28.09.15: Slow Down and You'll Get Higher on the Leaderboards

I got my first racing wheel on the 11th September, the day after the Ultimate Edition of FM6 went live. I drove the FM6 Qualifying Series on my Xbox game controller though because I knew that I would be hopeless with the wheel before I had a chance to get used to it.

My Logitech G920 mounted on a Hyperdrive Dominator sim rig made here in Australia

It wasn't long before I got a lot better at it. I was oversteering a lot to begin with, running off the track and into walls, but the FFB provided me with a lot of useful info about my driving behaviour and I quickly learned how to control it. I couldn't drive as fast as I could with the controller, but interestingly I found that it was a lot easier to stay on the track and do "clean" laps. My lap times weren't as good but I was getting much higher on the leaderboards!

This is because clean laps are ranked higher on the boards than dirty laps. Previously I hadn't paid much attention to this. Whenever I glanced at the leaderboards I saw that I ranked pretty low compared with most drivers. I was struggling to stay in the top 50%, which is pretty bad let's be honest, so I tended not to take them very seriously. I've been a Forza player for about three years now and in all this time it never occured to me that I could be doing better.

With clean laps I was getting into the top 5% quite easily, and in a lot of the lower class rivals events I was getting in the top one or two percent frequently.

I often found myself at the bottom of the list of clean laps but nevertheless in the top 5% which was interesting. It meant that I could look over the fence, so to speak, at the long list of dirty laps and it dawned on me that 95% of Forza players were doing dirty laps which was astounding to me! Some of them were doing pretty good times too, but in their haste they had run off the track or bumped into a fence and had been sent to the bottom of the list.

I wasn't doing the fastest laps by any means but I was ranked in the top few percent just by taking my time and staying on the track. If you use a controller then you'll probably know that it takes more concentration to stay on the track compared with a wheel, but you may find that slowing down pays a handsome dividend.