Learn braking first. Before racing lines, setups, or wheel upgrades, learn to hit the brake pedal hard and at the same point every lap. Then learn to repeat a lap within a few tenths, then trail braking, then throttle and tyres. Racecraft (actually racing other people) comes last, even though it’s the reason most of us bought a wheel. This order works because each skill depends on the one before it, and most beginners do it backwards: they jump into online races in week one, crash into somebody at Turn 1, and decide they’re slow because of their equipment.

Your equipment is not the problem. Mostly. The one piece of gear that does speed up learning is a load cell brake pedal, and it matters more than any wheelbase. I’ll get to why. The rest of this is the order I’d teach a friend, plus the drills that actually moved my lap times after years of buying stuff that didn’t.

Why braking comes first

Most of your lap time is lost in braking zones, and most of the scary moments happen there too. A beginner usually brakes too early, too softly, and then keeps pressing all the way to the apex. That costs about a second a lap at a track like Lime Rock and makes every corner feel like a guess.

Good threshold braking has a simple shape. You press hard and fast to peak pressure (somewhere near the locking point), hold it, then let off gradually as the car slows and the downforce or grip falls away. If you look at it in telemetry it looks like a cliff followed by a ramp. Beginners make a hill: they ease in slowly, so the car spends the first 20 metres of the braking zone barely slowing down.

So learn the cliff first. Everything else in this article comes later.

The drill

Pick one car with no ABS. In iRacing the Mazda MX-5 Cup is the default for good reason: it’s cheap, it’s in the free content, it’s slow enough to think in, and it locks the fronts if you overdo it. In Assetto Corsa (the original, not Competizione) the Mazda MX-5 or Toyota GT86 with ABS turned off does the same job. ACC is a poor place to start this drill because every GT3 and GT4 car has ABS, and ABS hides the exact mistake you’re trying to feel.

Pick one heavy braking zone. Turn 1 at Okayama, the hairpin at Summit Point, or Big Bend at Lime Rock (if you own it). Then do this:

1. Brake at a fixed marker, like the 100m board, every lap. Don’t move it yet.
2. Hit the pedal hard, almost to lockup. If you flat-spot the tyres, back off a little next lap.
3. Don’t care about the corner exit at all. Just look at the speed you carried at the apex.
4. Once you hit the same apex speed five laps in a row, move the braking point 5 metres later.

Twenty minutes a night for a week. It’s boring. It’s also the fastest single improvement you’ll make, and it carries over to every car you drive later.

The pedal question (the one gear buy I’ll push)

Most entry-level pedal sets, like the ones that come with a Logitech G923 or Thrustmaster T248, use a potentiometer or hall sensor that measures how far the pedal moves. Your brain doesn’t work that way when you brake. Under hard braking your leg remembers force, not distance. On a travel-based pedal, “80% brake” is a foot position you have to remember exactly, and you’ll miss it by 10% either way all night.

A load cell measures pressure. You push against real resistance and the sim reads how hard you push. Within a week people stop locking up as much, and it’s the most common “why didn’t anyone tell me” post on r/simracing for a reason. Nobody posts that about a wheelbase upgrade.

Some options, roughly from cheapest:

If you already have a G29 or G923, there are aftermarket load cell mods and brake springs for around $50 to $120 that get you most of the way there. Try one before you replace the whole set.

There’s one catch nobody puts on the box. A load cell brake needs to be bolted down. On a carpet with the pedals sliding forward, or under a desk where you’re pushing your chair backwards, you can’t push hard enough for the load cell to help. You have to brace against something. If you’re on a desk with an office chair on wheels, a cheap wheel stand or even a board wedged against the wall will do more for your braking than another $200 on the wheel.

Set the brake force in the pedal software so 100% brake comes in somewhere around 30 to 50kg of force to start. Too stiff and your leg is dead by lap 15. Too soft and you’re back to remembering a position.

Step two: consistency before speed

Once you can brake properly, stop trying to go faster. For a while, just try to drive the same lap again and again.

Aim for 10 laps in a row within half a second of each other in the MX-5. Then within three tenths. You’ll find this is harder than setting one fast lap, and it shows you which corners you’re guessing at. If one corner swings by two tenths each lap, that’s the corner you work on. The others are fine.

Get telemetry going here, because your memory of a lap lies. Garage 61 is free for iRacing and lets you overlay your laps against faster drivers in the same car and track. Look at where their brake trace starts and how quickly it reaches peak. Ignore the rest at first. The paid coaching tools (Track Titan, Coach Dave Delta) are fine, but you don’t need them to read a brake trace.

A word on your view, since it affects consistency more than people think. Use a proper field of view calculator and enter your real screen size and distance from your eyes. The correct FOV will feel weirdly zoomed in, like you’re driving through a letterbox. Leave it there for a week anyway. A wide FOV makes the car feel slower than it is, and you’ll brake too late or too early because speed doesn’t look right. Almost everyone who tries this for a week stops arguing about it.

Step three: trail braking

This is where your car starts rotating into the corner instead of sliding wide or understeering into the apex.

Trail braking means you keep some brake on past the turn-in point and release it smoothly as you add steering. The weight stays on the front tyres, which gives them grip to turn. Release too quickly and the car understeers. Too slowly and the rear goes light (in the MX-5 you’ll spin, and it’ll be your fault).

Don’t try this until the cliff-and-ramp braking is automatic. If you’re still guessing your braking point, trail braking just adds another thing to get wrong.

