Analyzing changes to the characteristics of a car requires that you go through a certain process. You have to know what it was like before you can say how it has changed. All of the cars I review are tested on the same track, Grand Valley Speedway. I also test them in three forms: stock, parts modified and full tuned.
Setup
I am a bit old school and still use a standard DualShock3 controller and have been using a standard controller since the days of the original Need For Speed, Gran Turismo, etc. I have a Driving Force GT wheel available to me but do not currently have a good, stable means of setting it up for use in the living room where the PS3 resides. Most of the driving aids are turned off. I keep the driving line on though I use it more a reference than a guide and ABS stays at 1. I also use a manual transmission. Overall I would consider myself a decent, better than average driver but certainly not great or elite.
Grand Valley Speedway
I actually dislike this track. I was never very good on it back in the day and grumbled about it whenever I had a race here. Also, it is visually uninteresting and feels washed out with the sun high over head. However, that is one of the things that does make it good to test on. Without pretty scenery to catch your eye there is a higher concentration on the actual driving itself. It also has a good mix of straights and corners of all speeds; hairpins, gradual corners, s-curves and a few tight ones in rapid succession plus short, medium and long straights into those corners. Coming off the big straight into a gentle left followed quickly by a big right is a great test of stability under braking. The tunnels add in some extra challenge of lighting changes as well.
Stock Test
As I said, you need to know what a car is like before you know how it has changed. I run the car fresh off the lot. No miles, no oil change, no modification of any kind; even paint. Obviously with cars from the UCD it is not always possible to get even a low mile example, but I keep with the spirit of the test as close as I can. Since I have been running GVS a while now I try to run a stock example 3-5 laps to get a feel for it around the track. I will go longer if I need to and have also gone shorter on a couple occasions where I was previously familiar with the car.
Parts Test
For a long time this was my "tuning"; add on the parts you need to win without changing the settings at all. By and large that works but tuning for a track or competition makes it that much easier. I include this test so that I can compare in a couple ways. First, how do parts increase the potential of the car? Does just adding power mods make the car faster or does the handling suffer too much? Do tires make the difference instead? Second, adding all the parts a tune calls for gives me a baseline for what the tuning is doing to the car. Yeah, if I add a turbo, some tires and tweak up the suspension I will probably run a lot faster than stock, but if the parts alone can run better and faster than that then the settings aren't very good. It also lets me see just how much faster I can run versus my old style of bolting on parts to win, before I began to seek out tuning settings. Sometimes the difference can be pretty dramatic. Since there are changes I will run anywhere from 5-10 laps or more, very seldom any less than that.
Tune Test
Obviously this is the goal. Add all the parts, tweak the settings as described and see what it can do. I look at the comments I may have written down about how it performed previously and see if and how it has changed. It is quite interesting when a tune changes the whole character of the car. Again, with the changes I run 5-10 laps. I will also run a sort of long term test. I will use the car on different tracks in different races and see how it responds to that change as well.
Overall the process gives me a good impression of everything and I try to sum it up as best I can. I try to go over the whole metamorphosis of the car and highlight several places along the way, especially if there was a significant change in performance in a particular area.
