After yesterday's race I had to dust off my old F430 Thrustmaster. At least I would be able to race again, even if it won't be so fun.
it's a pity my retire yesterday, cause I was very close to Geoffers, and it would have surely been a great duel til the end. It was funny til it lasted. Than I hit the wall of the fast right corner before the long straight, and the damage were pretty realistic in that case
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I would like to tell something just about the damage. The GTLW team, and Aris in particular worked a lot on this issue. I strongly agree with a couple of previous post with MJ and Clive, when they challenge you to go into a wall at 30 km/h. I would just like to remember that the EURO NCAP crash tests are done at 50 km/h (31 mph), and it's worth to take a look of what remains in the front part of the car, to understand what happens when you crash into a concrete wall at such "lower" speed. I can say that is pointless to say the opposite. Maybe is GTL that is "hardly realistic" about this aspect. To brake a radiator of a 70's car, just like that of a modern one, even 30 km/h are enough IMO. Same thing is for the suspentions. Sometimes, if you look at the XD motec, you'll notice that your suspentions are marked with 95 seconds damage, but with the P&G 3, it happened to me more than 1 time in the last 2 years of testing, you can simply go on if you didn't hit the wall or cars near you abruptly. Maybe you'll end up with the steering wheel slightly wrong centered, and the behaviour of the car won't be the same of an undamaged car, but you will waste a lot of time less comparing to a pit stop to repair your car.
When I started the phyisics beta-testing, I immediately noticed the difference between v2 and v3. As I said in an other topic here, the v3, is more user friendly to drive in every car, compared to the v2 (easy to drive... hard to master). At the opposite, the "neutral" default setup, are meant to be used by everyone, and their neutrality (intended as you will not esperience no major understeer/oversteer) helps a lot to stay on track without fighting too much with the steering wheel. The opposite side of the neutrality, is that for every Italian beta-tester, you need to do an harder setup, to obtain the best performance in almost all cars. Your car will corner easily with harder rear springs, and harder rear roll-bars, and you can feel almost immediately the difference about a "neutral" setup, and an harder one. Differential gear setting is really important to have a better traction, and you will have to use the throttle properly with an harder setup, or your car will spin easily cause of the power oversteer, if you don't partialize the throttle in acceleration especially if you have your wheels turned.
I can tell you that if you want to drift, P&G 3 is perfect, but you will waste a lot of time, cause drifting is not meant to be used to obtain a good laptime performance. Aris worked a lot even on this aspect. In the v2, in certain cars, the wrong side of the physics IMO, was that you could go faster when you were drifting, and it was totally a nonsense. Drift driving is strongly discouraged by my side, cause you will waste a lot of time. Dirft races are meant for japanese, but 70's races were not drift races. You need a clean driving to obtain the max performance of all the cars, and you'll need some time to spare to change your mind about the driving style of the v3, that is totally different by the 2.
Talking bout my VDA mates, I'm a bit disappointed about their lack of commitment to stay with 2 wheels on the tarmac despite my repeated warnings on the forum and in TS during the race. The thing that makes me even more "angry" is the fact that they didn't need to do it, watching their great laptimes, cause it would have made no difference at all in terms of result. So, if you want to punish them, I won't make any complain about this. I can just tell that is difficult for everybody to change their minds, but they have struggled very little to do their homework just a little better.
Last thing is that all the VDA drivers that you met yesterday on track were P&G 3 physics beta-tester by more than 2 years, so I guess it's totally natural that we are a bit advantaged compared to you. We have a lot of setup, and a lot of kilometers done with all the car pack. Not considering that we've done 2 ROTW championship with the v3, that was an only italian beta-testing championship. You know how much we train for every race, so you can just figure how many hours we spent with this great sim.
For the next race, I can tell you that BMW 24v and Capris 3100 are really close in terms of performance in almost all tracks, with a slightly advantage for the BMW, usually not more than 1 seconds depending on the tracks. In certain track (especially that with short straights), Capri 3100 could be even slightly faster than BMW, but it's a perfect combo, that we tested one year ago at the ROTW championship. They're very well matched.
Cu