Porsche Unleashed

First off, if you haven't played Evolution Mode in the game, you're missing out. That's where you buy the cars and speed parts, and once you've bought the cars, you can tune them as well. Even a car without any speed parts on it will be faster if tuned, and you can't tune them if you don't own them. That said, you may find you've gotten through Evolution Mode without buying some car you find you want. For instance, the 1953 356 Super Cabriolet (or the Super Coupe) is the 356A to have for fast tracks (Autobahn, Zone Industrielle, and MC2). Yet you don't need to buy it during Evolution, and it isn't available on the used car market later. Are you stuck? No. You can download and use Evolution Editor to buy cars you missed out on as the years progressed during the game. It's available from Team XR's web site (the links page has the URL).

When you buy parts, you basically just buy all speed parts available and install them (installing it is a separate act; don't forget it). There are a few exceptions:
1) Do not use any of the larger engine upgrades. These are available engines in cars like the 944 ("3.0 liter engine upgrade") and a few others. They're slower. Does it make sense that they are? Who cares; they just are, and you don't want them.
2) Due to a glitch, the 1973 Carrera RS is faster with the close-ratio transmission than with the high-speed transmission.
3) Transmission Quick Shifters are faster for some people; slower for others. It seems to be that it affects some cornering styles while benefiting others. Experiment.
4) With the exception of the '73 RS mentioned, you'll want high speed transmissions on all your cars, with the possible/probable exception of the fastest cars (like the '95 Turbo) at slower tracks.
5) Use slick tires on all cars at all tracks: fast, slow, rainy, snowy.
6) I would suggest that for the 944s, you keep around the "standard brakes" and the "sport brakes", as well as the "professional racing brakes". On at least some tracks, the "professional racing brakes" are too sensitive and seem slower. I first saw this racing at Cote backward, but haven't experimented a lot with it, except enough to notice that the standard brakes, which worked well for me at Cote, weren't powerful enough for a track like MC1 forward. The sport brakes may be a good compromise. So keep all 3 around and you can duck over to the garage while online and change them around (you can't buy parts while online, but you can chnage them if you have them).

Now, a few extremely brief notes on tuning: there are other sites with far more info on tuning the cars, like Team XR, Demolition Crew, Speed Kings, and Ahead Racing sites (links, naturally, are on the Links page). Check them out for detailed, car-specific tuning info, especially for info on the gearing changes you can make with the 3 race cars in the game (the Spyder, the "Moby Dick", and the GT1). Another suggestion: get and use the program "Silent Witness" (Team XR's site). Its purpose is to be able to spot cheaters who hack their cars by reading info from the online replays (which by the way can't be viewed the way offline replays can). But another great feature of Silent Witness is that you can see just what settings your opponents are using. You can always ask too. People are pretty forthcoming about giving out info; more so than a couple years ago, I'd say.

But there are some basics that answer the age-old newbie question "why are your cars so much faster than mine?" The basics are these: inflate the tires on your cars to 45 psi, front and rear. Very powerful cars may do better with slightly less in the rears (between 42-44). In general, use no downforce in 356's and 914's. I have been experimenting with 15-20 in the rear for tracks like MC4, but I'm not sure it's actually a benefit. Seems like it, but I can't be sure. Faster cars use some downforce in the front, and more in the rear. Downforce in the rear affects your speed far less than downforce in the front, so a 944 may have, say, 40/5 (40 in the rear, 5 in the front). You may even have a 95 Turbo with something like 100/0 or 100/5. See what suits you; I often use less downforce than other racers for a given track. Sometimes I'm faster; sometimes not.

The sliders are generally full left for ride height -- the top one -- or a click or two from full left like I have here. Full right for the next two. Toe-in somewhere between the middle and full right; same for brake balance. Most people have brake balance pretty far to the right or all the way over. Toe-in settings vary according to track and personal preference. For instance, in a 356 like this I'll use full right for a track with a lot of corners, like Corsica, or where I want to corner easier on certain corners, like MC5 forward. But on tracks where the 356 tends to do a high speed slide on certain corners (losing speed in the process), I'll use the middle position. These are tracks like Autobahn, the Zone, and Normandy.

Most sports are pretty simple: golf, hit ball from here into little hole there; bowling, knock down all the pins with this ball; racing cars, go from here to there and don't slow down unless you have to.

That's it: go from here to there and don't slow down unless you have to. That's all there is to it.

Somehow, the basically simple in sports becomes complex when reality intrudes. Isn't that just like life? But it is, at its core, basically simple. Most folks make one or all of three basic mistakes when racing: they don't go fast when they should, or they don't slow down when they should, and they don't anticipate corners, so they don't turn early enough.

So how do you know when you should be going fast or slowing down? Experience will teach you a lot, but you have to change and improve; it is possible to make the same mistakes virtually forever (even when you know better, you will make them sometimes). But the best basic rule of thumb I know of is the idea of the 3 types of corners.

