No more nasty surprises: How to calculate your fuel costs in ACC

Once you have under­stood the prin­ci­ple of man­u­al cal­cu­la­tion, you make your­self com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent from third-par­ty providers and act like a real race engi­neer direct­ly from the cock­pit. The math­e­mat­ics behind it is log­i­cal, sim­ple and, above all, absolute­ly reli­able.

The three indis­pens­able val­ues from the cock­pit
Every­thing starts with three essen­tial val­ues that the game serves you on a sil­ver plat­ter any­way and that you absolute­ly need for your cal­cu­la­tion.
The first val­ue is sim­ply the race dis­tance. You need to know exact­ly how long the run lasts, for exam­ple the typ­i­cal 45 min­utes that we often see in com­pet­i­tive leagues.

The sec­ond val­ue is your aver­age lap time. This is where ruth­less hon­esty with your­self is required. It does you absolute­ly no good to use your absolute dream lap from qual­i­fy­ing with an emp­ty tank and per­fect tyres. You need a real­is­tic time that you can con­sis­tent­ly reel off over the entire dis­tance in so-called race trim, mean­ing with a lot of fuel and degrad­ing grip.

The third and final build­ing block is your actu­al fuel con­sump­tion per lap. Asset­to Cor­sa Com­pe­tizione is very trans­par­ent on this point. Once you have dri­ven three or four con­sis­tent laps in a row in free prac­tice, the game shows you in the set­up menu under the “Fuel & Strat­e­gy” tab or direct­ly live on your dig­i­tal in-game dash­board exact­ly how many litres your engine burns per lap.

The for­mu­la
Once you have these three val­ues in mind or briefly writ­ten down, you sim­ply grab the cal­cu­la­tor on your smart­phone. To make the for­mu­la as clear and tan­gi­ble as pos­si­ble, we have divid­ed it into two log­i­cal steps for you. As an exam­ple, we take a race over 45 min­utes, an aver­age lap time of 1:50 min­utes (which cor­re­sponds to 110 sec­onds) and a con­sump­tion of 2.8 litres per lap.

The gold­en rule in sim rac­ing when deter­min­ing laps is: par­tial laps are always and with­out excep­tion round­ed up. In the heat of bat­tle, it can always hap­pen that you cross the start-fin­ish line when the race clock still shows exact­ly one sin­gle sec­ond of remain­ing time. That forces you to com­plete one full addi­tion­al lap at the lim­it. Any­one who rounds down here will inevitably be left strand­ed on the track.

The iron­clad safe­ty buffer
You have now cal­cu­lat­ed your pure race fuel amount. How­ev­er, any­one who goes out on track with exact­ly this math­e­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect val­ue is liv­ing extreme­ly dan­ger­ous­ly and has for­got­ten a cru­cial detail of motor­sport. The race does not begin only when the lights switch to green and the field is released.

Every seri­ous race includes an intro­duc­to­ry lap, the so-called for­ma­tion lap. On these fierce­ly con­test­ed metres, you may not be dri­ving at absolute race pace, but you are still con­tin­u­ous­ly burn­ing fuel in order to warm up the tyres and bring the brakes up to tem­per­a­ture. In addi­tion, real motor­sport is won­der­ful­ly unpre­dictable. Per­haps you spend half the race in the per­fect slip­stream of an oppo­nent and are sud­den­ly a few valu­able tenths of a sec­ond faster per lap than you had pre­vi­ous­ly cal­cu­lat­ed. This addi­tion­al pace adds up to more lap time over­all and thus high­er total con­sump­tion. That is why our advice is nev­er to treat the cal­cu­lat­ed amount as absolute, but always to add a buffer of about one addi­tion­al lap – usu­al­ly two to three litres – on top.

Dynam­ic fac­tors: Why your con­sump­tion sud­den­ly fluc­tu­ates
If you have mas­tered the man­u­al cal­cu­la­tion blind­ly, you already belong to the best-pre­pared dri­vers on the entire grid. A true sim rac­ing expert, how­ev­er, also under­stands the dynam­ic fac­tors that can sud­den­ly make con­sump­tion rise or fall while dri­ving. Any­one who can read these influ­ences is able to react strate­gi­cal­ly to the fuel lev­el even dur­ing the race.

Your right foot and your gen­er­al dri­ving style play the biggest role here. If you are involved in a hard, lap-long bat­tle dur­ing the race, rev the gears high­er than in prac­tice and squeeze every cor­ner absolute­ly to the phys­i­cal lim­it, your engine will be sig­nif­i­cant­ly thirsti­er. If, on the oth­er hand, you are dri­ving relaxed at the front or delib­er­ate­ly apply the so-called “lift and coast” tech­nique – mean­ing lift­ing off the throt­tle ear­ly before the brak­ing zone – you mas­sive­ly reduce con­sump­tion.

Anoth­er pow­er­ful tool avail­able to you direct­ly in the cock­pit is engine man­age­ment. In Asset­to Cor­sa Com­pe­tizione, this is known as the ECU or engine map. Almost all mod­ern GT3 vehi­cles allow you to adjust the mix­ture and pow­er deliv­ery via the steer­ing wheel while dri­ving at speed. Nor­mal­ly, you are on Map 1, which gives you the most pow­er, but also the high­est fuel con­sump­tion. If you realise in the mid­dle of the race that you bad­ly mis­cal­cu­lat­ed in prac­tice and the fuel will def­i­nite­ly not last until the fin­ish line, you can switch to a more defen­sive map. This may cost you engine pow­er and there­fore lap time, but in case of doubt it will save your fin­ish.

You must also nev­er ignore the exter­nal influ­ences of the sim­u­la­tion, because tem­per­a­ture and weath­er mas­sive­ly change the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the engine and your dri­ving style. On cool nights, engines work far more effi­cient­ly. It becomes extreme, how­ev­er, in pour­ing rain. Since you have to be much gen­tler with the throt­tle on a wet track, brake much ear­li­er and reach max­i­mum revs less often, your fuel con­sump­tion drops dras­ti­cal­ly. Any­one who stub­born­ly uses the con­sump­tion val­ues from a dry and hot prac­tice ses­sion for a wet race starts with a mas­sive­ly over­loaded vehi­cle and gives the com­pe­ti­tion an unfair advan­tage from the very first metre.

Last but not least, your tech­ni­cal set­up also plays a role that should not be under­es­ti­mat­ed. A vehi­cle set up with an extreme­ly steep rear wing for max­i­mum down­force and an aggres­sive toe angle fights against enor­mous air and rolling resis­tance on the long straights. The engine lit­er­al­ly has to work hard­er to reach top speed, which inevitably results in a greater thirst for fuel.

Make your­self inde­pen­dent from the sys­tem
At the end of the day, the art of per­fect fuel cal­cu­la­tion makes you a more com­plete and more con­fi­dent sim rac­er. It does not take thir­ty sec­onds on your smart­phone to per­form this sim­ple math­e­mat­ics, but the psy­cho­log­i­cal advan­tage on track is sim­ply price­less. Any­one who knows exact­ly how long their car will run can focus one hun­dred per­cent on the apex of the next cor­ner and the duel with the car in front, with­out con­stant­ly hav­ing to glance at the fuel gauge in pan­ic. Get to know your car in all its facets, under­stand the fac­tors of con­sump­tion and cal­cu­late your fuel your­self in future like an engi­neer on the pit wall.