In the past 2-3 days, I've left the ps3 on for countless hours lettin my B-Spec guy do the ridiculous Endurance Races.

Untill now, he's been smoking everyone in the Minolta Toyota. The Indy 500 is actually putting up a challenge:

1st time:  Won 1st place by a lap or two with some guidance on a rare occasion.

2nd time:  Got 3rd. Mini-raged when I saw the reward halved from about 150k to 75k xp.

3rd time:  Did an oil change. Got an extra 100'ish horsepower. Won 1st again while I was out at the college.

4th time:  Was way too lazy to do anything. I left M.Dudley to do his own thing only to see that he was way behind. Was abit disappointed and assumed he'd end up winning 3rd-4th, so I took half-assed action....

While randomly browsing VGC on the last 20'ish laps, I was lazily mashing the X button hoping I'd at least get 3rd or 2nd. After some time, I turned back to the TV to see how close the race was to finishing and noticed something:  He was in 1st! I was stunned. I didn't get it. He was far behind for so long, even being over lapped by those monstrous Audi R8 race cars yet he managed to retake his spot. I ended up getting 1st  that race.

Now i'm doing it for the 5th and smoking them again because I realized something:

When the AI's meter is hot, HE'S BOOKIN' IT!  He drives like speedracer on steroids.

When the meter is cool, that's exactly how he drives - cool, calm, relaxed. No motivation to to speed up and overlap the slower cars just to give them the finger.

In other words:

They brake so much more when the meter is cool. Once in 1st, the meter starts going down. He loses speed then all the sudden, the rest of the competition starts overtaking him. When hot, he pushes the car to it's limits, braking just enough to barely avoid hitting the walls. By doing that, he maintains a high speed.

I just let him cool down completely right now and he's doing horrible again. While hot, his speed only drops down to about 180mph at the least. While cool, he consatntly drops to about 150mph, so it really makes me wonder how he managed to get 1st while I was completely afk earlier. Then again, it was only by about 25 seconds, and for a race that's 200 laps long, i'd say that's pretty lucky.

EDIT: I'm currently on the 6th race now. Made a lvl1 driver and tried somethin different with the tuning this time: I maxed the brakes. The results are amazing. He's in 1st with a completely cool meter and almost always maintaining 180mph+ on turns, only hitting 160mph about every 3rd turn. As mentioned before, he was going as low as 150-160mph on pretty much every turn while cool (max downforce, nothing on brakes). Even while hot, the other AI (not your driver) always brakes more than they should.

Anyways, I'm not too sure how much of an effect the driver level has on this race. Even with a driver that's hot by default, they cool down when there's no other cars around. That causes the AI to brake more.

With all that being said, hopefully all this crap will be useful to someone. I'm only two Indy runs away from the X1 challenge!

I just got to level 20 so I can't do the endurance races yet, but my driver loses all of his handling skills when the meter gets in the red. He keeps going off the track, which is really annoying.

I guess asking to drive a 2-million dollar Toyota put a lot of pressure on him.

Your driver's level helps a lot when devising a tactic to win B-spec, if he's low, nothing you do will work. You need to lvl the guy up some more to imporve his technique, eventually, he won't need you to kick ass and take names.

I find that when I tell my guy to overtake he thinks I mean "let everyone else overtake you" and when I tell him to push harder he mistakes it for "get as close to the guy in front of you as you can and inspect his plates" :P

Your strategy might work for you but the general concensus is that a calm driver will make less errors and get better lap times.

I have 3 drivers now and my lead driver is at lvl 12 (or 13, I forget which) on the plus side, he now knows where the accelerator is but still hasn't figured out how to accelerate and steer so I'm spending most of my time tell him to "slow the fuck down!" instead of speed up, which I guess makes a change but it's still quite hard to control. I just need him to figure out cornering and I think I'm set.