Grand Prix Legends has a garage where you can change almost everything on the car: gear ratios, springs, shocks, anti-roll bars, ride height, tire pressures, camber, brake balance and more. Most new drivers either never open it, or open it and change eight things at once and can't tell which one made the car worse. I've done both.

I'm not going to give you my numbers. The truth is my numbers are for my hands and my wheel, and they'd be wrong for yours. What I'll give you is how I go about it, which is the same way I'd go about setting up a job on the mill at work.

1. Start from the default setup and drive it until you're consistent. If your lap times are all over the place, it's you, not the car. Fix you first.
2. Change one thing. One. Not two.
3. Drive ten laps and write down the best three and how the car felt in each corner.
4. Keep it or put it back. Then change the next thing.
5. Write everything down. I keep a spiral notebook for every track, with the date, the change, the times, and a line about how it felt. My wife says it looks like the log for the heat-treat oven at work. It does. That's the idea.

You pick a ratio for each gear, and this is where you'll find the most time for the least trouble.

• Top gear first. Set it so the engine just reaches the top of its revs right where you'd start braking at the end of the longest straight. If you hit the limiter halfway down the straight, it's too short. If you never get near it, it's too tall and you're leaving speed out there.
• Bottom gear next. Set it for the slowest corner on the track, so you come out of it pulling hard and not bogging down or spinning the wheels.
• Fill in the middle so every shift drops you back into the meat of the power, with the gaps about even. Then look at each corner and see whether it sits awkwardly between two gears. If it does, nudge one of them.

Here's the whole thing in two sentences. Make one end of the car stiffer and that end will let go first. Make it softer and it'll grip better.

• Car pushes (won't turn in, the front plows straight on): soften the front, or stiffen the rear a little.
• Car is loose (the rear wants to come around): soften the rear, or stiffen the front a little. In a Lotus with no wings, you will spend most of your life on this one.
• Bumpy tracks like the Nürburgring want softer springs, so the tires stay on the road. Smooth, fast tracks like Monza can take them stiffer.

Do the anti-roll bars the same way, in small steps. They're the fine adjustment. The springs are the coarse.

This sets how much of your braking goes to the front wheels and how much to the back.

• Too much to the rear and the back wheels lock under hard braking, and the car swaps ends. You'll know.
• Too much to the front and the front wheels lock, and the car goes straight on into whatever's at the end of the road. You'll know that too.

Set it so that if anything locks first, it's the fronts, but only just. I run mine a little toward the front of where the game starts you, because I'm forty-eight and I'd rather run wide than spin. Tarzan runs his the other way and he's faster than me. Make of that what you will.

Round ten is Sunday, October 3. This is the one I care about. Here's my notebook for it, cleaned up a little. This is the old course, the one I watched from the bank in 1967, before they added the extra loop in the seventies.

• The first corner. You come down the front straight going downhill into a hard right-hander. Going downhill, the weight comes off the back wheels just when you need them, and the rears lock if you're not careful. So for the Glen I move the brake balance another step forward from where I run it at other tracks. I've been in the grass on the outside of that corner more times than I'll admit.
• The Esses. Up the hill, left and right and left. Be smooth here. If you're sideways at the bottom, you'll be slow all the way to the top. A little softer at the rear helps the car put the power down climbing out.
• The straights. Top gear is set to run out at the end of the longest flat-out stretch. The Lotus is strong on the straights, and this is where you can make up for being a coward in the corners.
• The last corner. The one that puts you onto the front straight. Everything about the lap is how fast you come out of this corner, because you carry it all the way down the straight. Give up a little going in to get on the power early coming out.
• What I learned in practice. My best laps all came when I stopped trying to be Clark and just tried to be tidy. Same as at work: the fast way is usually the smooth way.

If I finish on the podium at the Glen, I'll put it on the front page and I'll go up to the real Glen the next weekend and stand on the bank for a while. If I don't, I'll go up anyway.