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The number one question asked in the DTR chat between races is "How can I make my car faster?" It is my goal to attempt to answer that question in as much detail as possible on the pages within. Although the bulk of this guide will be addressing the topic of setting up the car (as indicated by the title), the setup is actually only 1/4 of answer. I would be cheating you if I didn't at least address the other 3/4 of the answer. I'll start with the biggy…

Vehicle Handling (a.k.a. Realism)
If there is one single setting in the game that can speed up your car the most, this one is it! If you have your realism set to anything other than 100% you are wasting your time trying to win races online. To check that setting, from the Main Menu in DTR, go to the Options menu and then the Game menu. In the middle of that screen you'll find a yellow slider. If it is not slid all the way over to Realistic, put it there. I must warn you however, once you make this change, you car will be a WHOLE LOT faster and it is going to feel like you are driving on ice. This is where the setup comes in.

Driving Ability (a.k.a Skill)
It doesn't matter how great the setup is you've created (or downloaded), if you can't drive the car properly you are going to be slow! There isn't anything that you can find on the Internet which is going to improve this aspect of racing. The only way to improve is practice. Any by practice I mean running laps online against real racers. When I first got the game I didn't even look at online racing for about three months. I spent that time playing the game in career mode learning to beat the computer cars. When I got to the point that I had beaten every race at 100% AI and 100% realism, that's when I decided to go online. I was confident that I would be competitive since I could now beat the computer cars with ease. What I found is that I sucked, BAD!

I attribute this to two major factors. First and foremost the drivers online are using real intelligence to make their decisions, not AI. This means they do not suffer from the same mistakes that the computer cars ALWAYS make (which is usually where I would pass) and, more importantly, you CANNOT always predict what the other car is going to do. That makes a huge difference when it comes to racing in a crowd. Lastly, online racing introduces lag. If there is one key rule to remember about racing online it would be "the cars you see are NEVER where they appear!" Conversely, you are not in the same place on their screens as you are on yours. This fact will become evident rather quickly the first time you make a clean pass and the other car goes shooting off the track. On his screen you slammed him! The best advice is don't get near other cars unless you have to!

Therefore, the only way you are going to improve your driving ability is to run races online. And by races I don't mean a few. I started racing line in July of 2000. Between 7/1/00 and 10/20/00 I ran a total of 4,615 races (40,663 laps) online. It took me at least a month just to get to the point where I could win more than one race in a row. So, keep practicing!

The Perfect Line
The single most important factor in making your car go faster is the line you take when driving around the track. Every track has at least one "perfect" line. This is the line you have to run if you want to turn the fastest possible lap time. On most tracks, there is only one "perfect" line and if you are running anything other than that line you will never be the fastest. All a car setup will do is allow you to hold a given line. Therefore, the very first thing you have to do is find a good line and learn to hold that line every lap (which is where the skill comes in). At this point don't worry about your lap times, just concentrate on finding a line that feels fast and your are able to duplicate. Once you've gotten to that point, then you can start setting up the car to make that line easier to hold and faster. The key is finding a line that is natural. If you are having to make conscious decisions about when to get off the gas every lap or when to turn or when to get back on the gas, you will never be able to turn consistent lap times. What you are usually doing is fighting the natural line. The idea is to find a line you can hold every lap even when you're talking on the phone!

The question then becomes is that the "perfect" line? At some point you are going to find that tweaking your setup will not improve your lap times. If those lap times are not the best you have ever seen, then you know for sure you are not running the "perfect" line. That is when you have to find a new natural line and start the process again.

The Setup
As stated above, the last quarter of the answer is the setup. It is generally accepted that the default setup supplied with DTR is utterly useless! It is so screwed up in so many places that it can run as much as 2 seconds per lap slower on some tracks even if you are following the "perfect" line. Therefore, in order to race competitively online, you have to have at least one different setup.

To get this setup you have a couple of options. You can download a setup someone else has created, or you can learn to setup the car and create a setup on your own. The latter is the only viable option if you plan on being a serious online racer! I can say this because even if you download setups, you will be required to tweak them to your driving style. If you do not know how to setup the car, you will not know how to tweak them properly.

The rest of the this guide is dedicated to just that, learning how to setup the car. I hope you find the information useful!

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