Experiment with the game  and the almost infinite amount of set-ups. After getting your car built, test it thoroughly to get familiar with it. This allows you to cut good lights and run close on your dial-in. Depending on your preference, you may want to try deep staging, which is going farther down to where the pre-stage light goes off. This will improve your reaction time, but will give your car less roll out time (less time to start accelerating before the elapsed time clock starts).