Ran three offline races yesterday. In the Vintage Formula 1 championship in AMS2 I ran the SIlverstone and Spielberg races. So much fun, I really enjoy this racing. The AI tries to give you room, and they lap well, making for good racing. In ACC I ran the penultimate race of the season, at Spa. Finally the Lambos found a track they weren't the fastest car on, but the Audis had no such concern. Only Kyalami left to go. With the Lambos off the pace I opened a gap at the top of the table and a good result in South Africa should see me across the line.


I've complained of screenshots in Automobilista, but what are ya gonna do? Here I brake for the entry to Druids in the middle of the race.



Next up, Interlagos historic

Finished the AC Competizione championship. Had some good finishes down the stretch to pull away a bit, but it was closer than the final results suggest. The season was ten events, run against AI @ 90, 1-hour practice, 20-minute qualifying and 30-minute race driving the Porsche 991. I kept mixing up the weather to keep it interesting, but never chose wet. Just various cloud and temp conditions. It was a good variety of tracks too, and posting the final standings to show the AI car hierarchy. The Audis and Lambos clearly the class of the division. The Ferrari for example could only manage five points I talked before about how the AI gets hung up behind slower AI cars ahead in qualifying. The Audis and Lambos are fast enough to get by and are always at the top of the qualifying screens, but the rest depend on who they come out behind.

That was a good season, some great racing against the AI, at least as viewed from my cockpit. If I consider the way things go away from that bubble then there are flaws. Not enough variability in the AI order or results, too little chaos, crashes, offs or retirements. Matter of fact I don't think there was a single yellow flag all season. But ACC does race well in tight on the track. The AI is perhaps a bit too deferential, but in the balance that is preferable.

The British GT pack introduced multi-class racing, but I see it is limited the British GT schedule in championship mode, five or six British tracks including Snetterton lol. I might give it a go for a quick season and see how the AI handles having both classes on the track. Based on the season just completed I suspect the slower cars could cause some issues, but maybe the gap is enough that the GT3 cars can sail on by.

I want start another ACC championship but I can't decide on which car to drive. By the way, there's new DLC coming the end of this month I think, with more US tracks -- CotA, Watkins Glen and Indy, road course I guess.

I'm thinking of starting a GT4 season, but maybe I'll wait for the DLC. I did start one in the McLaren, but the other two AI McLarens were slow as sh!t. It's fun to root for the AI driving the same car model through the season, so I gotta pick one that is fast enough to score points in the AI's hands.

So back to the Vintage Formula 1 season. Round 7, Interlagos Historic. This is a far different layout to the current one. Nearly five miles in length.

Here I run fourth in the early going. With the tires yet to come up and heavy fuel I run a little wide here.

Spinning the sim racing wheel of fortune and landed on RaceRoom today. This one is free to play, with most of the content paid, but there's enough here free to wet the whistle. Sales are run often it seems. Last sale I grabbed it all, but I see there's already newer content, such as Interlagos which has just been released. It's probably several different configurations of the track, based on the tracks already in the sim. Five bucks for the new track, but I think I'll wait until there's more and another sale. With just an hour or two in this one so far I have plenty of content to keep me busy.

RaceRoom feels great to drive, it has the same visceral overload that I like about AMS2, and which is tempered a bit in the Assetto Corsas. I like them all, each is charming in it's own way. Not enough Ferraris in RR though.

I fired it up and straight to the Ring. Started off in the Pagani Zonda. Didn't fare well with car control, exit oversteer I failed to handle. And the Nordschleife is so long that any mistake that fouls your lap is a killer. I need more seat time in this one, and time in the garage, to learn how to set the cars up properly. It's all the same in the essential ways from sim to sim, but the physics are different, the tire models have their own interpretations and it takes time to feel the nuance.

I put the Zonda away and took the Ferrari 488 GT3 Evo out. This seems to be the only Fez in the sim, which is criminal, but maybe there are more in the pipeline. I've mentioned my love for Ferraris, and in particular mid-engined V-8 Ferraris, so the 488 is a worthy representative if I can have only one.

Then I swapped to the McLaren F1 GTR, which is an all-timer hypercar, and to run the Ring in this thing is exhilarating. Needs some setup, but the default with a slightly softer rear was good enough to blitz my fastest ever lap at the track. Any time I take out a car I haven't driven I instinctively do this to the setup first.

-- Shift brake bias to the rear
-- Lower brake pressure to 90%
-- Soften rear roll bar a click or two
-- Soften rear spring a click or two

And then after some laps I can start to dial it in. The McLaren F1 is so fast that even with those basic changes I turned a 6:41. Sub-sevens at the Nordschleife are blistering experiences! But that wasn't fast enough, so I went back to car selection to look over faster cars. Had a look at the prototype style cars and took out the Chevy Daytona, but ran off the track three times before Flugplatz and parked it.

