditions.
“If I can minimise the variables between me and the reference lap, and the lap times are slower from me, I know that it’s purely down to driving, which is exactly how I want it to be.” – James Baldwin
Load the Delta Setup
The reference lap was driven on a specific setup. Delta automatically installs that setup into your simulator, so you do not need to go looking for it. Load it before you go out. If you are on a different setup, you are driving a differently balanced car, and your data comparison becomes less useful – you cannot easily separate setup differences from driving differences.
Get Video Footage of the Reference Lap
Delta’s Hot Lap button gives you a video of the reference lap directly in the app. Watch it before your first session to build a rough mental picture of the circuit – corner sequences, braking zones, and the general flow. You are not trying to memorise everything in one pass. You are giving your brain something to anchor to when the track is unfamiliar.
If you can find additional footage – a stream or onboard video of the reference driver – keep it available for later in the session when you are drilling into specific corners and need to understand exactly what they are doing.
Enable a Track Map Overlay
A small track map overlay in your simulator gives you a constant bird’s-eye view of where you are on the circuit. This helps you build a mental picture of the track’s structure faster – you begin to associate the feel of each corner with its position on the map, which speeds up how quickly the layout becomes intuitive.
Set an Active Reset Point (iRacing)
In iRacing, set your active reset point at the end of your first representative lap – just before beginning your second push lap. If you spin or hit the wall, you can reset back to that point immediately and continue without losing the session. On a new track, mistakes are inevitable. This feature removes the friction of resetting and keeps your session moving.
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Step 2: Drive Under the Limit First
Your first laps on a new circuit should not be flat-out. This is a point James is direct about: driving at or beyond the limit when you have no track knowledge costs you time in the long run. You crash, you reset, and you are not learning anything useful in the process.
Drive at roughly 85 to 90 percent and build from there. At this pace, you are absorbing the circuit – corner sequences, surface changes, where the track narrows, and where you have room to use the kerbs. You are also building the muscle memory that lap times will eventually depend on. Rushing that process does not compress it; it just makes it messier.
“If you drive at 90% and just build it up and up and up, you’ll learn way more in a shorter amount of time.” – James Baldwin
Set a banker lap early – a clean, controlled lap you can use as a baseline in the data – and then chip away at the time from there. Your goal in this phase is not a fast lap. It is a representative one.
Step 3: Use Delta to Identify Where the Time Is
Once you have a baseline lap in Delta, resist the urge to immediately compare every corner against the reference. Start by breaking the lap into sections and identifying where the biggest gaps are. This tells you where to focus and prevents you from wasting time on corners that are already close to the reference. Fixing the biggest Delta’s first can indirectly improve other key areas without focusing on them.
James looks at five fundamental inputs when assessing the data:
- Throttle
- Brake
- Steering
- Gears
- Racing line
The Delta interface shows your data in blue and the reference in yellow, side by side, for each of these inputs. You are looking for the moments where the two diverge noticeably – those are the moments costing you time. Start with the biggest gaps first.
“The delta is the truth. You may think going through a corner a certain way is quick, but the delta will tell you otherwise.” – James Baldwin
When measuring time loss per corner, do not just look at the corner itself. Measure from the entry – just before you begin braking – all the way to the entry of the next corner. The corner includes the entry, the apex, and the entire exit. Cutting it short means you miss what is often the most significant part of the gap.
The AI Coach using Auto Insights will set you up nicely to further enhance your experience studying your data to identify where the time loss is and how to get faster. When you combine all of James’s preparation tools with Delta’s Auto Insights, your improvements grow exponentially because of good practices, good techniques, and instant help from the AI Coach.
Step 4: Prioritise Corners Intelligently
Not all corners are created equal. Treating them as if they are is one of the most common ways drivers waste practice time on a new circuit. James uses a clear two-part prioritisation framework to decide where to spend his effort first.
