I'm trying to get to that point with setups too!
but yea...practice is crucial, but I need to get my setup game on point as well, unless of course
@Celtic Pharaoh comes in and says his qualifying and race pace was all done on a stock setup LOL
Unfortunately he would be almost as fast on standard setup,
i am excluding the obvious.
tyre pressures , gearing , areo down force. ( and probably not even that )
I know i am going to get blasted for this.
Once the above has been sorted, this takes about 10 minutes, the rest of the setup is for small
gains.
i always drive front engine rear wheel drive, from my experience, mid engine cars are usually
difficult at the limit. ( i don’t have any skill levels , none, zero )
Virtually all my setup is two fold, first make the car fool proof, ( you have to survive 40 laps )
second, set it up to get it into the apex
third, make it stable under heavy braking into
corners ( sometimes there is a trade off in that for some corners ).
i practice for 10 minutes to get my braking points correct , any more and i get slower.
Don’t get hung up on setup, that was the first thing that i learnt. The faster i got
( okay that’s not very fast ) the more i could utilize setup , not for performance, but to make
the car work better for me.