How to calculate setup?
One of the most important things a rookie should know is to calculate his setup properly. A perfect setup can drastically improve lap timings, and it doesn't cost anything at all.
One of the basic things you must understand before learning how to setup a car is the 'Driver Happy Zone'
When you setup a car, a driver will, at some point not comment on a particular part. He might even say that he is satisfied with the setup. However, this does not mean that the setup you have achieved is the ideal setup. This is because a driver is happy over a big range of setups. The term 'happy zone' or 'happy range' is used to refer to the range over with the driver is happy with the setup. This range changes according to some factors, about which I will discuss later on.
So, suppose the ideal setting of a gearbox is 150, and the driver has a happy zone of 50, this means that the driver will be happy for all the values between 125 and 175 for the gearbox. Since speed for gearbox of 150 will be better than that for 125 or 175, you will be faster if you find the exact value (150) instead of using just any value your driver is happy with.
If the TI and Experience of a driver is low, it makes finding the ideal value even more important because of the time you can save.
So, how to calculate the ideal setup?
Step 1:
Find out the happy zone for your driver using the following formula:
H = 135 - 0.3*Technical Insight - 0.1*Experience
where H is the happy zone of the driver.
Step 2:
Find out the highest (or lowest) point the driver is happy at for all the parts. This is quite easy to achieve in 5-6 laps if you have raced on that track before.
Step 3:
Subtract (if you have found the highest setup value) or add (if you have found the lowest setup value) half the value of happy zone (calculated from the above formula) and you will get the perfect setup for your car.
Notes:
1) A setup of a car is a function to many attributes. These include your car CCPs, the wear on your car, your driver's attributes as well as the temperature and the humidity. It is, hence advisable that you calculate ideal setup for each and every race instead of relying on someone else to give you the ideal setup, because that will be impossible.
2) Some stats of the Technical Director affect the happy zones of a driver too. I will not tell you exactly how (however, I will tell you that the happy zone always decreases) since you will get a TD only when you get to Pro and you should be able to figure things out by yourself by then.