Trail-braking question in ACC

[James Beam]

I thought I found a big mistake in my trail-braking technique when I studied the telemetry. It seems I was starting to turn the wheel at max braking.

Turn 4 at Misano:

The steering is already at nearly 40 degrees still at max braking! I was rather excited about this discovery as it looks like an actionable mistake. Then I looked for a pro lap there, and found the same point just before he starts releasing the brake:

The wheel is nearly at 90 degrees and he's still at max braking!

Then I went to real life to see what they're doing on that corner and you gotta love the internet cos I found this:

You can see he's already massively off the brakes at just a 30 degree or so angle. So I'm now in a place of not knowing if learning the correct technique (for real life and other sims) will make me even slower in ACC. It would feel wrong to learn a technique that's fast for ACC but slow everywhere else.
Interested to hear from the fast guys here what their trail-braking traces look like. (and especially at this exact corner)

 

[Neilski]

The steering is already at nearly 40 degrees still at max braking! I was rather excited about this discovery as it looks like an actionable mistake.

Agreed

Then I looked for a pro lap there, and found the same point just before he starts releasing the brake:
The wheel is nearly at 90 degrees and he's still at max braking!

Yeah, that sounds bad, *but* did you find a lap that was posted by the person who drove it, or by someone else who posted it from a replay?
The reason I ask is that with AC replays (and possibly therefore also ACC replays) or onboard footage, the brake position for anyone but yourself is obfuscated. Can't recall if this is also true for the throttle position. By obfuscated, I mean that there's nothing shown in between 0 and 100%, so you can't actually tell where someone starts to roll off the brakes after a big stop, or how hard someone hits the brakes when slowing down only slightly for a faster corner.

Then I went to real life to see what they're doing on that corner and you gotta love the internet cos I found this:
You can see he's already massively off the brakes at just a 30 degree or so angle.

Yup, one would expect that to be (a) quicker and (b) less hard on the tyres, based on "real life" driving experiences.

So I'm now in a place of not knowing if learning the correct technique (for real life and other sims) will make me even slower in ACC. It would feel wrong to learn a technique that's fast for ACC but slow everywhere else.

It would indeed feel wrong, at least to me.
This is a perennial question in sim racing, of course. Some people (e.g. those who compete in tournaments) will always choose to do whatever makes them quicker on track, and that's entirely understandable in some cases. Others balk at doing things that are essentially "exploits" of deficiences in the physics engine. Every sim has its own physics quirks, and thus its own exploits.
To be fair, most of us don't truly know how a racing car will behave in every situation so we won't even be aware of some of the times that we've exploited the physics
But there will be occasions where a driver will know that an unphysical thing will make them quicker in a given sim and they still choose not to do it. (One good reason not to do it is in case you fail to unlearn it when back at the wheel of a real car!)

I haven't actually sim-raced much for ages, but one observation I did reach when comparing AC and ACC is that they had massively different treatments of understeer (i.e. they punished excess steering angle in very different ways) and I found I had to adjust my driving quite a lot when switching between them. (Probably a different tyre model...?)
But which one was more accurate? No clue, I'm afraid. (Honestly, I can no longer even remember which one had the harshest punishment for too much steering angle!)