How to be more consistent in iRacing
Picture two drivers in the same MX-5 at Laguna Seca. One laps within two tenths every time. The other is occasionally a tenth quicker, but regularly half a second slower, and every fifth lap or so they drop a wheel at the Corkscrew and lose a second. Over a twenty-minute race the first driver finishes ahead nearly every time, because across a stint consistency is pace. The quick lap only shows up on the timing screen once. The slow ones keep happening.
There’s a second reason to care about it, and in my experience it matters even more. You can’t get faster in a reliable way if your laps are all over the place. Try a later brake point into Turn 2 and your lap comes back three tenths quicker. Was that the brake point, or did you just nail the exit of Turn 11 for once? With a spread of a second between your best and worst laps, you genuinely can’t tell. Consistency turns practice from guesswork into something you can learn from.
Measure it before you try to fix it
Most drivers think they’re more consistent than they are, because they remember their good laps and forget the scrappy ones. So start with numbers. Go out in a test session or an open practice, run 10 laps in a row without resetting, and write down every time. Throw out the first lap, because the tyres are still cold and it tells you nothing. Then look at the gap between your best and your worst of the remaining laps.
As a rough guide, if that gap is under about 0.3 seconds, you’re consistent enough that pace should be your main focus. Somewhere between 0.3 and 0.8 seconds means a few corners are catching you out and you need to find them. Over 0.8 seconds and consistency is where your biggest gains are, probably by a long way. These numbers shift a bit with the car and track (a two-minute lap at Spa gives you more room to scatter than a minute at Okayama), but they’re a decent starting point.
The spread is only half the story, though. Look at the shape of it too. If most of your laps are within a tenth of each other and there’s one lap two seconds off, that’s a mistake, maybe a half-spin or a missed gear. If every lap is different by three or four tenths with no pattern, that’s a technique problem, and it’s the one this post is mostly about.
Why your laps vary
It’s rarely the whole lap. Nearly always, a handful of corners are doing the damage, and when you dig into them the causes tend to be the same few things. I spent most of my first season blaming “a bad day” for lap time scatter that was really coming from two corners at Summit Point, and once I looked properly the fix took about an evening.
The biggest cause by far is not having fixed brake references. If you brake by feel, you’ll brake in a different place every lap, and one metre of difference at the brake point turns into a different entry speed, a different turn-in and a different exit. Braking is where most of the variation starts, which is why our guide on how to find your brake points is worth reading alongside this one.
Driving over the limit does the same thing. If you’re sliding and catching the car through a corner, no two laps will match, because the slide is never quite the same size and neither is the correction. This is common in cars like the GR86 or a GT4 where the rear can step out and then come back, and it feels fast from the cockpit because you’re busy. The lap timer usually disagrees.
Changing your line is the next one. If you turn in half a car width earlier on one lap, you move the apex, which moves the exit, which changes your speed all the way down the next straight. Drivers who haven’t settled on a line for each corner end up improvising, and improvising is inconsistent by definition. If you’re not sure where the line should be, racing line basics covers apexes and track width in more detail.
Then there’s concentration. Plenty of drivers are tidy for five laps before their attention goes and things start to drift. You’ll see it in the lap times: a tight group early on, then a slow creep as braking gets lazy and lines get sloppy. Nothing about your technique has changed. You’ve just stopped actively driving every corner.
How to find the corners that cost you
Once you’ve got a lap time spread, the next job is working out where it comes from. Sector times are the easiest place to start. iRacing splits the lap into sectors, so when you look back at a stint, check which sector has the widest spread. If sector one varies by a tenth and sector three varies by six tenths, you know where to look, even before you open any telemetry.
From there, narrow it down to specific corners, and make it a habit at the end of every stint. The quickest way is to put your worst clean lap next to your best in a telemetry viewer and look at the speed trace. Where the lines split apart is where the time went. If you’re new to reading traces, how to read iRacing telemetry walks through the five that matter. You’re looking for where the brake trace starts, how deep it goes, and where the throttle comes back in. On a scrappy lap you’ll often see the braking start a few metres early or late, followed by a lower minimum speed and a later throttle application.
