SimRacing.org.uk

(https://i.postimg.cc/zGDDHQgW/Screenshot-ks-lamborghini-countach-s1-pine-gp-18-2-121-20-55-7.jpg)

This is the 1st of our track tests prior to the GPL67 series.
Pinewood has a nice fast old-school vibe to it and also looks pretty - as such it's prefect for the GPL cars but I need to make sure it has no unpleasant surprises if we run it.
I don't believe it needs CM/CSP so so work for everyone.

We'll be hurling some of Lamborghini's finest around for half an hour in this test race :)

Password: see above (#post_event_password)

Practice: 19:30 (45 mins)
Qual: 20:15 (15 mins)
Race: 20:30  (30 min race)


Cars allowed:
Lamborghini Countach (Normal and S1)
Stock AC content


Track: Pinewood GP
https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/pinewood.29825/ (https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/pinewood.29825/)

Live Timing: here (http://stracker.simracing.org.uk:50041/lapstat) (Only available in the week up to the race)

Time of Day Setting: 13:30
Weather: Mid Clear
Start: Standing
Tyre wear: Normal
Fuel consumption: Normal
Pit-stops: Not required

Server track settings:
SESSION_START=95
RANDOMNESS=2
LAP_GAIN=0.00757
SESSION_TRANSFER=90

Damage: 70%

I'm in!

Same words as Jos but little bit deeper voice...

>:( :fencing:

I'm posting here, as I think it will get most traffic with most relevant people :)
I just got Oculus Quest 2 with link cable. So any guides you guys followed to set up vr in AC? Any recommendations?
First impressions from just using it standalone to view some 3d videos and around the interface, horizontal fov seems narrow. I wonder how is that going to be in AC. Seems you have to turn your head quite a bit to see the car next you, when fighting for position. Also, so called sweet spot, where the text is in focus, seems realtively small right in the midle of the screen infront of my eyes. If I glance to sides without moving the head, nothing is really clear. I wonder how that will go with info screens in AC that are usually on the left and right edges of the screen?
I'll try some thinkering tonight after work, to at least to get AC connected and to show up in the headset. With it arrived my new RTX 3070, so horsepower for running vr shouldn't be a problem :)

Been using it for a month now, found it tricky to set up but got the hang of it now. I find if I sit in racing seat and define area then enable the oculus link it works fine. I have to have the hand controllers behind the seat to avoid the red and blue lines on screen. If it doesn't load first time found unplugging link cable and reconnecting always does the trick. In the oculus software I set it at 90fps and 1.3 and it runs butter smooth with all maxed out. Its by far better than the rift once you get used to it . I purchased the after market headband  by Newzerol from Amazon. Up to now happy with it I thinks it's great  for the price. Only downside I had to join bl**dy Face book to use the software!!

Yeah, facebook. After creating the account I spent something like 20 minutes just turning on all privacy options, turning off all notifications and recommendations. There is A LOT of them.

I set it 90hz and 1.5 and it's smooth 90fps in AC :)
It's a strange sensation when turning in sharp corners, I feel lightheaded :)
Also, when I put the seat in the right driving position (DTM ALFA), where my hand essentially overlap with virtual hands, mirrors are too far off center to see anything in them without turning my head. Is this other peoples experience with mirrors? I might have to rely on crew chief even more :).

Hi Tim,

It appear that the server isn't 100% grip, is it intended ? I spot that with Syd's first laps in the server and then saw by myself that the practice was starting @95%, then qualy @96 and eventually the race @98%.
Also I'm not fully sure but maybe the time setting isn't 13h30 neither.

 ;)

Only need to turn my head slightly to look at right hand door mirror, pretty happy with it so far. If I increase to 1.5 frames drop to 45fps graphics card upgrade maybe, used crew chief for first time last week find it a bit distracting, after hitting wall head on, collected by following car he told me "just a scratch will buff out"  ;D ;D

Yeah, don't listen to his damage reports  ;D
But he is good when someone is around you, he'll tell you something like "left side", and then "still there" while there is any overlap with another car. I find that easier then looking at something like heliocorsa. Also, he'll tell you your lap times and sector times. That's especially good now, when I have to turn the head to actually see my time (unless of course the car has lap times on the dash :) ).
And man, did I not know what I was getting into when I went to this track. We're climbing mountains here, multiple times, and then dropping straight down the side of a cliff  :o So far I didn't really feel motion sickness, possibly 90fps helping with that. There is a bit of a strange feeling after you take the headset off. Like your're mising a dimension now, in the real world :)
And yes, like Maxime, I noticed the grip is low. And I maanged to blow my front right tire almost every time I went to the track. I've never blown a tire in AC before. Don't know if that is something to do with this track or VR.

My first experience of AC in VR was the Porsche 962 series - have a go in one of those ;)
It's not posible to see what is directly behind you and the mirrors are fully left for one, and right and up for the other ;D

I like it though, it's an element of realism that simply isn't available on a monitor.


As for the server, it's using the grip settings from the Mt Fuji race - not sure about why the time could be off though, but I've noticed that sessions in the server don't always seem to be what they are supposed to be. The server config file is definitely 13:30

But didn't you want the server to start with 100% grip ?