Swapped to the Formula RaceRoom US car. If there are descriptions and specifications in the sim for the cars I have yet to see them. Where is this info? Anyway, it looks to me to be a Dallara Indy car from five years ago or so. I usually avoid cars like this. They are in a sense too fast, each corner coming in a blink compared to say GT cars or even vintage F1. But they do offfset that with insane downforce and light weight. So what the hell, let's give it a go.

Amazing. I've never attempted laps here in a car this fast, and the sheer pace forced some mistakes, but even so this car clipped a full thirty seconds off my all time Ring record, set just a few minutes before in the McLaren haha. 6:11 around the Ring. Checked the leaderboard to see that lap put me 21st in the world! Scrolled down to see all the drivers I was faster than only to find that 21st is the slowest lap submitted so far. Doh! Haha, that's just motivation isn't it? The gearing was poorly suited to the track, winding out 6th gear way too early. So I'm sure I can find some more time if I run it again. And I will because I won't mind being second slowest, but prefer not to pull up the rear.

Formula RaceRoom US at the Nordschleife (2016 IndyCar?)

Here's the track select screen from RaceRoom, which I'm posting to show which tracks it has (note how many have multiple configurations) and how neat and clean it is. It's a good UI in RaceRoom, from the track select, to the leaderboards to the chassis set up.

RaceRoom seems to fly under the radar a bit compared to the competition, but it's a good sim.

Had such a grand time running a V-6 Indy Car from 2016 around the Ring, I decided to up the ante and took out the X-17, a 2017 F1 car. V-10 and probably 300 more horsepower. Just insane to guide such a rocket around the Ring. Exhilarating, and then some. So much downforce that the limit is beyond what I think is possible so I'm left far from it. This car wrecked my fastest Nordschleife lap and it wasn't all that clean. But the fact that the top lap on the board is over thirty seconds faster shows there is plenty more in it.

Formula X-17 in RaceRoom @ Der? Nordschleife

I should probably point out that F1 cars in 2017 were V-6 turbo hybrids. So not sure what car this is? The store says it's a V-10.

Thirty days now without a comment. Let's keep it going and see if we can hit two months with no interest!

I write for the unregistered lol.

I took some more screens but forgot to grab 'em this morning, and I'll put them up later.

With the hotlap challenge inert, I transitioned to running the Green Hell in any car. Mostly the open wheel stuff shown in the screens above. But I've mixed in a lot of Porsches, GT cars, prototypes and more.

I was also interested in starting another championship of some sort. In the end I did so in RaceRoom. Oddly I ended up choosing GT3, mostly because there are so many cars in this class and the field would be interesting, and because RR has the McLaren MP4-12C, so I am running that car. I set a cool schedule of ten events, starting in the US, then moving to England, then European mainland, before reaching the season finale in Dubai. First race is Mid-Ohio.

Before choosing GT3 I started a championship in DTM, because I wanted to drive my beloved Ferrari. But it was horrible, I couldn't drive a lap without spinning three times. I said fook that and switched. Not sure what was going on there, because I've driven the 488 successfully at other tracks, but here it was a nightmare. The McLaren was much better, so good in fact that I drove it in leaderboard and set the chassis lap record by some margin.

I really like RaceRoom, the driving's great and now I can get a feel for the AI. I ran that first race and the AI did fine, but will take more time to see how they are over the course of the season.

I am now using the Crew Chief app which I have to say is awesome and it has improved the experience quite a bit. Recommended

https://thecrewchief.org/

The RR championship is ten events. I posted the track select screen earlier and the mix is pretty good. Some glaring holes, but also some boutique stuff you don't see anywhere else. A few fictional tracks too which are pretty good.

Here's the schedule for my championship.





GT3 Class in RaceRoom. Quite a nice variety of GT3 cars, twenty in all, though some are variants. But there are several cars here that are not in ACC, like the Ford GT and Mustang, Chevy Camaro and Corvette, to name just a few. I set the season up for 31 cars including mine, so I didn't get all these cars in the field. You can individually select cars to be opponents, but it's a tedious process so I just went with whatever the game selected. A good mix, and the Mercedes were the fastest AI cars at Mid-Ohio






My weapon. This livery, am I right?






Practice or qualifying for the season opener at Mid-Ohio

Indy cars at the Brickyard in RaceRoom

These are great shots sir!!

Thanks. What are you driving these days?

I'm mostly just lapping the Nordschleife in bunch of cars. But I also have a couple championships going in different sims.

The laps around the brickyard were fun, but I liked doing the same in rFactor a little better. Feels like more authentic oval action in some way.

I haven't been driving or flying anything sadly. In the midst of packing up our duplex and preparing to move into our first house.

