ok so this is maybe a dumb question but bear with me. been doing local club races for about 8 months now, im not the fastest but im consistently mid pack which im pretty happy with for where i am. theres one guy though who is just in a completely different league and ive been trying to reverse engineer what hes doing by watching his dvr footage and i honestly cant pinpoint it.

his quad doesnt sound like its pulling harder on throttle, his lines through the gates look similar to mine on the straights, but somehow he's putting down lap times that are like 2-3 seconds faster on a 45 second track which is actually a massive gap when you think about it. someone told me it might be his braking points but i dont really know what that means in practice, like i thought fpv racing was mostly about holding throttle not managing braking. am i missing something fundamental here

the braking point thing is real and its probably the single biggest thing separating mid pack from fast guys in my experience. in fpv you're not braking with a brake, you're braking by cutting throttle and using the drag of the props to bleed speed. the fast pilots are doing this way later than you'd think - they're carrying more speed deeper into the turn and THEN killing throttle hard right before the gate, which means they spend way more of the lap at high speed. if you're lifting early to "set up" for a gate you're bleeding speed for longer than you need to.

watch his footage again but this time just watch the throttle trace if he has osd on his dvr. bet you'll see longer stretches of high throttle with shorter sharper dips compared to your footage

2-3 seconds on a 45 second track is huge yeah. could also just be his tune honestly, some people run very aggressive rates and their quad is just rotating through the gate faster so the gate-to-gate time is compressed even if the actual path looks similar. what rates is he running do you know? also what motors, some guys show up with 2306 2450kv setups and they just have more snap than a typical race setup regardless of how its tuned