A bit of advice to those new to Beyond Visual Range weapons employment; the Crank is the most fundamental tactic to be employed and if you don't know it or how to use it you are putting yourself at a significant disadvantage when engaging other BVR capable enemies in DCS.
The purpose of the Crank is as follows:
To limit your downrange travel by reducing your relative velocity towards the enemy thus keeping you further from the enemy (and potentially out of his weapons employment envelope) till the time your missile impacts than if you had kept driving toward the bandit
To reduce the weapons employment envelope of the bandit by significantly offsetting the intercept point, causing (i) any missile he employs to pull a significant amount of lead and thus expend energy, and (ii) extending the flight time of that missile and thus depleting it of further energy and reducing it's terminal phase manoeuvrability and therefore lethality.