When I got my current car I could trigger the ABS at will with stock brakes and tyres.
After upgrading to stickier (street) sport tyres I had to upgrade the brakepads because the stock ones didn´t generate enough friction with the clamping force (N) possible.
After upgrading the tyres to Semi Slicks (TW 140) I had to put in race spec pads to overwhelm the grip. (Ferodo DS1.11, DTM spec)
The formula for friction is:
N being the force applied by the brake pads to the rotor, mu is the coefficient of friction and f is the braking power. The harder you stomp on the pedals, the more your car stops. You simply got brakepads with a higher coefficient of friction. So braking force is the coefficient of friction of your brake pads multipled by the force your leg can push, the only upper limit is your strength.
Ordinary tires allow accelerations up to around 0.85g, sportier semi slick tires can do 1.2g. This is an increase of 40%. You simply had to push the pedal with 40% more force to lock up the tires.
Of course there are more things to consider. The pads coefficient of friction is highest within a range of temperature. Below and above the coefficient of friction is lower, which is why street brakes will not work when overheated, which is the main reason people get race brakes.
My Simagic P1000 are rated for 200kg but the game certainly is not coded for that. The game is coded for potentiometer brakes, which is why I'm in the blue why everyone is recommending load cells. The pedals are fun, but I'm starting to realize that sticking to cheap potentiometer (or reassigning the clutch pedal as the brake pedal) might actually be faster on the track as you can control the amount of brake bleed much more precisely (you know exactly when you hit 100%, and when you're below it e.g. 95%. With load cells you don't).
My fix is to use the Car Tuner and as you can't edit the cars directly create a "Step1" version of all my favorite cars and triple the maximum braking force. I calibrated my P1000 brake pedal to as hard as I can push it with one leg. Now my brakes lock up around 50% brake power with reasonable force and I have huge dynamic reserves in my pedal.
I don't know how you guys set up your FFB, but I do it the same way. Reduce the cars FFB down to around 30% in AC and set the Moza R12 to max power. FFB will usually activate no more than 40% of the 12NM the wheel is capable of which feels ideal, but when crashing or hitting a bump it makes use of the reserves.
There's people out there (youtubers, skilled ones) who limit the FFB to 50% in the Moza software but then turn the FFB up all the way in-game to the point where FFB is actually clipping on each turn. This kind of stupidity is unfathomable to me, but it appears to be the norm among people who aren't engineers or the like... ;(
Read up on aerodynamic downforce.
At high speeds the additional grip is higher than brake power possible.
When you slow down and downforce lessens you have to bleed of the brake pressure to avoid locking up and flatspotting your tyres. That´s real world physics, not a flaw in AC.
You can check that when watching F1, they never lock up at the beginning of the brake zone, except when spinning. But a F1 car sideways has already lost all downforce.
I know how bleeding brake pressure works in high downforce cars.
A F1 cars tires allow for lateral acceleration up to 5 G's. When braking from max speed, they can decelerate with 6-7 G's. The tires don't magically have more grip in one direction than the other, the additional braking force comes from air resistance. That means the tires are on the limit during braking as well as turning, so the brakes are certainly sufficient and it's the tires traction that are the bottleneck during braking at any speed. If they weren't, the F1 engineers would simply make stronger brakes and they would win every race by outbraking the opponents.
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