Any track that you can't be at top speed for the entire track has, obviously, corners. The essence of the idea is the realization that not all corners are equally important. The 3 different types of corners, from most important to least important, are:

Corners leading onto long straights;
Corners leading onto short straights;
Corners leading to other corners.

What you're after is speed -- overall speed -- and where you find it in abundance is on the straights. Every second you can be at a higher speed is a lot of ground covered. You want to get to your top speed quicker on the straight, you're spending more time at that top speed. Being at a higher speed in a series of corners is less important, because that speed is, by definition of a corner, not your top speed.

If you have a corner on its own, you just drive it as quickly as possible, making sure you get a good drive onto the straight after it. But many times -- usually -- you have a series of corners, and going through them becomes a compromise; you can't exit one corner optimally because you have to be set up to take the next corner. What you want to do is make sure that your last corner in the series -- the one which leads onto a straight -- is the one you are always properly set up for. Check out the Corsica forward page; the first example is a classic example of this problem.

But here we see the continuation of that corner; turns out it's an S turn. If you take the line I drew in above, you'll make time on the first half. But you'll be set up all wrong for the second half, and that's the critical part, because it dumps you out on a straight (you can't see it, but trust me). So your first half of the corner should follow a slower line that leaves you on the left side of the track instead of the right side. Then you're on the proper side to make a strong drive onto the important straight. If you were on the right side entering that last section you'd have to slow down or at least delay applying the power.

The most important and basic thing to remember is the two essential parts of that first statement: don't slow down unless you have to. I can't emphasize this enough -- take it in two parts:
1) don't slow down: self-explanatory...
2) unless you have to: often forgotten. Many times -- at the jumps at Normandy, the switchbacks at Alps, the big downhill switchback at Corsica backward, the classic mistakes of Schwarzwald backward -- the error is in simply not slowing down when you have to. Many times you'll find that you have to go slow to go fast. Remember it.

Oh, and correct early... as you learn tracks, you'll recognize when you've made a mistake before the mistake becomes obvious. The earlier you can correct the better you'll (usually) be, either saving the corner or minimizing the error. Sure, once in a while your correction will cause a worse event than a total screw up wall banging, but that's just a matter of luck.

Correcting too late and not turning until you see the corner are the two most common driving mistakes I've seen.

A car in Porsche Unleashed does a pretty good job of acting like a real car -- perhaps not just like the actual cars it portrays, but a lot of the same feel. For instance, that business of lifting the throttle and having the tail swing out is classic Porsche behavior. In fact, that's typical car behavior when you're going fast in a car that isn't extremely nose heavy. Just as in a real car, you can use this sort of reaction on the part of the car to help you get around the track faster. But first, a note:

Don't even start to think that because you know how to drive fast in a racing game that you know how to drive fast in reality. Not only does the real world have more -- and less predictable -- hazards than a game, the cues you'll get from a real driving experience are at once both more subtle and more severe, and more numerous and more confusing. Take this from someone who's driven a large variety of cars in my years at Ferrari shops, someone who's roadraced motorcycles, and someone who's smashed a Volvo into a large, unusable brick. Now back to our previously scheduled lesson.

Perhaps the most critical part of going fast is attitude -- not just yours, your car's. Think of your car's "attitude" as a combination of where it's pointed and where it's going. On a straight, the 2 are in harmony, but in any corner, there's a balance between "pointed" and "going". Too much "going" in a direction it isn't "pointed" means a speed-robbing slide. And you can be pointed and going -- sliding -- in a direction you don't want to be going, usually understeering or "pushing" instead of turning. For these reasons, you may need to make corrections in a corner, or between corners.

For instance, on a corner like turn 2 at MC1 or MC3 forward, you can often find yourself understeering and getting wider and wider through the corner, delaying the time you can put the power down. A bit of correction is in order.

Learn to use your brakes to help adjust the attitude of your car. Just as you can get the tail to begin coming around by lifting the throttle, you can do so with the brakes. And you can do so with the brake even while you're mashing your foot down on the gas. This is used sometimes in racing real cars too -- it's extremely common in rallying, where large attitude adjustments are needed often. An advantage of applying brakes and throttle at the same time is that is tends to upset your car's attitude less; it creates a smoother transition and your car will be more settled evenly on all 4 tires and therefore ready to respond smoothly. Remember, it's a game; you're not going to wear out your brakes. "Feathering" the throttle -- lifting slightly, or often a combination of lifting, reapplying, lifting, and reapplying, etc. -- is another important skill for adjusting your car's attitude.

So on that turn 2 situation, you could feather the throttle or give the brakes a brush, or more likely a series of brushes, to get your car pointed in the direction you want to go. Another example of a place this technique often comes in handy is the at MC1 forward, on the right turn going uphill after you've come off the straight. You may often need to make several adjustments in your car's attitude to get yourself pointed in the right direction as you go through the turn. The uphill esses at various MCs, such as MC3 and MC4 forward, and MC2 backward, are a spot where you might find tapping the brakes and/or lifting the throttle will be helpful getting you pointed in the right direction as you negotiate them.

