Vs. Mode Tips in Hakone in WMMT (Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune)

A few things that make Hakone a different track to do battle in in vs. mode.

1. There's no orange car/traffic, making the result of a match-up less RNG than it would in any city pass.

2. Your time-attacking skill will be much more decisive here in the mountain pass. Because even compared to tracks like C1 there's still so much more straightaways than Hakone, allowing catch-up mechanics to work quite fully. In Hakone this catch-up mechanics is almost insignificant due to the so many corners; each of which would give an opportunity for a skilled driver to stretch out the distance between him and a worse driver.

This can be seen in the TA results, too.  Two guys can have very similar TA performance in C1, one clocked in at '50''7, the other '50''6, for example. But given that one of them trains very dilligently in the mountain pass, his TA could be a FULL SECOND or more fast than the other who does not. I have a similar C1 record to a friend of mine, but my Hakone TA is more than a second faster than him (2'26"9 compared to 28"7). Hakone is truly the only course in WMMT where you can destroy your opponent simply through virtue of a better TA performance.

3. Suicide attack. This technique is pretty useful in 2v2s, and can be used for funzies when it's a free-for-all match. How it works is, when you are in the 2nd position, and your teammate 4th, you want to slow down one of the opponents (3rd in position) to make opportunity for your teammate to catch up, evening the score. So upon entering the corner, you deliberately aim at where it's too early to kiss the apex, essentially turning the corner much earlier than you would properly. What this does is you crash HARD on the apex instead of kissing it, but given the narrow nature of Hakone, there's no way the guy coming behind you could detour his way around you, so he will crash too, possibly on your rear-end. This slowing down allows enough time (probably one or two seconds) for your teammate to catch up, especially when there's too much differential for the opponent blocking tends to get much harder to pull off.

4. Low horsepower does not mean better control. This is for beginners. Using low horsepower (e.g. 700hp, 660hp) makes it pretty much assumable that you are a newbie in Hakone, and it's not going to help having a lower horsepower when you don't even know the course well to navigate through the corners confidently. It's also definitively slower than 760hp, because due to the interconnected nature of corners in Hakone, you rely on the drift that comes with 760hp to tackle through each corner in seamless fashion. And like I said before, TA is so much more important here than in the city, and using a low horsepower reduces your chance to be benefited from catch-up mechanics.