Not really - that's copy and pasted above and this is only a fun race.  :)

I've edited above to match the server setting

Maxime, where is the shortcut  ;D

That chicane in the middle of the lap is brutal. If you catch the curb on the right, it will blow out your tires, every time. If you catch too much on the left, it will blow your tires, almost every time.

How do you type in chat when in vr. So far I got 'try to look though the small gap between the nose and vr headset'  ;D

That's how I type in VR - It's why my sentences are regularly full of typos and very poor grammar ;D

I haven't blown a tire in the chicane yet - I obviously need to try harder!

This car is quite horrible, it feels under powered, brakes are bad, gearing is awefull and drivebility sucks, track is great tho... :)

Cars like this underline how good a sim AC actually can be - the Countach is awful in nearly every conceivable measure of modern driving ;D
Just like all old supercars really ;)

I've picked it as it's stock (so any problems are purely the track) and we've never dusted them off previously :)

It think it should still be fun though, even though I'm bound to either crash out or munch my gearbox as my SHH has turned up today and has very different spacing to my old G25 H pattern...

I thought Lola had bad brakes and handling, and then I drove this :) Now Lola feels like a modern supercar  ;D

Hey guys, it's just a great '80s supercar whose overall design is much older. It's just 1,5 ton heavy. But it's a great beast.  ;)

My first race in VR :)
For driving it was great. But still not that great fighting for position. I made a small mistake on lap 1 and Stefan got through. Than I spent the rest of the race about 1 second behind. On penultimate lap Stefan made a small error on that downhill right-left esses and I managed to get along side. But then I had no idea where Stefan was, and probably stayed too far to the left and had to slow down too much not to drift out, and Stefan got the position back. That's when I noticed Matteo in my mirrors, and of course started to make mistakes with my braking points. But half way through the last lap Matteo crashed. I hope it wasn't because of some contact with me (I didn't feel anything), but I also had very poor awareness of where you were. I hope it's part this car/part me being new to vr, and I can improve in close racing.
There is definitely a bug in that chicane with high curbs in the middle of the lap. If you cut over it on the right, it will blow up your tires. Even if it doesn't on the spot, if you look in your tire temperatures, they keep rising, even if you are stopped, eventually blowing your tire up. Or it's the car with the bug, but since it is stuck Kunos car, it's more likely that this is due to the track.

No Syd, at the last lap I did it all by my own and our cars didn't came to contact.

This car is a crazy horse, but at least I had some fun with Jos for 20 mins or so. A bit brutal sometimes, but great fun :)

Unfortunately this track seems good in every part except for the chicane. If you touch the armco on the left your car is kaputt!

See you for the next

Brutal race (Matteo's dixit) yesterday. https://youtu.be/UuBmtrYVKZI (https://youtu.be/UuBmtrYVKZI)
Matteo and I had a few exchanges of positions whilst Tim was making the most of our skirmish.
Despite my terrible start from P3 which saw Tim and Matteo running in the distance, I managed to keep it from my teammate Maxime and focused on catching up. Matteo and Tim's fighting allowed me to catch and put some pressure on Matteo. We slightly touched but I don't think that had much influence in Matteo's getting out of the track a couple of turns later and I managed a tight overtake on the chicane.
I started to close on Tim but he pushed hard on the straight and gained an extra half-second at the time Matteo was again breathing on my neck. We had a few laps of close racing and the wheel-to-wheel moment came in the way down after T1. It was very tight and a difficult place for such a maneuver. We touched. I almost lost control of the car but kept it straight, pointing to the right place and without suffering terrible damage. I wasn't happy but I am sure Matteo would find himself in a similar place... Although less heavily impacted.
I managed to close the gap again and restarted my charge. Overbraked myself on the last 90-left turn affecting Matteo's line... I was planning to return the position without losing too much time on the straight but Matteo got nervous and all flashing around... Give back the place on the roundabout...
Left a bit of space but Matteo was distracted or something and I closed the gap again...
Back in the 90-left turn at the end of the track and Matteo lost it. We crashed as I couldn't avoid him... That was the end of the race... Other than Stefan was pushing hard at the end and I had to keep the focus on finishing keeping P2.
A great race and fights with Matteo.
Well done Tim and Stefan.

That was a poor show for me ! ^^

1st I was unable to find my pace, and even was ending my rides in the heaven of drivers.  :angel-wings: I couldn't have the right feel of the car, looked like my braking was problematic. Maybe due to a recent PC restart (I need to check my pedals calibrations after every restart for some reason  :-\)

2nd I then quite missed my qualif.

3rd Did a poor race beginning after a decent start but lost some time while giving up vs Jos in a stupid manner. Then several little mistakes I wasn't used to do in practice. Then a big crash in that deadly-as-expected T1. Thankfully Stefan managed to pass the danger fine, sorry for the mess mate. Really I wasn't concentrated enough.

