Reddit reviews Drive to Win: Essential Guide to Race Driving

Sorry, I typed a reply earlier on my phone which apparently didn't send.

If I were you I would call Skip Barber back and try to reschedule something sooner. If you wait until summer you'll miss at least half of the 2016 season. I'm not sure about series in California, I know there used to be a Pacific F2000 championship but I'm not sure how good it is or if it's even still around. You may get annoyed traveling across the country all the time, but IMO the best place to start is the SCCA's F1600 Championship Series. They straddle the line between club racing and pro. The paddock is really relaxed, but the racing is still really competitive and most of your competition will be career-minded drivers. A new car will cost around $70,000, but you can find older, still competitive ones for less, and a season budget will be anywhere from $30-150,000. Another bonus is that the Formula F is an SCCA class, so you can also run the same car in the SCCA Majors, Runoffs, and there are several championships in Canada that the car can run in with zero modifications. You could run a race every single weekend and still have well over half of your budget intact. If you decide to do this, let me know. I'm working on putting together a program to run in that series myself.

In the meantime, read these two books: Going Faster and Drive to Win. The first is all about racing theory and is the official textbook of the Skip Barber Racing School. Become familiar with that before you step into a race car and you'll be ahead of everyone else at the school. The other is more about what is expected of a racing driver who wants a career. They're both a bit dated but still very relevant.

Also, get iRacing and buy the Skip Barber car. Even if you don't do the Skip Barber series, it's a low-powered formula car that behaves a lot like anything else you'll drive at the beginning of your career. Simracing can't replace real-world seat time, but you can still learn things from it that will help you when you get into a real car.

Good luck, and don't let anyone tell you you can't do it. Honestly I'd trade 10 years of karting experience for an $800k/year budget in a heartbeat. You've already got the hardest problem solved, now go have fun learning to do something well.

Background: started my simracing journey with Gran Turismo 2, started using steering wheel since GT3. Am now building a custom OSW rig with VR and been doing track days and autocrosses IRL the past 5+ years. I'm no alien, but I love trying to get better at it.

The easiest and most efficient way to casually learn to drive better than ok-ish that I found is.... by trying to get all Gold in every single Gran Turismo license tests(maybe except the "coffee break" ones). It's easy for aliens, but challenging for casuals.

I say this because you go thru all the basic skills in nice and organized order, and if you make a mistake or have hard time figuring out, there are example 'ghosts' you can try to emulate and learn from it.

You get immediate feedback since those exercises are short, and it keeps you honest since it discourages you from blatant cutting or crashing to gain advantage.

Then, I welcome you to challenge yourself to beat top players in time trials by downloading and racing against their 'ghosts'. If they're faster than you by significant margin, they must be doing something right that you aren't doing...

Also, grip your wheel lightly and 'listen' with your fingertips what the car is trying to tell you. It could sound like a foreign language at first, but you'll get proficient at it as you practice more.

Anyway, to answer your questions...

1. Nah, not really. You'll get by just fine. It's a nice trick up your sleeve for chasing after the last tenth of a second by putting the engine in a particular power band you find advantageous.
   
   
2. If the particular sim is decently accurate, then any driving technic book will help you. For casual driver, I can recommend "Drive to Win" by Carroll Smith. It's an older book, and it's written in more of a conversational style. Think of it like grandpa with experience winning Le Mans as an engineer with Carroll Shelby and his GT40 telling you how to drive. It covers all the basics, and you'll find the section on tire behavior - specifically about load sensitivity and self-aligning torque - immensely helpful since that's pretty much what's going on with the FFB.
   
   Unfortunately, without a proper motion rig, you can't 'feel' it in a traditional sense. The way you feel with sim is by detecting understeer and oversteer condition with FFB and your eyes. I'm going to explain this extremely casually: weight transfer(or technically, load transfer) happens when the vehicle experiences g forces. This happens when you gas, brake, turn, and anything in between except when coasting or maintaining speed. During weight transfer, one end of the car will get light and load up the opposite side. For example, when you're turning in a circle, your outside tires are loading up and inside tires get lighter(and want to overturn). This all happens about the Center of Gravity of the car where you've transferred the weight(or load) from the inside to the outside - hence the weight transfer. It's a bit more complicated than that, but it'll get you started.
   
   With the FFB, you can 'feel' this depending on how the car reacts to your input. The FFB will get heavier or lighter as you load up or unload your tires. Tires can only handle so much force, and generating grip by putting weight(or load) on the tires have diminishing returns (aka load sensitivity). And tires generate the most grip when it's barely sliding. So, if you over-drive the car and sliding too much, you're probably not braking, or turning, or accelerating as hard as it can be if you were driving more tidily and smoothly. Tires also react to temperature. If it gets too hot(from scrubbing while turning or spinning the wheels) or too cold(just out of the pit with fresh tires), it won't grip as much.
   
   So, if your eyes tell you the car isn't turning as much as you've turned your steering wheel, then you're understeering. You'll also feel it in your hand because proper FFB will get light when you understeer. With oversteer, you suddenly don't have to turn as hard as the car is rotating more than you're asking too. Your eyes will tell you that the car is rotating too much. Your FFB will kinda sorta want to straighten itself out(due to caster angle) so work WITH the FFB, and it can help you catch the slide.
   
   You can also adjust the level of grip with the way you use your brake or gas. When you're turning(load transfer from inside to outside tires) and the car isn't turning as well as you want it to(understeer), if you go easier with your gas pedal or brush on the brake pedal even, then you're also transferring the weight(load) from the rear to the front, thereby increasing front grip, helping you turn. If you over do it, then you'll get snap oversteer. It also works the other way around. If your initial turn in was too hard and the car over-rotates into oversteer, a little dab on the throttle will transfer the weight from the front to rear so you have more grip on the rear tires - provided you don't over do it and light up the rear tires into spinning.
   
   During hard brake or acceleration, if the car isn't braking as hard as it should, or isn't accelerating as hard as you should, you've exceeded the tire's ability and is sliding too much. And, as mentioned above, when you're sliding too much, you're not generating maximum grip, so you have to reduce whatever you're doing to regain traction.
   
   
3. no idea. I usually just race against myself offline most of the time in a controlled environment(so people don't crash into me, or I into them) or race with close friends.
   
   
4. Don't bother with GRID or DiRT3. Drive any sim or something very close to it, and practice driving slower car faster than fast car slow. The reason is, fast cars can mask your faults and still turn good lap times. With slower cars, there's less margin of error, and it'll punish you with slow lap times if you mess up.
   
   
5. You probably need to bind the dial from the settings. That dial was intended for adjusting car settings(Torque Split, Brake Bias, etc) on the fly in Gran Turismo 5.
   
   Also, watch "Going Faster" by Skip Barber Racing School if you have some free time. It's old, but it's very good.

I was recently having trouble with a car myself, and I asked /r/simracing for advice, I got this brilliant reply out of it. It's well worth reading. I was also linked to this video about degressive braking. Very useful information, but the production is pretty low.

If you want some good reading about getting better at racing, pick up Drive to Win, by Lewis Carroll.

Even if you don't splurge for the book, Going Faster is a great place to learn the fundamentals.