Feature
November 3, 2009

Racing Around the Clock
L2RES and the Roller Coaster Ride Known as rFactor Endurance Racing

by Doug "guod" Atkinson

Introduction

You know how it goes. There is always something to tarnish something wonderful.

Such is the case with rFactor multiplayer endurance racing. Endurance racing melds together fast cars, strategy, training, practice, teamwork and racing luck in ways no other racing format can offer. Think Daytona, Sebring, and Le Mans. Those are names known the world over to those that follow motorsports and for those that don't.

When it comes to the software of choice for endurance races, rFactor represents the only motorsports sim that allows you to run online 24 hour events with time advancement and driver swaps with other humans (as opposed to the AI). "Time advancement" meaning it changes time-of-day, and you have to deal with late afternoon reflections, sunrises, and total darkness on starry nights. So you can run the same length as the actual endurance racing events.

While rFactor multiplayer is legendary in its stability, the endurance racing increases the potential for a disconnect, or "disco", substantially. For events longer than your tail bone can withstand, there are pit stops where you swap driving with other drivers in your team. This is where is where the "tarnish" comes in. Driver swapping during a pit stop is not without its excitement. Now driver swapping in rFactor is an "unsupported" feature included by Image Space Incorporated, the developers of rFactor. It was "discovered" by players. There is little doubt it has added a new dimension to sim endurance racing. Now before somebody says, "what about the Simbin offerings and Live for Speed?" Simbin titles offer time advancement, but not in multiplayer. Live for Speed offers officially supported driver swaps. But only rFactor offers time advancement and the driver swaps. Sometimes. Compounding the problem is that team mates may span across continents, so their pings can vary widely. It's a testimony to the stability of rFactor multiplayer that it works as well as it does.

So why attempt such feats of folly? Because the teamwork, the camaraderie, the strategy are so much fun and such a big payoff in fun that we fans of endurance racing kept falling off the cliff each time hoping "this time will be different".

It's Been Tried and Tried Again

SimHQ Motorsports has hosted multiple endurance races. Events like the 2.4 Hour Race, the Eight Hour Daytona Endurance Race, and The Deuce (a zipped Divx video download link). Some were less than hoped. I won't discuss the painful attempt a few years ago at a 24 hour race. It was clear we needed to learn from the Pros about sim endurance racing.

That opportunity came in 2008 courtesy of the Simulated Sports Car Association, or SSCA. SSCA was owned by Darin Gangi, best known for the fantastic Inside Sim Racing Internet TV program. SSCA provided what we were looking for in sim endurance racing, and we jumped in. It was first class racing with world famous sim racing drivers. Events were broadcast on Internet PSR TV so fans could spectate and cheer on their favorite cars and teams. In 2008, Team SimHQ Motorsports entered four events. The evil discos caused us some of the worst luck in the respectable sized grids of 35-40 cars.

Consider our 2008 finishing results:

March 3, 2008
SSCA Daytona - 12 Hours
Finished 14th (DNF) and 33rd (DNF) overall of 38 cars
Running 3rd overall till a disco at lap 395
Highest running position was 2nd overall

May 10, 2008
SSCA Sebring - 12 Hours
Finished 4th (yeah!) and 28th (DNF) overall of 34 cars
Highest running position was 2nd overall

July 7, 2008
SSCA Silverstone - 6 Hours
Finished 10th, 27th (DNF), 31st (DNF), and 34th (DNF) overall of 41 cars
Highest running position was 8th overall

September 6, 2008
SSCA Fuji - 10 Hours
Finished 16th (DNF) and 26th (DNF) overall of 41 cars
Running 4th till a disco at lap 341
Last car to disco in the event

Those of you who are reading this article that were drivers in those events, are probably having a sinking feeling right now. Except for "Stev8" and J.P. Catalan's 4th at Sebring (congrats again guys!) it's a record of almost, close, but not quite. The harder we tried and the more we prepared, the worse our luck seemed to get. Candidly, some very good drivers privately said to me in emails and PMs that they just couldn't take it anymore. All of us could understand what they meant. rFactor disco's became The Topic at SSCA. Especially since the next race was scheduled to be a 24 hour race using the 2004 Le Mans track. Then SSCA decided to move away from endurance racing to hosting rally events, and our endurance racing effort ceased for 2008. Yet even with the pain of the race discos, Team SimHQ Motorsports car #35, an Audi R8, still finished 5th place overall of the 31 cars in class for the year.

L2RES to the Rescue

While the discussion was going on at SSCA about resolving the discos, an enterprising gentleman by the name of "PatrickA" of L2R improvised using the practice mode to run rFactor endurance events. Through trial-and-error, lots of work and testing, testing, testing, a software workaround solution was born: L2R Endurance Solution or "L2RES".

L2RES tracks each car running in practice mode. It keeps real time stats of each car and shows their status. Drivers start the client-side TSR application of L2RES known as "L2RIR" from their Windows desktop before entering rFactor and the server. Have a disco? You get a 1 lap penalty and are able to rejoin. Trash your car? Leave the current car and grab a new one, and take the 1 lap penalty. Purists will argue that it is not 100% "real", but L2RES is the best answer to a problem that, so far, has not been resolved through any other means.

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