You can also do a surprising amount without telemetry at all. Drive a few laps and, after each one, say out loud which corner felt wrong. Did you run wide at the exit of the Esses at Watkins Glen? Did you have to lift mid-corner at Road Atlanta Turn 1? After ten laps you’ll usually have named the same two or three corners several times, and those go on your list.
One mistake I see a lot is trying to fix everything at once. You find five corners that vary and start working on all of them in the same session. Pick the one that costs the most time (usually a corner leading onto a long straight, because a bad exit there costs you all the way down) and work on that alone until it’s settled. Then move on to the next.
Drills that make your laps repeatable
These are the routines that have worked for me and for drivers I’ve practised with. None of them are exciting.
Drive at 95%
Back off a touch on purpose and concentrate on doing exactly the same thing every lap. Brake a metre or two earlier than your best, carry a bit less entry speed, and focus on hitting every reference cleanly. You’ll lose less time than you expect, often only two or three tenths off your personal best, and your laps will tighten up a lot.
The point is that at 95% you’ve got spare attention. You can notice where you’re turning in, what the car is doing, and whether you hit the apex. At 100% you’re just surviving. Do a 10-lap run at 95%, check your spread, and then creep the pace back up a corner at a time. You’ll often find your 95% laps settle into a group quicker than your old average, which tells you how much time the scatter was costing.
One reference per corner
Pick a brake reference, a turn-in point and an apex for every corner on the track. Use things that don’t move: a marker board, a kerb stripe, a change in the tarmac, a tree behind the fence. Say them out loud if that helps. It feels a bit daft but it works, because saying “brake at the two board, turn at the end of the patch, clip the second red kerb” forces you to commit to a plan.
In a Formula Vee or a Ray FF1600 at Lime Rock, for example, you might only have seven or so corners to set references for, so there’s no excuse not to. The aim is a lap you drive deliberately, the same way every time. When one of your references stops working (you keep missing an apex, say), move it, and then stick with the new one.
Longer stints
Practise in runs of 15 to 20 laps rather than three-lap bursts followed by a reset. Holding concentration is a skill like any other, and races go on a lot longer than three laps.
A good routine is one warm-up lap, then 15 laps at a steady pace, then a look at the times. If your last five laps are noticeably slower or more scattered than your first five, and the tyres aren’t the reason, it’s concentration. Work on that by picking one thing to focus on each lap, such as your braking at one corner, so your brain has something active to do.
Common mistakes when working on consistency
The first is confusing consistency with being slow. Some drivers hear “drive at 95%” and settle into a comfortable pace forever. The 95% drill is a tool for building repeatable technique, and once your spread is under control you need to push the pace back up. The goal is to be consistent at the limit, which is harder and more useful than being consistent a second off it.
The second is resetting too often. If you reset to the pits every time you make a mistake, your data only contains your good laps, and you never learn how you respond to a scrappy one. In a race you can’t reset. Leave the mistakes in, drive through them, and note what caused them.
The third is changing the car. Fiddle with setup between every run and your lap times start measuring the setup instead of your driving. If you’re working on consistency, pick a baseline setup (the iRacing default is fine for most cars) and leave it alone for the whole session. Same goes for switching cars and tracks every night. It’s hard to build a repeatable lap at five different circuits in a week. Spending a few sessions at one track is also the fastest way to learn a new track properly.
Consistency first, then pace
When your laps are repeatable, testing changes gets easy. Try a later brake point in one corner and your lap times tell you straight away whether it helped, because everything else is staying the same. Try carrying more speed through the Andretti Hairpin at Laguna Seca and you’ll know within three laps if the exit suffered. If your laps are scattered, every change is buried in noise and you’re just guessing.
This is the order I’d recommend to anyone who feels stuck. Get your spread under about three tenths at a pace that feels controlled. Then pick one corner and try one change, run five laps, and compare. Keep the changes that work and drop the ones that don’t. It’s slow and a bit methodical, and it’s by far the most dependable way I’ve found to get faster.
If you want to see where your consistency breaks down without trawling through traces yourself, Sim Sense scores consistency as one of its six skill groups, looking at how your lap times, brake points and line vary, and ranks your weaknesses per corner with a lesson and drill for each. It’s part of the free telemetry analysis. Whichever way you measure it, this is worth sorting out before you go chasing raw speed, and it’s first on our checklist for finding lost time for good reason.