My interests have always been more on the vintage side of things - I love the classic cars. The modern cars and tracks just don't hold my interest much... Feels like I'm driving on rails.

It's been a month since I posted here, so time to catch up. I picked up F1 22, Codemaster's latest entry in the F1 sim game, Electronic Arts has gotten their grubby mitts on it, and it shows, but they've not done anything to ruin it, yet. One obvious change off the bat is the naming convention, calling it F1 22 instead of F1 2022. They've added a number of ways to blow your dough, microtransactions, and Podium Pass returns. Thankfully this can be ignored entirely and you don't miss a thing. Not pay to win. All cosmetic, and then there's the F1 Life side of things that is pretty uninteresting.

Hell, if it makes them money and doesn't cost me anything that's fine with me. There are good bones in this series and as long as EA don't foul it up it will be fine.

For the sim racing side I reckon they've done the job. Mechanically there's little new over last year's edition. What's new are the cars, a couple tracks and the introduction of the sprint race format. Of course 2022 saw the delayed implementation of new regulations intended to foster closer racing by reducing dirty air and generating down force through increased ground effect, theoretically allowing the cars to run closer than they could before. While I can sense the shift to high high-speed grip and low low-speed grip due to the new car designs, I don't feel the effects of less dirty air. Maybe it's there, but this is not something I've ever felt was a thing in this series. Unlike real F1 racing, I never felt I struggled to run on the exhaust of the car in front, down force stolen off my front wing. Matter of fact, if you watch any e-sports using this sim you can see that the effects of dirty air are either so small as to be meaningless or just absent altogether as the cars run nose to tail.

Gone too is the narrative mode they trotted out for F1 2021, called Braking Point. That was mildly interesting, but superficial and I won't miss it.

The cars however are fabulous, beautiful, sleek rocketsleds. I'm in love with this year's F1 cars. They look and sound amazing and drive exquisitely. Of course this series is not regarded as the pinnacle of physics fidelity, but I couldn't care less. It feels great to me lapping at pace. However I don't think the FFB is very good. I say that because unlike other sims, I don't feel the onset of traction loss through the wheel. There are no cues to tell me the tires are over the edge. Maybe it's my settings (I doubt it), but this sort of tactile feedback is critical to racing sims.

A couple new tracks to mirror the 2022 schedule. The high speed Saudi Arabian track Jeddah and the new street course in Miami. Two tracks saw significant alteration for 2022, Abu Dhabi (actually done last year but not reflected in the sim) and Australia's Albert Park which saw some chicanes removed. It's funny but I expected to not like both of the new tracks. Jeddah, in my view, is simply too blind for how fast it is. I think it's a disaster waiting to happen, a stopped car around an unsighted bend is incredibly dangerous at these speeds. Plus there's the whole 'well it's Saudi Arabia' thing too. No missile attacks are simulated in the sim. But man is it great to drive! 27 turns, but it doesn't feel like it. Just a full-on blast for miles through the desert.

Miami too I thought I wouldn't care for. On television, the race track didn't look great, but having run a number of races on it now I gotta say I quite like it. A nice blend of turn types, high speed and low speed sections, and a high risk of rain to keep it interesting.

But as I've talked about over and over in the F1 2020 thread, the career mode is the thing. It's the best of it's kind, and even then there are several options to choose from. Standard driver career puts the player in a seat in either F2 or F1. The player drives the car and controls technical engineering development, but has no other responsibilities. My Team returns, which is like the standard career, but adds the corporate responsibilities such as choosing sponsors, liveries, engine supplier, hiring drivers and upgrading the factory and facilities. It's the sort of thing I always wanted in a racing sim and first appeared in F1 2020. It's been refined a bit, but essentially the same as previous seasons.

As good as My Team is, it's awkwardly balanced so that a good player will progress very quickly to the top of the table. See the F1 2020 thread for more of my thoughts on how and why this is, and ideas to mitigate the effect. For long term saves a standard career is probably the better choice since there are fewer ways to get ahead.and leave the AI behind.

New too are sprint races where the weekend format changes. One free practice is removed and replaced with a sprint race which doubles as qualifying for the grand prix. Imola, Red Bull Ring and Interlagos are the designated sprint tracks, and this cannot be changed . I hope they tweak this to allow the player to set any track as sprint or not. A minor point, but something I'd like to see in the future.

I've already run through a My Team career, choosing the new midfield starting point. By the middle of season three I'd had enough, our car far and away the class of the division by that point and I don't want to be so far in front. Now I'm in a standard career, having started in F2, getting promoted to a seat in F1 at Alpha Tauri, and then switching to McLaren for season 2.


