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Beginner's Guide to Weather, Setup and Tyres.

Batracer StartGuide for Players without KT

This guide will get you started in Batracer. It is aimed at newcomers without Kool Tools to help them change setups. Feel free to copy it to a file of your own for reference. All corrections, additions and updates welcome. This is partly compiled from other help here, and simplified where I thought they got more complicated than they needed to.

This guide assumes you have already joined or created a team, chosen your engine and tyres and are ready to start your test runs. There are 4 main areas to any Batracer game, regardless of the series. They are - Checking the Weather, Setting up your Car, Adjusting your Setup for different Weather, and When to Change Tyres in a race.


1 - Weather Conditions

The Weather is the most vital component of Batracer to learn about because it decides everything else. Tyres, Setup and Race Strategy all depend on it. These percentages apply to everything in BatRacer, so LEARN THEM :)

Bone Dry = 0% Wet Factor
Greasy = 9% Wet Factor
Moist= 18% Wet Factor
Drizzle = 27% Wet Factor
Light Rain = 36% Wet Factor
Rain = 45% Wet Factor
Wet and Slippery = 54% Wet Factor
Steady Rain = 63% Wet Factor
Heavy Rain = 72% Wet Factor
Treacherous Rain and Spray = 81% Wet Factor
Monsoon = 90% Wet Factor
Storm = 100% Wet Factor

Use these values to decide your Tyres for the Warmup, Qualifying and Starting Tyres for the Race. Look at how they wear in practice or warmup, too, as this can be a good indicator of how they will last over race distance.

For the race, Tyres need to be set in the Race Strategy screen. You don’t want to use valuable test runs to get a good setup then throw it all away by starting a wet race on slicks! Even experienced players forget this sometimes, so make sure you don’t.


2 - Initial Setup and the Engineer's Advice

The Engineer is your first port of call in warmup sessions and will give you a rough starting point to fine tune your car for each race.

The Engineer's Advice is normally “low”, “medium” or “high”, however he may use other terms as follows;

Suspension - soft, medium, hard
Anti Roll Bars - loose, medium, stiff
Brake Bias - safe, medium, loose

Note that although “loose” is used twice, with Anti Roll Bars it is low and with Brake Bias it is high.

The Experimentation Slider decides how risky you go with your data. The higher the value the faster you will find a good setup, but the more chance of a mistake or accident that will cost you test runs. If you have Thinker you can set the Experimentation Slider to 100 and get maximum feedback to setup your car without losing runs.

Using the basic advice from the Engineer, and making sure you are on the right tyres for the session, you set starting values for each part of the car, do your test runs and adjust them as the estimates are updated. Estimation updates reduce the range, which helps you zoom in until ideally all of your values are spot on.

Most players recommend the 8-4-2-1 method to tune in your values between tests, i.e. move the slider by 8 first, test, then when the gap is down a bit go to 4, then 2, then 1. You will rarely get enough runs to do this for every value, so just get them as good as you can.

After the initial setup, perhaps the most baffling thing for newcomers is what to do if the weather in the race will be different from the warmup. If the weather is likely to change there will be a set of figures below the Engineer’s advice, which are used to calculate the new setup values for that weather condition.

A Worked Example of how to do this follows.


3 - How to change the setup for different weather

Let’s say you have a Bone Dry setup and it is going to be Heavy Rain in the race.

The formula for working out the necessary changes assumes that all your values are spot on. Do not worry if they are not, as already stated a 100% setup is rare. Generally speaking it is best to do all your runs for the current weather, get the setup as good as you can, then adjust it for different weather afterwards.

Let’s say your Bone Dry values are;

Suspension = 65
Anti Roll Bar = 60
Front Tyre Pressure = 50
Rear Tyre Pressure = 55
Brake Bias = 40.

and the Engineer says that to change for the wet you should do the following;

Suspension = -20
Anti Roll Bar = -14
Front Tyre Pressure = +7
Rear Tyre Pressure = +9
Brake Bias = +10.

