The myth of defensive and mental training

Of course my experience is different than yours. I've seen it about four times but I'll mention only the latest because I remember the details. One driver trained physical attributes to 19, Speed attributes to 19, defensive attributes to 12 and attacking attributes to 10. Never trained Mental. composure level 1 and anticipation level 1. Usual qualifying position about 6th or 7th. usual finishing posistion about the same. Trained mental with no evidence from the previous season that this was a preferred track of the driver. (composure went to 2 and anticipation went to 2) Qualified third, passed two opponents (without Kers in the first lap) and ran first for the first half of the race. Was caught by much more developed drivers and finished 4th.

This seems like evidence that mental training was the cause of that performance increase.
The fact that this has happened to me more than once is what stirred me to disbelieve the "don't touch mental" paradigm.

What Yuri was describing seems pretty accurate to me and and never really thought about the combination of having defence and attack lower while mental and technical stats are on the high side.

It seems logical now I think about it as I experienced some weeks ago comparing drivers in my junior teams. The half trained drivers with mental and technical in their stats in 80% of the time managed to beat the fully trained with the same design and race strategies. Sort of the obesed and short version of the rectangle of speed beating the almost perfect rectangle of speed.

It can explain why drivers tend to ask gear ratio's over 75 (which is bad for their speed in my opinion) if their defence and attack is at 20 but mental and technical are not low yet. Once those go down, the gear ratios the drivers ask balance at 75 and stays there. Also noticed last season that once one of the drivers in my main team got the age of 32, he started requiring some mental training. His gear ratios were dropping and that wasn't very good for his speed either.

I think Leslie is right with mental at 1 not being the ultimate level, I wouldn't be surprised that the qualifying speed improves when it's a 2 or 3. I just never bothered to try and see what it does. Perhaps it's something to try during a winter period where the temperatures are at the same low level for multiple seasons.

Does anyone know who first came up with the idea that "mental is bad"?

For some reason the drivers who set track records are almost all "rectangle of speed" drivers

This thread from 2 years ago shows that the idea was around then but not to the extent of "don't touch"
http://igpmanager.com/play/?url=forum-thread/3198

It also shows a misshaped graph caused by crossover in mental training attributes.

Is very difficult to test different abilities configurations due a lot of variables in each season and every player maner to play....   Telling about one time you qualified in 4th and the next season 8th are not necessary due a pilot abilities .... Qualifying in a certain place could not be important, you could qualifiy first with little fuel.. But always you can write your qualy time if you have all other variables same than the past season. (Y)

Carlos, My qualy times were not from one season to the next. In the league I was in, using my conventional fuel strategies, I habitually qualified 6th or 7th and finished 6th or 7th. Nothing changed for me in the race that I saw the improvement except I trained Mental for the first time for that driver. If you have been finishing 6th ot 7th for ten races and suddenly you are running in the front it seems rational to attribute that to the one thing you know that is radically different from what you have been doing.

I expected to run 6th, my opponents were 100% design and I was 75%. We were all running the same engine, tires. and fuel. My driver was level 9 and theirs were 12.