Race cars have shift lights on the dashboard or wheel to indicate when to upshift to stay within the ideal part of the powerband. Some cars will make most of their power near the engine's rev limit while some do it a fair bit before, but that's why we have the shift lights so we don't have to guess the ideal shifting points.
However, in LMU I've already seen a few cars where the shift lights are not quite telling us the full story, and while for some this may be common knowledge for others it may explain that bit of time lost on the straights. There's also a mismatch between the in-car shift lights and the shift lights on the UI tachometer which creates even more questions.
The biggest offender currently seems to be the Ferrari 499P Hypercar, where you need to shift it pretty early. I don't know the exact point for the best straight line performance but it seems to be around the last yellow and the first red light on the physical steering wheel and before any shift lights appear on the UI tachometer. While the actual RPM you shift at seems to be correct, when compared to WEC onboards which is around 7600 RPM or so, the shift lights tell a different story.
I've mostly played around with the GTEs and I can tell that the 488 needs to be shifted a bit after when the red light appears on the dash but before you see the third light go up on the UI tachometer and the Aston also needs to be revved a bit after all shift lights turn blue and right as the third light on the UI tacho appears.
I could go on about all the cars in this game and test them further, get some telemetry data with Motec and really get to the nitty gritty, but that's when I realized... What's the point of these shift lights if not to tell us when we should shift gears?
I know most cars' powerbands aren't that consistent, some may require you to rev higher on the first 2 or 3 gears and then short shift the rest in comparison, but I also don't understand why this information needs to be hidden from us. Real teams surely have the powerband of the car and the driver will know how to make the most out of it, so why can't we have this data? Raceroom shows us a little dyno graph on the setup page which is already pretty nice but only really works if the car's displays have an RPM readout, but I wish we could have some Forza-like telemetry page where we can see live readouts of the power output.
I don't know if this is a bug or just a design oversight when it comes to the shift lights not being accurate to the ideal shift points, but I also don't understand why the powerband or dyno graph data needs to be hidden from us. I'd like to see both the shift lights be corrected and to know my car's powerband.
