Chase a target lap

Why a target beats a lap time

A lap time on its own tells you nothing about what to do next. A lap time against a target does, as long as the target is fair: the same car, the same track, the same conditions and settings, so that the only thing left to differ is the driving. Then every red block on the plan is something you could do and did not, and the plan can say what.

The best targets are close. Your own best lap from a good night is ideal — it proves the time is available to you. A teammate's lap in the same car is the next best thing. A lap five seconds quicker in a different car is not a target, it is a different sport, and StintLab will not pick one.

How the target is chosen

Open any session under View → My laps and the Your next goal panel has already searched every lap you have ever saved — including sessions older than the 200 laps the page carries — for the fastest lap that could fairly be your target. To qualify, a lap has to be:

• Valid and timed, with a lap time in whole milliseconds, and not a pit lap.
• Fully traced from the start line to the finish — speed, throttle, brake, gear, distance and elapsed time on every sample, with no gap in the telemetry longer than 100 m, and a trace clock that agrees with the lap time.
• A match for your lap on game, track, car, weather and session type — and, for F1 laps, telemetry format, game version, formula and the assists in the game's session data: steering, braking, gearbox, ERS, DRS and the racing line — with track lengths within 20 m of each other. Traction control and ABS are not recorded, and Assetto Corsa's driving aids and tyre compound are not part of the match, so keep those the same yourself.

Imported references are searched too, and shown as their own option. The lap you want to study has to pass the same checks — an invalidated lap, an out-lap or a pit lap gets no plan, and the panel says why. Pick your lap and the target from the two lists, read the gap, and press Study this target.

The practice plan, worked through

Here is the plan for the worked example: your lap, 1:21.560, against a target of 1:20.243. The headline is the official gap — 1.317 s to your target — and under it a strip of 100 m blocks, each coloured by the time your lap lost or gained through it:

Runs of losing blocks become sections, and the three most expensive become the plan. Grouping matters: without it, one slow corner spread over four blocks could fill all three places and hide the second-worst corner of the lap. For the example, StintLab's coaching code produced these three cards — the text below is its output, word for word:

Under the cards, the plan prints its caveats. For these laps there is one — “Fuel, tyres and setup may differ. These are observed gaps, not promised gains.” — and there would be more if they applied: that the track temperatures differ, that weather was not recorded, or that older laps did not save the game edition.

Read the evidence as a pattern, not three separate facts. All three sections begin with braking at exactly the target's point, all three have a minimum speed 10 km/h down, and all three end with the throttle at 90% where the target is flat out. One habit — over-slowing three of the five corners, then a softer exit — accounts for 91% of the gap. That is a far better evening's work than “be quicker”.

Replay it on the circuit

Every section has a Replay this section button, and the whole lap can be played back at 1×, 2× or 4×, clocked from the lap's own elapsed-time trace, or scrubbed to any metre. The speed, delta, throttle, brake and gear readouts move with it.

On an F1 lap, a circuit map rides along: the line is the one the game's position data recorded for that lap, the stretches that lost time are painted red and the gains blue, and the focus sections are numbered. Where the game did not report a position, the map stays blank rather than guessing.

F1 laps recorded without position data — older laps, for instance — show one of 28 bundled full-GP circuit outlines instead, labelled Outline only: for orientation, never used to invent a racing line or a marker. Short layouts get no substitute outline, and Assetto Corsa laps have no map.

Chase a friend's or coach's lap

Every lap StintLab records is a plain file — lap_<n>.json — and the same file is how you share one. A faster friend, a league teammate or a coach sends you theirs; you import it; it becomes a target like any of your own laps.

1. They find the lap.Laps → Open saved laps folder opens StintLab's data folder. Inside traces each session has its own folder — sort by date to find the newest — with one lap_<n>.json per lap, numbered as in the lap table. They send you that file.
2. You import it.Laps → Import reference lap… and pick the file. StintLab checks it the way it checks your own laps: a full, valid lap with a complete trace, under 8 MB. If it fails, the window says exactly why.
3. It becomes a target.Open a session in the same car, track and conditions and the import appears in Your next goal as an imported reference, alongside your own best.

Imported laps live in their own references folder. They never count as your driving, never set your personal best, and importing the same file twice gives you one reference, not two. StintLab does not verify who drove them or certify their times — they are laps, not records.

What can and cannot be matched

That last column is why every plan carries the same sentence about fuel, tyres and setup. A target lap set on low fuel and new tyres, chased on a full tank, will show gaps no amount of practice can close. StintLab states observed differences; it never promises that a loss it shows is a tenth you can have.

How to practise from the plan

1. Take the sections in order. Focus 1 costs the most; start there.
2. Replay before you drive. Watch the target's speed and pedals through the section until you can say what it does differently in one sentence.
3. Three clean laps, one change. The plan's own drill: practise the section for three clean laps and compare the exit speed before changing anything else.
4. Re-run the plan. Pick your newest lap against the same target. If the section's blocks have gone grey, move to Focus 2. If they have not, the change was not the answer — try the next one.
5. When you beat the target — your lap becomes the new target, or, against an import, the plan says “Target reached” — stop chasing and repeat: the next job is making the new lap your typical lap, not a one-off.

The method around this — baseline, sections, drills, re-measuring across sessions — is in how to get faster in F1 25.

Questions