Okay, so what the heck is "railing"?

Once you get online, you'll see people flying into certain corners, whacking the walls, and steaming away at high speed. What they're doing has become known as "railing", because it so often involves using the guardrails to help get around the corner. However, railing can be done with guardrails, walls, and even earthen banks at tracks like Schwarzwald. Although railing has become the generic name for this maneuver, on these pages I often use the term "bouncing" in certain instances. This is because there are two distinct varieties of railing: sliding your car along the rail for a short distance, or just hitting it and bouncing off. In general, the longer your car is in contact with a rail or wall, the slower you'll go. But some cars, such as the 959, steer so poorly that you can only make a fast time on some tracks by sliding along rails and walls for much of the distance.

So a few basics about railing are:
Driving with your car touching something like that is just slower than driving when not in contact.
Railing is only faster when your car just can't make the corner fast enough without it.
If you're in an online race with "damage on", hitting these rails will usually cause damage to your car and make it slower or harder to steer.
Nevertheless, you may find that, even with damage on, railing may improve your cornering speeds enough to counter the damage, and the damage can be minimized by hitting the rail or wall lightly.
If the damage setting is off, how hard you hit is only constrained by whether or not it causes you to crash, and sometimes that hit can be very hard indeed.

There are some corners where railing is faster with all cars; an example is the sharp corner at the end of the straight on MC2 backward or MC4 forward (same corner). The turn at the end of the straight in the opposite direction at those tracks provides an example of a turn where slower, better turning cars are better off not railing, while the fast ones benefit from it.

In general, there are two ways to make contact with a rail -- with both you keep the throttle down all the way. If you're railing for a long distance in a relatively gentle corner, you should try as much as possible to contact it gently and smoothly at only a slight angle to the wall. In this case you may be able to contact it without using the e-brake, or you may need a touch of e-brake to make the contact smooth -- hitting it flat sided (neither nose or tail first) is ideal. If you're using it to get around a tight corner, you head for it at a sharp angle, even almost (but not quite) head-on in some cases. In this case you use the e-brake, and leave that e-brake use until really late. If you do it too early you'll be likely to spin or to bounce across the track in a direction you don't want to be going.

Keyboarders will unfortunately find railing more difficult, as using the e-brake is hard to do when you're simultaneously steering and holding the throttle down.

Here's two examples from my pages here: On the left is a gentle, oblique approach; on the right is the sharper angle with the "hit and run" method. (The specifics of these turns I go over on the pages they're from -- MC3 backward on the left side examples and MC3 forward on the right.)

Railing takes practice but yields good results, and cases, like Spyders and 959s on many tracks, it gets results you just can't begin to approach in any other way.

At this time, I'll only make a few points specific to some of the cars in Porsche Unleashed. I'll add more as I think of them and have time.

The 959 and the Spyder are examples of cars that often need to be driven with a lot of adjustments just before, or during, corners (others are the GT2 and GT3, the 928, and pretty much all stock cars). Ideally, you make most of them before the corner and get the car pointed and settled so you can turn on the power and (largely) leave it on, but this theoretical ideal is often not met in practice. If you can't get it ideally set up before the corner, it's better to make those adjustments in the corner than to not make them at all.

Stock cars, because of the tires and suspension, need to be driven in much the same way as the Spyder and 959, with more adjustment before and in corners than modified cars. You may also find that on some tracks -- for instance Corsica -- where I mention not getting onto the grass, you may need to cross over grassy sections you'd miss in a modified car simply because the stock cars, and the others mentioned above, don't turn well enough to take the proper line.

356s should be driven -- ideally -- with less tire squeal than the faster cars. They lose speed in heavy cornering and can afford to lose it less than the later, faster, cars. This naturally results in a compromise on many corners, since, after all, you do have to turn. Just keep it in mind. You'll find that using manual transmission is a big plus in a 356; leaving it on automatic causes too early a shift. Don't necessarily wring it out right to the redline though, but you will get it into the red zone on the tach (I use an analog tach). While the 1956 Speedster and the 1960 356B can be taken to (or almost to) 6,000 rpm, the 1953 Super Coupe and Super Cabriolet should be shifted slightly earlier. You'll see why if you try to take it to 6,000 rpm; at some point, it'll just stop revving. Obviously, trying to go past that point is just a waste of time -- time on the track. You'll see the same thing, only more so, in the 1962 356 Carrera.

The "rubber-legged" cars, like the '62 Carrera, the "78 Turbo, and (to a lesser extent perhaps) the '72 911, can benefit from a cornering style where you "load" the outside wheels when you start the corner, just before you actually begin making the corner itself. This needs to be done with care, since overdoing it unsettles the car as much as, if not more than, not doing it at all. (This, incidentally, is how I used to drive my Chevy van fast around twisty California roads.) You begin to turn gently before actually starting your turn, causing the weight to shift to the outside wheels.

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