Took your advise Skill and qualified for Texas. I didn't do brilliantly (mostly because I somehow manage to load the wrong set-up!) but It did seem to help avoid some of the carnage. I still ended up with someone spinning right into my path but I manage to avoid wrecking my car at least. Once again I was amazed at the fact the rear end of the field didn't slow down for the caution at all despite the fact there must have been a ton of tyre smoke since two of us were sideways. Personally I blame Days of Thunder
Having issues with tyre wear though. By the end of the race my tyres were completely gone having only run about 30 laps I think. The leaders seem to be able to run longer and faster somehow.
I ended up doing 2 races on a setup that was excellent around Michigan, bit loose around Texas though, only realised (thought I was driving oddly to make it looser) when I went into practice just before qualifying, then felt silly
Cole Trickle is my idol, if I see a wreck I simply close my eyes and keep it flat, what could possible go wrong...
With the tyre wear it's either setup or your pushing too hard, as an example of pushing too hard I can do a 30.155 in practice on the first lap of my setup, a 30.3 is doable on the second lap, and then if I push really hard I can do a couple of 30.6/7's but then I need to drop into the 9's for a bit to cool the RR, before settling down to consistent low 9's/high 8's. But if I start the run like that it won't be too long before I'm struggling and getting 31.2/3's if not slower.
The punishment given to the RF when really pushing doesn't seem to affect you for a good while, yet it will come to bite you.
In a race situation (eg I've got a draft) if I'm being sensible and attempting to keep my tyres alive I will be doing 30.3's for a lap or two before fairly rapidly dropping to the 30.8/30.9's, all with draft so no need to push all that hard in the corners, doing this I can do >50 lap runs before it starts dropping into the 31's on a regular basis (my consistency, or lack of, means I hit some 31's at various points beforehand). There's a big difference between those lap times and the ultimate pace I can do in practice with no draft, and the length of the consistent bit in the middle of the tyre life represents that.
Obviously the other argument is setup, if you've got a 'tight' setup then it's invariably going to wear out the RF more which means it just keeps getting tighter, which wears the tyre more etc etc etc, an ideal setup is one that you can drive in a manner that suits your preference of loose/tight but the only important bit is that the tyre wear is roughly equal, I think at one point I checked and I had 50% on the RF and 53% on the RR in the centre of the tyre, and with that the balance was good enough to just keep lapping quickly and not damage the tyres so much.
And now we're onto New Hampshire, which is evil, and hard, done a bit of practice and set a 30.4 but nowhere near able to race yet, either gonna sit this one out or gonna take a while of practicing till I'm ready...
