Simracing can be a fairly complex hobby, sometimes giving you the roles of driver, engineer and strategist all at once, which can be overwhelming, but there are steps to follow to make your experience better as a beginner. Fortunately, GT7 and Coach Dave Academy are ready to take you by the hand and guide you through the basics. Here’s how we suggest you begin your sim racer career.
Make Yourself At Home
The very first thing you should take care of, like for any other sim – and even in a real car – is making sure you’re seated comfortably, and all the commands are properly mapped to your liking.
If you’re starting with a gamepad, our base recommendation would be to map throttle and brake inputs on the triggers, steering on a joystick, and upshift/downshift on cross and square. L1 can be a good location for the overtake button (which controls DRS, nitrous or hybrid deployment depending on the car). We also suggest turning the steering sensitivity up, but you may want to experiment with that a bit.
Steering wheel users will want to set their driving position correctly before anything else. With your shoulder resting on your seat’s backrest, you should be able to rest your wrist on top of the steering wheel. That should allow your elbows to have a slight angle when your hands are placed at a 9h15 position on the wheel – which is the desired hand position in pretty much every circumstance in racing, as most of the time, you won’t need more than 90° of steering input.
Regarding your pedals, they should be positioned in a way that allows you to fully press the pedals without having to rotate your ankles: the legs should be able to do all the work. This will give you more strength and precision, especially if you’re using a loadcell brake or even just hard springs/rubbers.
Overall, you want to avoid any of your limbs to be fully extended or tensed up. Being somewhat relaxed will go a long way in terms of comfort and fatigue for longer sessions.
Licence Test And Circuit Experiences
The first thing you should attend to in any Gran Turismo once you’ve made yourself comfortable is tackling all the licenses the game has to offer. The tests will start from the basics like straight line braking and simple cornering, and progressively evolve into more advanced things while providing you demonstrations and advice – which are especially good on GT7.
Work towards getting gold times: that will allow you to become more familiar and precise with your inputs and more regular with your lines, in addition to providing nice bonuses to kickstart the single-player career.
Circuit experiences are also a great thing to learn the various tracks and earn a good deal of credits. But you can spread those out through time while you start enjoying career and lobby races – in fact, this is preferable since all those experiences are done with race cars. Once those are done, you can move up to the next difficulty level; online time trials.
It’s Better To Drive Slow Cars Fast Than Fast Cars Slow
The main thing you need to develop is muscle memory to get consistent with your inputs to progress further. Racing is a fast-paced activity, with a lot of things happening suddenly, so you need to build reactions and general movements as reflexes. And in general, the more grip you have, the more brutal everything becomes.
This is why you should start driving slower road cars with soft suspension, and more importantly, comfort tyres. The grip loss on that type of rubber is quite progressive, and they generally give cars a loose handling, which will give you feedback at a slower rate. Your brain will get more time to compute and understand what is happening and register how to modulate things like throttle input and countersteering.
As you start catching slides comfortably and make fewer mistakes, progressively add in more power and move up tyre classes. Once you get into race cars, you will realize Gr.4 is very easy to adjust to, but as you move into higher downforce cars, you’ll find out that figuring out the grip limit requires you to sort of ignore the preservation instincts you’ve built in until then.
Race In Online Events
Simracing is not only about getting fast, it’s also about learning how to navigate a pack of cars trying to get to the destination before you. The default AI will not be very effective at that, and Sophy is limited to PS5, and still not as human as it could be.
The safest way to start is lobbies, rather than sport mode. Lobbies have no stakes and that will not ruin your driver and safety ratings if you crash: an apology and waiting for an opponent you have wronged is usually all you need to keep things cordial. An additional benefit is you will quickly get to experience dealing with very different types of racers.
It is equally important to learn how to deal with good, aggressive and unpredictable opponents. Understand their behaviours, adjust to their patterns and more importantly, anticipate what’s far up front and what’s coming behind so you can take avoiding action when the situation gets dangerous.
Don’t be afraid to join a community either! They are a great way to get a regular dose of racing and pull each other to a higher level.
Keep A Varied Routine
The amount of content available in GT7 is a blessing. You should take advantage of the vast amount of choice you have in terms of cars and tracks: while focusing a bit on a specific combo will help you for specific races, ultimately you’ll become a more complete driver if you keep mixing things up.
Racing is not just about getting the fastest lap: being able to adjust quickly to ever-changing conditions is important, especially for longer races and series. Adaptability is one of the most valuable skills you can acquire.
In that regard, we highly suggest you read our guide to top tips to earn credits in GT7, so you can fill up your garage as quickly as possible.
Use Telemetry Tools To Your Advantage
Finally, our last piece of advice in this list is designed as some self-help thanks to our new telemetry tool, specifically developed to help sim racers analyse their laps and improve themselves, Delta for GT7.
There is nothing more frustrating than not knowing what you did right or wrong, and that’s why racing teams all use telemetry nowadays to figure out where they gain or lose time.
You can even use Delta to compare yourself with some of the fastest drivers in Gran Turismo 7. Including multi-time champion Igor Fraga, Many Rodri, Tsu Tsu and Tidgney who all help produce reference lap data for you to see how they are so fast.