Assetto Corsa Competizione is a highly detailed racing simulator where car setup plays a vital role in achieving competitive performance. There are vast amounts of options that can be adjusted to find more pace, but making these adjustments can be time-consuming. What's worse is that the various setup options can be confusing to beginner drivers and sometimes so overwhelming that most drivers either stick to the defaults or turn to the various setup shops that sell pre-made setups.
This article explains the basics of setup shops and tests some setups we bought for comparison purposes.
What exactly is a setup shop?
Setup shops typically are the storefront for setups made by ACC experts that compete at a high level in ACC. They either sell the setups themselves directly or via a setup website.
They charge various prices that include single-track setups for a specific car in ACC as well as complete setup bundles for all ACC tracks for a car. Some sites also sell a setup subscription that may include all setups for all of the cars in ACC.
Advantages and disadvantages
The advantages of these setups are that they can be faster out of the box. They include telemetry data for you to compare yourself to the pro driver that made/drove the setup and Youtube videos explaining how to drive a competitive lap. You could also have support via their respective Discord channels and meet and chat with other drivers who are also customers of that setup shop.
The disadvantages of setups from setup shops are that they are essentially one size fits all and could be hit and miss for you. Every driver has a unique driving style, and sometimes these setups may not suit you perfectly. There could be time still to gain that you could theoretically only unlock once you've adjusted the setup to work for you. The other obvious downside is the cost. These setups don't come cheap, and buying them for each track or subscribing every month will add up quickly.
How we tested
We bought setups from the following setup shops:
They were developed for ACC build 1.8 or higher. We drove at Silverstone in the Mclaren 720S GT3. The track condition was set to optimum, and we ran 30L of fuel in a private session. We tried to drive in a race-mode style, meaning we didn't push hard and focused more on consistency and clean laps. There was a lot more pace to be found if we pushed harder, but that wasn't the aim of the exercise.
The first setup we tried was the ACC aggressive default that felt very forgiving but not particularly good under heavy braking. The car didn't enjoy it when we attacked the kerbs, especially in the fast sections. We eventually set a time of 2:01.820
We then loaded up the Coach Dave Academy setup and immediately went faster. The car was noticeably better everywhere, and it was easy to find the extra time. We ended on a 2:01.072
After that, we drove the GO setup and went even faster. The car felt much better under braking and handled kerbs amazingly well. The ability to hold the racing line, especially through the very fast Abbey and Farm corners, made it easy to line up for the braking zone at Village. Our best time was 2:00.705
The Hymo setup was next and we found it to be similar to the GO setup with a best time that was nearly identical. However, it felt a lot trickier to drive, mainly because the car felt like it was on edge. It was almost like we were overdriving the car to match the GO setup time, which didn't give us much confidence.
Final thoughts
The setup test we did doesn't mean that some setup shops make slow setups and others make fast setups. It does mean, however, that there is a lot of time to be found if you move away from the default ACC setups. We also didn't run the setups in a race or over a significant distance. This implies that the results may differ after the tyres wear down more and the fuel burns off.
An experienced driver may also find more speed and consistency than we did using the slowest setup in the test purely because they know ACC better and may have a different driving style from our tame racing driver.
What we do know is that the default ACC setups have lots of room for improvement, and you can find this improvement by making adjustments yourself or buying a setup from a setup shop. We can't really recommend one shop over another, but we do recommend you do a lot of research before spending any money.
