what is a car setup
Author: Bernhard Wymann
Description: car setup
Keywords: torcs, berniw, bernhard wymann, car, setup, introduction

# 5.1 What is a Car Setup ### Introduction Racing cars have a lot of parameters one can change. For example you can change the angle of attack of the spoilers, the gears in the gearbox, the stiffness of the springs and many more. A car setup is simply a set of such parameters. Our task is to find an optimal car setup for a given goal. This is a very hard problem, because the parameters are not independent. In fact it's almost impossible to find the optimal setup. Why that? You can imagine all possible setups as n dimensional function (with n the number of parameters) which computes the lap time. We want to find the minimal lap time, so we have to minimize this function. Because this function has (at least!) around 10 dimensions it's almost impossible to find the global minimum. What you can get is a local minimum, which can be much worse than the optimal (global) one. ### Qualifying Setup In the qualifying the goal is to get the minimal lap time. Because there are no other opponents on the track we can drive at the limit. We also just need fuel for a few laps. The top speed on straights doesn't matter as long we reach the minimal lap time. ### Racing Setup The racing setup is a bit different. Of course you still would like to minimize the lap time, but other things become also important. For example it is much easier to overtake on a straight than in a turn, so you want to optimize the setup also for top speed on a straight, altough it probably will increase the lap time. The car needs also to be more stable, so that it doesn't spin of the track when it tries to overtake or to avoid a collision. Keep in mind if you want to win a race you have to reach at least the finish line... ### Skill Level There are four skill levels available, namely rookie, amateur, semi-pro, and pro. On rookie you have a lot of adherence and no damages, with pro you get a lot of damage and less adherence. I mention that here, because this affects the setups. The default skill level is semi-pro. You can configure it for every car individually in the bt.xml file. Add the skill level line in the section of the car you want to configure, e. g. for the car with index 0:
        <section name="0">
            <attstr name="skill level" val="semi-pro"/>
        </section>
### Summary You know what a car setup is. You know that for different goals different setups are required. You know how to change the skill level of your cars.