Prioritise Corners with Long Exits
Any corner followed by a long straight amplifies whatever exit speed you carry through it. A good exit compounds all the way down the straight. A poor one gives that advantage to every driver behind you. These corners – the ones feeding the fastest parts of the circuit – are where the biggest chunks of lap time live, and they are where you should focus first.
Corners that feed directly into another corner are of lower priority. You can lose significant time in them, but a poor apex in a mid-complex corner will not punish you the same way a poor exit onto a straight will. Get the high-exit corners right first and work backwards from there.
“If there’s a big exit after it, those are the corners you need to prioritise getting right. Corners that lead straight into another corner are, in a way, throwaway corners – you obviously want to be quick everywhere, but if you want to delegate your time efficiently, that’s where I’d spend the time first.” – James Baldwin
Prioritise Slow Speed Corners
The second part of the framework is about the nature of the corner itself. Slow-speed corners offer more relative time gain per unit of improvement than high-speed corners. If you find an extra 5 km/h of minimum speed through a hairpin where you are doing 60 km/h, that is a proportionally larger gain than finding the same speed through a fast sweeper where you are already doing 150 km/h.
Work slow corners first, then medium speed, then high speed. Combined with the exit priority above, this gives you a clear order of attack for any new circuit – and it means you are always spending your available practice time where it returns the most lap time.
Alongside using James’s techniques to study certain corners, Delta’s Auto Insights will pinpoint a specific sequence in the lap that needs the most focus. It will say something like “Looks like you are losing the most time in SQ5. Here is how you can improve” with a button to take you directly to that sequence, followed by tips on your Braking, Entry, Apex and Exit.
Incorporating James’s five fundamental inputs when assessing your data with this data puts you in pole position for immediate improvements when learning a new track.
Step 5: Use the Gear Chart to Make Quick Gains
Gears are one of the quickest and most actionable areas to address early in a session. They are easy to read in Delta – your gear trace sits directly below the reference – and getting them wrong costs consistent, measurable time at every lap.
Common mistakes include carrying too high a gear through a slow corner – which limits rotation and forces you to wait for the power – or revving out unnecessarily before an upshift. Check what gear the reference driver uses at each corner, confirm whether your gears match, and make the corrections before you go back out. It is one of the cleanest, most low-risk changes you can make.
James notes it is also worth confirming your gear choices against what actually makes sense for the exit: a corner with a long straight after it often rewards dropping an extra gear to get on power sooner, even if it feels counter-intuitive from inside the car.
Step 6: Establish Tangible Reference Points
Consistency on a new track depends on having fixed reference points you can rely on lap after lap. These are the markers that tell your brain when to brake, when to turn in, and when to get back on the power. Without them, your inputs will vary from lap to lap, and no amount of data analysis will give you reliable information to work with.
Use permanent, fixed markers, and have multiple of them on either side of you – distance boards, kerb edges, marshal posts, barriers. Do not use shadows, which move with the sun, or anything else that changes between laps or between sessions. The more concrete the reference point, the more repeatable your driving will be.
“It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as in your brain it’s there every lap. It’s a common thing – don’t use shadows because they move with the sun. Use fixed, tangible reference points.” – James Baldwin
Delta helps here in two ways. The lap comparison view lets you see exactly where the reference driver begins braking and turning, which gives you a data-backed reference point to test. And the reference video from the Hot Lap button lets you confirm what that looks like visually, so you can identify the physical marker the reference driver is using and adopt it yourself.
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Step 7: Understand Track Limits Early
Knowing the boundaries of the track – where you can run, where a kerb becomes a track cut, where the walls are – is foundational. It defines the entire field of play you are working within. The sooner you establish those limits, the sooner you can push against them confidently.
On street circuits, the walls define most of the limits. On permanent circuits, kerbs and track cut lines vary corner by corner and need to be assessed individually. James makes a point of sussing these out deliberately early in a session – particularly on corners where the track limits are not obvious – so he knows exactly how much room he is working with.
Delta’s line comparison view helps here: the reference driver’s line will show you whether they are using a kerb aggressively or giving it room, which gives you an immediate read on what is safe and what is available to use.
