BustaWrench › Answers › What are the most common mistakes iRacing drivers make?
The short answer
Over-driving, changing too many things at once, ignoring the tyres, chasing qualifying pace in the race, and never looking at telemetry. They all feel like effort and they all cost time. Slow down 10%, change one thing per session, watch your tyre temps, run the first stint at 95%, and compare your trace with a faster lap.
Over-driving is braking too late, turning in too hard and sliding everywhere. That is survival, not pace. Slow down 10%, hit your marks, then add speed lap by lap — the time comes back faster than you expect.
Changing too much in one session — new wheel, new pedals, new field of view, new setup — leaves you with no idea what helped. One change per session, tested and logged.
The current tyre model punishes lockups, gets hot over a long run, and rewards smooth inputs. If you are spinning on exit or losing the rear mid-corner, that is usually you asking for grip the tyre does not have.
Watch the temperatures and the wear. Fronts glowing after three laps means you are braking too hard. Back off, let them cool, and learn where the sweet spot is.
One hot lap is fun; thirty of them will kill your tyres. Run the first stint of a race at 95% effort and focus on consistency — you will pass the people who burned their rubber by lap ten.
And after each session, compare your best lap against a faster one: braking points, throttle trace, steering input. That comparison finds half a second in an afternoon rather than a month.
None of these five are setup problems, and none of them get fixed by spending money on the car.
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