Am I actually getting quicker?

Why the question needs a record

A game shows you tonight. What it does not keep is the story: the three evenings in June you spent learning a circuit, the week you found half a second, the month you did not drive at all. Without every session in one place, “am I getting quicker?” is answered by feel — and feel is generous on a good night and brutal on a bad one.

StintLab writes every lap you drive to disk the moment the game times it and deletes nothing unless you ask it to. That makes the question answerable, and Your driving — the section that leads the printable session report — answers it.

The record, worked through

Here is the record for a synthetic three-session season at one circuit — June, July and September, built from StintLab's demo laps and computed by its own code:

Under the tiles, the season in a few sentences — StintLab's output for this record, word for word:

1. 29 m on track across 3 sessions and 21 laps, since 14 Jun 2026.
2. Biggest gain: Monza — 1:20.950, 0.786s quicker than your first session there.
3. Most driven: Monza — 21 laps over 3 sessions.
4. You drove on 3 separate days, averaging 7 laps a day.

Then every track, most driven first:

Session by session, the best lap went 1:21.736 on 14 Jun 2026, then 1:21.379 on 19 Jul 2026, then 1:20.950 on 17 Sep 2026. The improvement figure is the first against the best: 1:21.736 − 1:20.950 = 0.786 s found.

Activity: the weeks you did not drive count too

A chart built only from the weeks you drove would draw a month off as no gap at all, turning “I stopped for a month” into a smooth line. So every week from your first to your latest is drawn, with idle weeks as empty bars. The chart covers the 26 weeks up to your latest session — about half a year.

Time on track: why the scruffy laps count

Time on track is the sum of the lap times of every lap StintLab has recorded — valid or not, flying or out-lap — and it is printed the way a person says it: “4 h 12 m”, not “252:14.880”.

Two alternatives were rejected on purpose. “Time the app was open” would count sitting in a menu. “Time on counted laps” would quietly delete the half of an evening where you were learning the circuit and binning laps for track limits — exactly the driving that makes you quicker later. If you drove it, it is in here.

The rules that stop the record flattering you

Improvement is the one figure in the record that can lie, so it is fenced in:

• A track is a game and a circuit together. Assetto Corsa Monza and F1 Monza are never compared — merging them would invent a gain of many seconds. In Assetto Corsa each layout is its own track too: Silverstone GP is not Silverstone National.
• A faster car is not a faster driver. Improvement is only reported when your first session and your best session there were in the same car. Otherwise your best still stands — it is a fact — and the improvement is withheld with the reason: “first driven in a Williams, best set in a Ferrari”.
• One session is no trend. Your best at a circuit stands from your first counted lap; the improvement reads “one session here so far” until a second session there has a counted lap.
• Only counted laps set a best. Valid, timed and driven from the line — the same rule as the session report, so a quick lap binned for track limits never becomes a personal best here.

When some tracks have a best but no improvement yet, the record says so and says what to do: drive them again in the same car.

Using the record

• Pick a focus circuit for a few weeks and watch its improvement figure rather than jumping between tracks. Progress spread over twelve circuits is real but invisible.
• Check monthly, not nightly. A single evening is noisy; the record is built for the question you ask a month in.
• Pair it with the session report. The record says whether you got quicker; the session detail underneath — best lap, theoretical best, consistency, where the time went — says why. See consistency and theoretical best.
• Keep your own charts if you like. lap-times.csv has every lap of the sessions in the report, one header, ready for a spreadsheet.

Questions