A good place to learn it is the Mazda at Okayama’s Turn 1 and hairpin, or a Porsche 992 Cup in iRacing or ACC’s Porsche at Brands Hatch Indy, where the cars punish bad releases but don’t kill you instantly. The Porsche’s rear engine makes trail braking very obvious: hold the brake too long into the Paddock Hill bend and the back comes round. You’ll know.

Force feedback actually helps here, and this is the one place a better wheelbase earns its keep. You want to feel the steering go light when the front starts to slide. Starting settings:

• Rotation: set the wheelbase to 900° or 1080° and let the sim set the steering lock per car. iRacing and ACC both do this automatically. Don’t set rotation in both places.
• iRacing: use the auto button for FFB strength on a hot lap, then check that the force meter isn’t clipping in high-load corners.
• ACC: start around 60–70% gain on a direct drive base and lower it if the meter turns red often. Belt-driven wheels like the T248 usually want a bit more.
• Turn off canned effects (road and kerb effects, the fake rumble) at first. They hide the signal you want.

On direct drive bases, the first night tends to go the same way: people max the torque, the wheel rips out of their hands in a crash, and they spend the next day reading about clipping. Even 5Nm on a Moza R5 or 8Nm on a Fanatec CSL DD is plenty to learn on. If you’re bolting it to a desk, expect the desk to flex at anything over about 5 or 6Nm. That flex blurs the detail, so you pay for direct drive and get something that feels like a wobbly gear wheel. I’ve driven a cheap gear-driven G29 on a solid stand and it beat a direct drive bolted to an IKEA desk for feel. Fix the mounting first.

Step four: throttle and tyres

This one gets a short section because it comes easier once your braking is sorted.

Don’t snap the throttle open at the apex. Squeeze it, in steps, as you unwind the steering. If you’re adding throttle while still adding steering lock, you’re asking the tyres to do two jobs. In the MX-5 it feels mostly like being slow on exit. In a GT3 car without much traction control, it puts you in the wall at Spa’s La Source.

Tyres come in once you run longer stints. ACC and Le Mans Ultimate both reward watching tyre pressures and temps far more than iRacing’s short sprint races do. Hot pressures in ACC around 26–27 psi for the dry compound is the target most people chase. If your pace falls off over 10 laps, your inputs are probably too aggressive, and that’s information.

Step five: racecraft, finally

You can drive the car. Now you learn how to drive it around other people, and it’s a separate skill with its own lessons.

Most beginners join a race in iRacing’s Rookie class and find out that it’s chaos. That’s normal. Rookie MX-5 races are famous for Turn 1 pileups, and the community joke is that the real race starts on lap 3 once everyone who was going to crash has. iRacing’s incident points and Safety Rating system mean that staying out of trouble moves you up the licence ladder faster than pace.

A few things worth knowing before you race:

Your first lap is about surviving. Brake earlier than usual into Turn 1. People ahead of you will brake early or crash, and you need room to react.

You don’t own the corner because your nose is ahead. In most sim racing etiquette, you need your front wheels roughly alongside the other car’s driver at turn-in to claim space. A bumper next to a rear wheel doesn’t count. People argue about this endlessly on r/simracing, and the stewards in leagues mostly use the same rule.

Use the relative, not the mirror. iRacing’s relative black box, the Crew Chief app for ACC and LMU, or a spotter will tell you when someone’s alongside. Mirrors in sims are terrible at showing a car that’s halfway up your side.

Learn to lose a place. Letting someone through cleanly and following them for three laps teaches you more than a lunge you might get away with.

If iRacing’s subscription puts you off, ACC’s online lobbies with a decent Safety Rating requirement and Le Mans Ultimate’s ranked races are reasonable alternatives. Gran Turismo 7’s Sport Mode is also stricter than people expect, and it’s fine for a controller or console wheel player.

FAQ

How long does it take to get decent at sim racing? If you practise three or four nights a week with a plan, expect to be mid-pack in iRacing’s lower classes in about three months, and consistent within a few tenths of your best in about six. Without a plan, it can take years. I know people who’ve done 2,000 laps of Spa and still brake at the same wrong place.

Can you learn sim racing on a controller? You can learn lines and racecraft on a controller, and GT7 is built for it. You can’t really learn threshold braking or trail braking, because a trigger has about 2cm of travel and no resistance. If you’re serious, a used Logitech G29 for around $150 with a load cell mod is a better start than any controller.

Should I start on iRacing or ACC? iRacing for learning, ACC for GT3 cars specifically. iRacing’s MX-5 and Safety Rating system teach discipline, and Garage 61 telemetry is free. ACC looks better and has excellent GT3 physics, but every car has ABS and traction control, which hides your braking mistakes. Start in iRacing’s free content and only buy more tracks once you know which series you’ll run.

What to actually buy (and check first)

If you’re still on the pedals that came with your G29, G923, or T248, upgrade the brake to a load cell before you do anything else. The Moza SR-P with load cell brake for around $200 to $250 is what I’d point most people at right now; the Fanatec CSL Pedals with Load Cell Kit costs about the same, but check current stock and shipping times first, because Fanatec’s delivery estimates have been a long-running complaint.

Before you order any of it, put your foot on your current brake pedal and push as hard as you would in a real emergency stop. If the pedals slide, your chair rolls back, or the desk moves, spend the first $100 on a wheel stand or a way to brace the pedals. The pedal upgrade won’t help until your setup can take a hard push. Then go and do that 100m board drill.