Assetto Corsa Competizione – Beginner steps to setup

Intro

 
BAD NEWS 
Safe and Aggressive preset setups are fine except for two extremely important reasons: 
Tyres and brakes are set so wrong that you will be sliding about and lacking in brake performance no matter how good you are as a driver. 
 
Unfortunately to fix this you need to mess with your setup… 
…and setups are scary 
 
GOOD NEWS 
 
I want to help you dip your toes into this world in an accessible way that assumes you have no idea what you are doing but know how to make car go vroom. 
 
Just changing brake ducts and tyre psi will make your car faster in corners, more stable to drive and is easy for anyone to do with no experience as there are handy visual hints for both. 
 
Why Brake ducts and Tyre psi? 
These two elements give you a huge boost to laptimes and are both easy to get in-game numerical or visual feedback from the game so you can adjust them correctly. Other factors of setup unfortunately require reliable lap consistency to see if you are making a good or bad change. 
 
Disclaimer for people with 1000 hours in ACC and strong opinions: 
I am well aware that this guide is limited and there are other methods. This guide is designed for simplicity and tangible benefits without needing to be a super consistent driver or have a physics degree to deal with suspension geometry and aero/ride height balancing. 
 
 
Before we start, make sure you have the tyres overlay visible when you are driving. 
It looks like this > 
 
 

Brake Ducts

 
Start with safe setup or aggressive setup (up to you, I prefer safe setup) 
 
After selecting a preset, click current setup 
 
Go to the AERO tab 
 
Look for the Brake Duct setting on the front and the rear of your car. 
Set both of the brake ducts to 1. 
 
Drive 4 laps and watch the tyres overlay. If the brakes ever go red on the tyres overlay go straight back to garage and make the brake duct that hit red +1 number higher. 
 
 
 
Do 4 more laps watching the brake temps on the tyres overlay. If it goes red, you guessed it, go straight back to garage and increment the brake duct by +1. 
 
Repeat until the brakes are green and sometimes yellow after heavy braking zones. 
 
When you think you have it perfect do about 8 laps in a row to make certain that there are no long term overheating issues (eg. no blue or red brakes on the tyres overlay after at least 2 laps) 
 
Then 
SAVE YOUR SETUP 
 
I recommend calling it “ambient temp + track temp” for example “20c – 28c” 
This is because every session has different temps so in future you may need to modify the brake ducts because the temps changed significantly. 
 
 

Dry Tyre PSI

 
Continuing on, this part is very important. Tyres make the majority of your track grip and you need to be approximately 27.5 psi on all tyres when you are driving for optimal grip. 
 
Here are the issues: 
Tyres that are too hot or too cold will have less grip. 
Tyre psi increases as the tyres warm up. 
The temperature in the session may change over time. 
On a clockwise track the right side tyres are likely to be much hotter than the left. 
Some tracks really heat up the front or rear tyres. 
The temperature of your brakes will change the temperature of your tyres which will change the psi of your tyres. 
 
The result: 
We have to do the following method from scratch on every new track and weather combination. 
 
Here is your tyre psi method: 
Do 2 laps, do not spin or slide or it will invalidate the test. 
 
Come to a gentle stop and return to garage. 
 
Then go to the current setup and look for ‘Psi hot’. 
 
Target is 27.5 ‘Psi hot’ on all tyres. 
If your ‘Psi hot is under 27.5 then you should increase the psi setting on the tyre. 
If your ‘Psi hot is over 27.5 then you should decrease the psi setting on the tyre. 
For example: If your ‘Psi hot’ is 25.2 I would increase that tyre’s psi setting by at least +2.0 psi. 
 
 
 
Do this for each tyre. Don’t panic, this is all guesswork, no one gets this accurate after just 1 adjustment. Also the psi settings will probably not be symmetrical, this is normal. 
 
Do 2 more laps with the new settings. 
Return to garage, go back to the tyres setup tab again and see what your new ‘Psi hot’ is. 
Adjust your psi settings same as before. Remember the target ‘Psi hot’ is 27.5! 
 
Repeat over and over until you are at (or really close to) 27.5 ‘Psi hot’. 
 
Then do about 6 laps. See if the tyres stay around the 27.5 psi mark on the overlay as you drive about. Longer stints will bring the brake temps into play as they will stabilise in temp after about 4-5 laps. 
 
If the brakes seem to have started overheating and are hitting red you might have to open one of the brake ducts by +1. 
If you have to modify the brake ducts expect the tyres on that side of the car to increase or decrease in psi. This is why you must settle on your brake duct settings before doing tyre psi settings. 
 
Then SAVE YOUR SETUP 
Next time you return to this track with this car it is very likely that the temps will be different and you will have to make some small adjustments to the psi to suit the temps. 
Because of this I cannot stress how useful it is to include the track temps in the setup name. 
 
 

Returning to the track in future with the same car

 
With your saved setup you can load it in future and have your brakes and tyres close-ish to a good temperature right from the start. 
 
HOWEVER 
 
It is extremely likely that your psi settings will be off by a bit and in some cases the brakes may go cold (blue) or hot (red) because the track has a higher or lower temperature than when you made the setup. 
 
All you need to do is make small adjustments to compensate for this new ambient temperature. 
Remember that the goal is 27.5 ‘psi hot’ on every tyre. Use the method mentioned previously to get to that magic number. 
 
After you have everything fixed: 
SAVE YOUR SETUP AS A DIFFERENT NAME 
Include the ambient temp and track temp as part of the setup name again. Ideally you will end up with a range of preset setups with different temps ready to go so that in future you can pick the setup that matches the current sessions the closest. 
 
Good luck and enjoy your newfound braking performance and low to mid speed corner grip! 
 
I may expand this with more easy setup tricks if people like style of beginner guide 
 

This is all about Assetto Corsa Competizione – Beginner steps to setup; I hope you enjoy reading the Guide! If you feel like we should add more information or we forget/mistake, please let us know via commenting below, and thanks! See you soon!