OP: First, become a consistent driver! That way, you can accurately judge whether the "ills" in a car's handling are your fault or that of the setup/hardware. If the problems lie with the car, they will be absolutely consistent. If the balance is set towards understeer, for example, you will find that the car understeers every time you perform a specific action, because you can eliminate the driver as a variable. If the car always pushes on entry, it's setup. If it pushes some of the time, and it's loose some of the time, then it's a driver issue with technique or inconsistent speeds or cornering points.
KC and I have been around a couple of times on the "simulator" thing, and at our level, I will maintain that there just isn't a good simulator available. GT6/NFS/iRacing/etc. are really only good enough to generally learn a track layout and start refining a few cornering points here and there. iRacing is about as close as I've found to the real thing, but even there there are "reality" issues, particularly when it comes to recovery dynamics. With the FR500 model, at least when I was using the sim, if you got into a mid-corner push condition, letting off the throttle led to understeer, which just ain't the way it happens in the real world. Also, if you did happen to go 4-off, the grass behaved as if it were freshly rained-upon and on a VERY cold day. Ice mode. In the real world, you CAN recover from a 4-off event.
The real secret to becoming consistent and pushing the car is to A) refine your techniques with the controls, B) focus on consistent cornering points and speeds, and C) approach the limits incrementally. DO NOT assume that because the car was fine in a particular corner at 40mph, that it'll also be fine at 80mph.
First, stay off race rubber. Use the noise a street tire makes at the limit as a guide. Keep increasing your entry speed (and therefore your mid-corner and exit speeds) unit you hear a thin squeal from the tires all the way from turn-in through apex. Now, practice hitting that corner the same way every time, until you get that thin squeal consistently. NOW add one or two mph to your entry speed and see what happens. If that thin squeal becomes a healthy "singing," great. If it starts to "howl," and you'll know the difference, trust me, note what the car's response to that noise is. Right there, the transition from "singing" to "howling" is where you have crossed the limit from completely in control (100% grip or less) to slightly out of control (trying to exceed 100% grip), and the line WILL suffer. If the car is biased towards understeer, you'll start pushing wide of apex. That means that you'll have to delay throttle-on during the exit phase until the car is back on line after apex. If the car is biased towards oversteer, the rear end will start to stick out, and you'll have to snap-correct to get the car back in shape, and that means you'll have to delay throttle-on during the exit phase until the car is back on line after apex. In neither case, assuming you went for just a little more than the car could give you, does it mean that you're going to go off, hit a concrete wall, flip, burst into flames, etc. It just means that you've botched that particular corner. THAT is what you get from incremental changes. Depending on how often you run, how diligent you are about going out with a plan and executing it, and your natural talent levels, it may take a few weekends, a year, or more before you can become reasonably consistent as a driver.
Let's take a look at how to develop braking points for a moment. Pick a brake marker, threshold brake (wait to see Jesus, then throw out the anchor, per DILYSI), then analyize your entry speed based on that braking point. To increase entry speed, move your braking point closer to the corner. At SOME point, you're just going to over-reach, and go in too hot. Does that mean that you have just wadded up your car? No. That means that you have to throw away that corner, and recover. Assuming a standard 90* right-hander, and assuming a turn-in point for a late-apex line right at the "1" marker (fairly typical), your decision point comes right about 150' or so from the corner. That is your "go/no-go" point. Assuming you make the "no-go" decision, you must recover. Remember that at your decision point, you're hard on the brakes... The simple way to recover is to just STAY on the brakes. You have a full 150' of braking room before you even get to the corner, plus up to 40' of track width to work with as wall. You can shed a LOT of speed in 190', particularly if you're already on the brakes and the chassis is "set!" If you've been working up speeds incrementally, you are at worst case, MAYBE 10mph too fast to turn-in successfully at the "1" marker. It won't take but a few (20?) feet to shed those extra 10mph, but you'll want more than that since you can no longer hit the ideal line. Let's just say that sanity suggests you need to shed a whole bunch of speed, so stay on the brakes all the way to the point where the track begins to curl to the right, at the "0" marker. Last weekend, during a planned exercise, my student discovered that her 4000lb Camaro, on street tires, took roughly 350' to go from 100mph to a dead stop. We ALL know that the Mustangs can out-brake a 5th-Gen Camaro, so call that a worst-case scenario. At a minimum, you'll be able to shed AT LEAST 35mph of speed by staying on the brakes for that extra 140'. If we assume a maximum corner-entry speed of 65mph for our theoretical right-hander, and assuming you came in 10mph too hot (which is a LOT!), then at the point where the track starts to curl in, you'll be doing a sedate 40mph, and should be able to run the outside edge of the corner (wide radius) without issue. Yes, the corner is blown, yes, your exit will suffer, but the car is still shiny, clean, and on all four tires.
This is the real difference between the simulators and the real world, where you have pushed the envelope too hard. Sims just kind of give up and you crash, but in the real world there are a lot of opportunities for a "save." But, to save it, you have to be within a performance envelope where the car CAN be saved, and that means a 5-10% margin of error, NOT overshooting by 50%! That's where incremental "pushing" comes in.