4th Even if car was able to ride, I got some problems with my wheel clamp which started to loosen (a problem I'm fighting against since years now, I hate this very poor T500 clamping system) and right after that I started to hear and "feel" some "chkling" sounds while downshifting from 4th to 3rd as long as I was feeling my TH8 gate was getting more and more loosen, I think it's quite dead now. Thankfully I had realised it was poor quality stuff when I ordered it so that I had ordered immediately after the right gate mod for the TH8 : the Clixbeetle GT, I need to install it now. It should be much better and durable than the poor stuff I had. I put a link in case any TH8 owner would be interested in :
https://nolitto3d.com/products/clixbeetle-gt%E2%84%A2-colours-may-vary-free-shipping
Oh, and I had to tighten up my TH8 clamping too. Lol, better to experiment all these f**king struggles at once !  ;D

Congrats podium, great pace Tim !

Oh and the track doesn't seem to suffer a glitch at the chicane in first intention, those kerbs aren't more deadly than they should given what they look imo, so maybe some guys experienced a car-related problem with the wheels, or maybe it just simulates a wheel breaking up ? I mean, it's obvious that if you drive over these with speed + gravity center towards it you're very likely to pay the price.

This is what I want to check - hitting something like that at 30mph in real life is liable to blow a tire/break a wheel/snap something in the suspension.
We would be hitting it at close to 100mph last night...

If I can straight-line those kerbs at 20mph without random stuff exploding then I'm happy to declare the track suitable - no one complains about the walls at Monaco braking their car 'unexpectedly' after all  ;)

Think of it as added-gpl'ness, this track is entirely sane when compared with some of the popular old gpl courses!

Quite right indeed, even if always disrupting when we cannot use our precious little spare time just for the driving but it has to be done and better in a test race than in the middle of the series... Good luck with those adjustments.


I'm totally with you on this, Maxime. I think those curves a clearly marked as DANGER  :devil: and we should take them very seriously or face the obvious consequences of breaking the car. I cannot possibly see a real car going through that at pace and surviving. Same should be for simracing.
I hit them once yesterday but managed to mitigate the worst outcome at the last second... Although I think I lost pace after that in any case.

I think the track should be good for the GPL series and we need to take that chicane seriously.

With regards to the car - I think we will have to dust it off more often.
What an absolute beast 8)

If it had better sound i'd already be planning a series!
Once I got the hang of it I absolutely loved it, a proper old school brute of a thing  :angel:

Agree it is a fantastic beast. One of those you shouldn't ever hear the tyres as there is an exponential relation between dBs and lost seconds...

This one, as well as the Ferrari 250 GTO are masterpieces by Kunos in everything other than the sound department... They/Someone should update this to give them both their proper self.

Agree with that, just add option car(s) for variety, comedy and real contender options if possible. We need to remember this track, it's pure diamond, just mind chicane it's quite realistic. :) Btw, is this fantasy track, try to google it but no results?

Yes - pure fantasy. The guy wanted to make something with a load of his favourite types of corner from other tracks as well as the feel of the 'Ring.
I think he did a pretty good job hence wanting to try it

Oh, that explains total lack of boredom, every corner is fun to drive.

I've done some intentional kurb-hopping at various speeds and have to conclude that the damage isn't a bug in any way.
You have to hit the kerbs much harder than I thought in order to do damage - so if anything they aren't severe enough! ;D

I quote myself just because maybe I wasn't clear enough. The trouble is not the chicane itself. In my last lap crash I didn't report damage for hitting chicane curbs. As I said in advance the real trouble is the armco on the left in the specific point in which I crashed on it, because I experienced this issue many times in my first practice laps some days before the race  :angel: :angel:

The angle with which you hit the armco is not relevant it seems. Your car will instantly explode in the air. Than you will see some anti Lambo mines planted under the surface exploding like a timed building demolition  ;D ;D ;D

Look to believe  :D

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7Rh500iwx5uC9EDkluDLNVZDJlNjpdt/view?usp=sharing (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7Rh500iwx5uC9EDkluDLNVZDJlNjpdt/view?usp=sharing)

Agreed. I never drove on it in practice but in the heat of the race, I did once. 1 tengh before I thought "Ok, this Lambo is going to be done here" and actually the car managed to endure that very well, quite unrealistically well I'd say.

I'm not so sure Matteo : to me this crash is rather believable-ish (then we all know that nor AC neither any other sim is about nicely simulating the crashes). Then about anti-Lambo mines, I think it might happen in any place in fact, as to me it's car damage related, because of your severly damaged front suspensions/wheels. I kinda remember a comparable behaviour after a big crash in T1. Of course you're right that it looks weird, but not sure it's due to a track glitch.

I would agree with you if I had T-Boned the armco in a Grosjean style F1 Bahrain GP Maxime, but I didn't.

With my impact angle I wouldn't expect a complete stop from 130 kph to 0 in the space of 0 meters. The same didn't happened to Syd after he crashed on a slightly later spot of that armco.

Then we all know that AC is rubbish about damage model, and my race would have been compromised for sure in real life after a crash like that, but I guess we need to be very careful to attempt an overtake in that part of the track in order to avoid worse consequences for the drivers involved.