Welcome mate - yeah we only race GTL on Thursdays, you might notice we run two championships side by side. We've just had a sprint event and this Thursday is the enduro. Next week is back to a sprint around Monaco79 for the penultimate round.
I can't comment on RaceDepartment but I remember first finding this bunch of hooligans a couple of years ago and was just so happy to find an alternative to racing offline or on the crazy as public servers. There are loads of groups out there but I consider myself quite lucky to have found this one first.
You'll notice it's really well organised, there's a race incident procedure where a team of moderators will look over anything you feel has happened during a race that you're not happy with - there are proper standings tables, stats for your career, detailed lap by lap analysis reports (*cough* most of the time
) but above all, it's a friendly bunch of damn good drivers throughout the games we run on here. I cannot tell you how many insanely good and close races I've had...I used to rave about them but now it's almost expected you're going to have some serious fun on most occasions.
Just my opnion but I would say the best way to start off is read Gizmo's (Bossman) rules, go for consistency with your lap times and absolutely attend the practice sessions when you can (Wednesday night there's usually somebody on from 9pm'ish - also on Teamspeak). Nobody's going to get peeved if you're not smashing lap records from the get go but they might if you do some crazy move when being lapped or try and make up 15 places by corner one or basically don't follow the pretty simple etiquette
As for Melbourne, I was blabbing on to my team mates about techniques and all of that stuff in our forum so if you send me a PM with your email I'll copy that for ya but also give you the setup I used during the race. I would also say watch any replays you can from a few camera angles and try and make a note of when people are getting on the brakes, turning in, getting on the throttle again and so on - it really helped me when I first started and I still do it now if I'm struggling somewhere.
It's all getting a bit tense as it's the closing rounds but normally everyone's really free with setups etc. I'm still properly crap with them but I guarantee somebody will be about to help you, particularly if you're just starting out.
Last but not least, if you're into this era of racing, you might want to keep one eye on the Power n Glory mod. It's this but for GTR2 and I suspect before long we're all going to end up there as much as loads of would rather not admit it. Very different, I would say much trickier but if you've got half an idea what they feel like it might help if you make this a regular thing.
Christ I've written a lot.....err....and to summarise the racing here is wicked, you'll love it trust me