Using the calculator in Windows or equivalent, as it’s already to hand, it’s pretty easy.

The formula is simply the Weather Difference as a percentage of the Engineer’s value, then rounded to the nearest whole number. This gives the actual number to add or subtract.

The Weather Difference in this case is 72% (Heavy Rain minus Bone Dry = 72-0 = 72).

The amounts to add or subtract are therefore 72% of the numbers given by the Engineer. So you simply multiply the Engineer values by 0.72 and round down;

Suspension = 20 x 0.72 = 14.4. So the new value is 65-14 = 51.
Anti Roll Bar = 14 x 0.72 = 10.08. So the new value is 60-10 = 50.
Front Tyre Pressure = 7 x 0.72 = 5.04. So the new value is 50+5 = 55.
Rear Tyre Pressure = 9 x 0.72 = 6.48. So the new value = 55+6 = 61.
Brake Bias = 10 x 0.72 = 7.2. So the new value = 40+7 = 47.

As long as the previous setup wasn't too far out this will give you good ballpark figures to work with. If it is the other way round, i.e. wet to dry, you use the same values and formula but reverse the + and -.

Remember that it is the Weather Difference that gives you the percentage to use.

Example 2 - The weather has been Drizzle in the previous race and remains so in the next warmup, but the coming race is expected to be Monsoon. You have a decent setup for Drizzle but now it needs changing. You would use the difference between Monsoon and Drizzle = 90-27 = 63% or 0.63.

Sometimes you will be told that the weather has changed! and to re-evaluate your setup, only to see that the icons used for the weather remain the same (e.g. shows Bone Dry for Warmup and Race.) This means that the weather has indeed changed, but not enough to take it to the next weather stage. Use your best judgement in how little or how much you wish to adjust your setup in these cases.


4 - When to change tyres during a race

Should the weather change during a race you need to include when you will change tyres in the Race Strategy screen.

We will use BAT7 as an example. In the BAT7 series are 4 tyres. The top one is slicks for the dry, the bottom is the full wet tyre and the 2 middle ones are intermediates.

The Slick Tyre will be at 0 for Bone Dry. This does not need changing.

For the Intermediate Tyres, the point at which you change to them from Slicks, or back to slicks from them, is the midpoint between the 2 values, not the value for the inter itself.


Example

You are in a BAT7 game, using Afon Tyres and want to use the ACB10 Intermediates if the weather changes.

If you put 50 for the intermediate ACB10 tyre you will actually change at 25, the midpoint between 0 and 50. By 25 the weather is approaching Drizzle (27) so you may decide you want to change earlier, for example at 15.

Take the difference between the desired value and the value for the previous tyre and multiply it by 2, then add the value for the previous tyre;

15-0 = 15. Multiply this difference by 2 = 30. This is the number to add to 0 to make 15 the midpoint, so put 30 for the ACB10.

To go from Inters to Full Wets is the same process, but this time it uses the midpoint between the Inters and the Wets.

To change from inters to full wets at 45 = (45-30)x2 =30. Add this to the Inter value = 30+30=60. Put 60 in the value for Wets and it will change to them at 45.


The When on Wrong Tyres Slider

The values above can be affected further by using this slider. Adjusting it is a black art as nobody knows exactly what the effects are. If it is on 0 you will come in at the points you have set above, as soon as the weather changes. If you set it to 100 you will never come in. Past that your guess is as good as anybody's.

So why experiment at all? You've set your points, what's the use of it? One reason may be changing conditions. If it starts to rain and you change tyres but it doesn't last, you might have been better off putting up with a few wet laps without pitting, and gaining an advantage over those who did, when the track dries again a few laps later. It's another option to experiment with to see if it helps your strategy, using your judgement on how changeable the weather will be.


Document created by Sonia Northstar. Last updated 14 Sep 2012.

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