Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-170.52.87.61-20180524022124/@comment-31668816-20180524100848

2405:204:B009:93FB:2C71:B074:F0EB:AE13 wrote: Driving off track & crashing will & does definitely affect your car performance if it moves the service bar to red.

So if you have not FU'd your car & you go off track and crash quite a few times (making the service bar go red in the backgroud during the race) the most noticeable change will be in your top speed & acceleration. If you drive without assists, you'll find the original brake points moving forward on the track & speeding through the esses would be more difficult as the handling is affected. Whereas if you have a FU'd car, you'll need to crash & go off track quite a few times to see the actual difference (as you have more bars on the service to consume).

The damage is also persistent through all the races for the specific car until you service. There is an official RR3 help topic on this subject from EA/FM on this which I have read a few years back, just couldn't find it to link it here. It's important to differentiate between off-track and crashing as each has different immediate effects.

The immediate effect of off-track is to increase the rate at which wear and tear occurs, so driving off-track for a lap will use more service bars than a clean lap. However, this does not take effect until after the race - when one sees the service bar count down screen. So it only affects the next race, and then only if the bars are in the red, or zero.

During a LM event it takes about three clean laps to incur enough wear and tear to result in no service bars left, but there is no drop-off in performance after three laps in a ten lap race for example.

Crashing in such a way to cause body damage will slow the car during the race, i.e. it has an immediate effect on performance, and is repaired during the post-race R$ reward screen. It doesn't affect service bars per se, unless of course the crash is as a result of running off track in to a barrier, but it's the off track bit that relates to service bars.

I must say I've never noticed a performance downgrade following excessive off-track driving.