A few screen shots of the action

My old car, Alpha Tauri AT03, battling my new car, McLaren MCL-36 through Ascari




DRS train at Bahrain




My Alpha Tauri runs with the leaders down to Lesmos 1 at Monza in the early stages of the race

Here's a surprise for you;

I'm dipping my toes back into rF2 after a long hiatus. It started with the old PC refusing to start, and after knocking on it, opening it to see if there were any obvious faults (none that I could discern), I decided to bin it since it was from october ´09 when Win 7 came out and it was never going to run anything newer than 10.

So, I found What I thought was a good deal on a pre-built off the shelf Lenovo with a gen 12 i-5, lots of RAM and an RTX 3090. Quiet as heck and a small footprint on the desk.

I am deliberately going only for content that is "Goodwood Revival" material, anything with LCD on the steering wheel and more than buttons for headlights and windscreen wipers I forego.

Just a few screenies, as I crash in every mod. If the content isn't immediately identifiable, it's the endurance 1967 at Le Mans 67, Endurance 1954 at Hockenheim, Eve and Spark at Rouen and lastly Lola T70s at Targa Florio.

Nice screens and an excellent choice of cars, tracks and time period for your virtual racing, Jens!

That RTX 3090 is a monster and should serve you well in the years/sims to come.

I knew you'd be back

A man of refined taste. Quite so.

After taking a break from sim racing for a few months I fired a few of them up over the past few days. Confirmed Jens' request. Honestly I don't think I knew you had RaceRoom. Saw that you had run one of the competitions, the Crosslé 90F at Charade and thought that looks like a proper combination. Never knew of this car before RR. But open wheel, no wings, vintage. And around a delightful track too it must be said. A two litre fourbanger that weighs nothing at all. Wonderful drive. Had a bash about in a race event to run the track with some AI out there and learn the lines. Then entered the competition and turned a few. Thanks for the inspiration.

Over the past few days I snapped up several things from RaceRoom. Got the 488 GT3 Evo, as mid-engined V8 Ferraris are my thing. Picked up Interlagos. And the Driver's pack, which included the car and track for the Charade competition, plus the Crosslé 9S, Mazda MX-5 and the Praga R1. Maybe a few other things I'm forgetting already. Usually wait for sales, but I've got some time off and there ya go.

I've also been turning laps in AMS2. But I was disappointed to see the leaderboards had been wiped. I spent a lot of time climbing those ladders, especially in the Formula Vintage Gen 1. Must have been some physics changes that warrant it? I don't know why it is done. I hope at some point it sticks for good.

To borrow a phrase we used in the Battle of Britain forum; Here´s What Happend:

I don’t own any content in RaceRoom and only downloaded the 53 GB of it because of your posts about it, Derek, and the December release of the Crosslé Formula car and the Charade circuit. Furthermore, I had some time to spare, felt the itch, partly because I can’t get GPL to run on my Win11 rig, and the price of electricity over Christmas was down from the one Dollar+ Per KWh, that has become an almost daily occurence here,

I slowly figured that there was a time limited competition and how to enter it.

I spent some time in that Crosslé/Charade combo because I felt it massively addictive with great FFB and sound and nice graphics, and I wanted to see how quick I could go. Now, RR have done a very fine job, after a while though, I felt frustration set in with the way the rear-end of the car loses grip. To me it seems like I cannot really trail-brake or drift that car at all because the rear-wheel slip angle does not feel progressive to me but rather like a table look-up, so if I exceed a certain point which is on a knife’s edge, the rear tires let go. And they don’t regain grip again until I’m almost stationary, heading in the wrong direction. Maybe its just me, or my old G25, we’re both a bit long in the tooth.

I briefly tried the sportscar version but ultimately didn’t take that one further. I also did a couple of races with the AI in the free TCR content which felt pretty good although I didn’t look into the various gizmos of launch control etc. The Formula 1 1990’s inspired car was fun and finally I did a bit of crashing the old Kurt Thiim MB 190 DTM Touring Car. That thing is a handful.

I’ll look out for future sales and might get me some content as my current thinking is that I think I want to focus on sims that offer official content over mods to a) keep the number of content manageble and keep it simple b) that content hopefully is of consistent and high quality. Some of the mods for rFactor 2 while very nice do imo vary a bit in the resolution of the simulation.

It is a bit of a downer, when you have spent the time and effort on posting laptimes to leaderboards or just gotten familiar with certain cars and maybe like the way they drive, and then they go and change the physics or some other thing, wiping existing times. In iRacing, this potentially happens every time they release new builds and tire models. Some cars just stayed undriveable for me for a long time, like the Lotus 49 so I spent less and less time with iRacing until I just stopped resubbing.

By the way, I think that GPL is about to recieve a 1970 mod and scratch made new versions of the old Papy tracks that have not already been updated by the community. Anyone going back to Rank?