Track limits differ between each simulator, and there’s no better way to understand these than by completing laps. Test the limits for yourself when learning a new track. Delta is programmed to recognise when a lap is valid or invalid, and keeps a lap count for you whenever you complete a session and want to review the data. When comparing your lap against a reference lap, A good practice is to load your invalid lap against a valid lap to see the differences in the racing lines.
Step 8: Use the Line Comparison and Reference Video Together
Once you have identified the corners where you are losing the most time, the Delta line comparison view and the reference video are most powerful when used together. The line view in Delta shows you where the gap is – whether it is at the entry, the apex, or the exit. The video shows you what that looks like physically, including what the reference driver is doing with their car placement and what markers they appear to be using.
A common finding at this stage is that the reference driver is using more of the track than you – getting closer to a barrier on entry, riding further over a kerb, or running the car wider on exit to straighten the following section. These are the kinds of details that feel risky from inside the car but are often where a significant portion of the time gap lives.
When you find something specific – a braking reference you can adopt, a kerb you have been avoiding – write it down or say it out loud before you go back out. James caps his action list at three items per analysis break. More than that, and you will over-stimulate during the lap and end up changing nothing effectively.
“Before I go back out on track, I’ll try to break it down to three things I need to improve on. If I have any more than that, it’s just too much – you end up over-stimulating your brain, and you won’t improve.” – James Baldwin
Step 9: Compare Against Your Session Best, Not Your All-Time Best
When comparing laps in Delta during a session, use your session’s best lap as the reference rather than your all-time best. Your session best lap was set in the same conditions, at a similar point in tyre life, with driving that reflects your current understanding of the circuit. It is the most representative baseline for what you are doing right now.
An all-time best may have been set in different conditions, on a different tyre, or even in a previous session where something worked that you have not yet figured out how to replicate. Using it as a comparison can give you misleading information at exactly the moment when clarity matters most.
Delta lets you toggle between these comparison modes. Make a habit of setting it to the session’s best lap every time you open a new session.
Step 10: Know When to Stop Analysing and Just Drive
Data analysis is a tool, not a substitute for seat time. The cycle James describes is: drive, analyse, identify three things, go back out and fix them, repeat. The analysis phase should be brief and targeted. You are not trying to solve the entire lap in one sitting – you are extracting one or two actionable changes and executing them.
When you are mid-session and within a second of the reference lap on a new circuit, that is real progress. Do not stop and analyse every corner when the lap is already coming together. Let it develop, hook up a clean lap, and then assess. Some of the remaining time will resolve itself through accumulated familiarity – you do not always need to engineer it out corner by corner.
James’s Pre-Session Checklist: What to Have Ready Before You Drive
Before your first lap on any new circuit, run through this list:
- Find a reference lap in Delta and note the target time
- Match your server conditions as closely as possible to the reference lap conditions
- Load the Delta-provided setup into your simulator
- Watch the Hot Lap video to get a rough picture of the circuit
- Source additional reference footage if available for later in the session
- Enable a track map overlay in your simulator
- Set an active reset point (iRacing) at the end of your first representative lap
- Sports, Formula & Oval iRacing Setups
- Race Telemetry - Brake, Throttle & Racing Lines
- Corner by Corner AI Coaching To Gain Seconds
- Challenge Racers on the Delta Leaderboards
The Bottom Line
Learning a new track is a process, not a single session. The drivers who get up to speed fastest are not the ones who push hardest from lap one – they are the ones who set themselves up properly before driving, use the data intelligently to identify where the time is, and make targeted changes rather than trying to improve everything at once.
Delta removes the guesswork from that process. It tells you exactly where the gap is, what the reference driver is doing differently, and gives you the specific changes to go out and work on. Combined with a structured approach to prioritising corners and building reference points like James does, it is the most efficient way to get up to speed on an unfamiliar circuit.
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James Baldwin is a professional racing driver and an exclusive Coach Dave Academy partner. This article is based on James’s own track learning methodology developed across eight years of sim racing and real-world GT racing.
