NASCAR The Game: Inside Line - Talladega Setup Discussion For Patched Games

If you're completely clueless about where to start or even what I was talking about here, I first suggest you read my 3-part NASCAR The Game: Inside Line Talladega Setup Tutorial and then try plugging in my pre-patch NTG:IL Talladega Setup to get a basic feel for the problems described here. If you have read the tutorial, and have downloaded the patch, this covers the advantages you can gain in speed, and the problems you may encounter in handling at plate tracks.

After you have patched NASCAR The Game: Inside Line, you find that you can raise your front ride height from a maximum of 8 to a new max of 10 at Talladega. You can also lower the rear ride-height from 7.5 to 5.5. In combination, this change lets you easily get your car up to 202-203 MPH down the straights. Raising the front nose and lowering the rear lets you get that spoiler out of the air, and the patch lets you do that more than before.

It may look weird, but it's fast.

Unfortunately, while this improves straight line speed, it severely worsens out the problem where the back end of your car bottoms out, sparks, and drags along the track. This causes your controller to want to rumble out of your hands, and can seriously compromise your car's handling at times. It's particularly bad in the corners.

Bad like, "My car seems to think this 2.6 mile superspeedway is a dirt track."

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There are tricks you can use to counteract this. You can stiffen the rear springs, increase the rear bump (this makes the shocks slow down the force of that part of the car pressing down into the track,) and reduce your rear rebound. (More rebound holds down that corner of the car for longer once it's been pressed into the track, so a lower number helps it bounce back faster, especially if it just hit the track.) Of course, adding too much to your springs will slow you down, as stiffening starts to push that spoiler back into the air.

Another option to combat the problem is to lower the springs in the front, but I generally advised you run them at the minimum (350 lbs) in the first place, so there's no way to soften them more. You can lower the bump in the front and increase the rebound. This will let your ridiculously raised nose press down more into the track in the corners. But if your bump is too low, the nose of the car goes down too early going into the corners, and you lose that last bit of speed. Similarly, if you raise your rebound too much, your shocks prevent the nose from coming back up for so long you lose way too much speed again.

The point is, from now on, if you want to run fast at Talladega, you can no longer avoid the compromise between pure speed down the straights, and ruining your handling in the corner as the back of your car drags along the track. You might be able to get your car up to 203 MPH in the straights, but that's worth nothing if you spin out every other turn, or slow down to 196 just to maintain control.

I'm still working on this compromise myself. I'll post two different setup configurations I have. They still bump and drag, so you may want to follow my above advice to make them more comfortable, even if they lose a little bit of speed.