SimRacing.org.uk

A return to a familiar circuit for the GT's. No excuses for not "knowing" this track. Rouen, in northern France on the River Seine, is the capital of the Haute-Normandie (Upper Normandy) region and the historic capital city of Normandy. That information will not make your lap times any faster, nor will it increase your standing in your local community, but it does add an educational element to this race post.

Teams can choose to run any cars they like, but in any race each all team members must drive different cars, so only one driver can drive the car that does not need to stop.

Pit stop times are listed below with a choice of a single long stop or two shorter stops... the choice is yours.

THIS RACE WILL HAVE A ROLLING START AND CARS ARE EXPECTED TO MAINTAIN THEIR GRID POSITIONS FOR THE FIRST LAP. THE POLE CAR WILL LEAD THE PACK AROUND AT A STEADY SPEED AND RACING WILL START AS CARS ENTER THE START FINISH STRAIGHT AT THE END OF LAP 1


"Please ensure you are aware of the new in-series penalties for this season. Details are here (https://www.simracing.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=10879.0). Drivers incurring a penalty will receive a PM informing them of this."

Race list	iGOR
Server	T7_2
IP address	62.149.202.168
Date	11-11-2012
Race time	Race starts at 09:30 UK time
Qualifying time	Between 30 and 60 minutes, starting no later than 21:00 UK time
Track	Rouen les Essarts
Mod	GT
Damage model	INT (Each driver is allowed a single Shift-R)
Race length	27 laps
Replay	Available here (ftp://ukgpl3.dyndns.org/Replays/Archive/Season23/GTs/)

REVISED PIT STOP TIMES SHOWN BELOW

Rouen - GT

	Single Stop Time		Double Stop Time		Post Race Time Penalty
Ford GT40 Mk1	No Stop		N/A		0
Porsche 910	31		12		41
Mirage M1	45		18		55
Ford GT40 Mk4	50		19		74
Ford GT40 Mk2B	59		21		60
Ferrari 330/P4	65		27		75
Lola T70 Mk3	100		45		110
Chaparral Mk2D	97		44		107
Chaparral Mk2F	110		50		120

 First Pit Window is: 22 (to go on your pit board) to 10 (to go on your pit board)
 Second Pit Window is: 17 (to go on your pit board) to 8 (to go on your pit board)

T7 server is set to 27 laps Long race and listening on Igor in Console session with OpenGL_V2.
Ciao

Looking 50/50 if I'll make this as my internet is still on the blink. Don't seem to have a connection at all at the mo so currently having to use my mobile  ::)

Sorry guys - internet is back here but I have ping that's measured in seconds :(

I won't be able to join you - If anyone wants to stand in for me then I;m sure Phil will appreciate the help!

This was my first GT race in a very long time and for once I was actually enjoying driving the big beasts. OK so I wasn't fast but I was in perfect control of myself.... unlike certain others with whom I had to share this race track. I shall be submitting two incident reports tomorrow, being rear-ended twice in the space of 3 corners really isn't funny......

Early bath for me :(.  About half way in I put a wheel on the grass at T1 which caused me to spin and damage the engine.  So I had to do a shiftR and a S&G.  Then with about 4 laps to go my engine blew again so I had to pull out.  Good luck to the remaining runners, there were some very fast drivers out there tonight!

That was fun. I joined qually late as I was getting the kids sorted so I only had time for four laps. Tried too hard and made a mistake on each. I was on a 2:08 for the last run and managed to put a wheel on the grass at the last corner by being TOO cautious :( - braked a bit too hard and over rotated.

Knew I was competitive with a few guys in front but Phil was too quick but maybe the pit stops would work in my favour? ARRRRGGGGGHHHH. Pit stops - hadn't looked up the window. Had to get Luke to log on to a laptop and show me the thread... still did a 2:11 whilst reading the laptop!

At the start I was all over Stefano and when Nigel made a mistake ahead we moved up. I then got over hasty and span which let Stefano away with Nigel. I set about hunting them down and we passed a stricken Jason and Sky at Nouveau Monde. I could catch Nigel in the twisty bits but he drove away through the woods. We passed Stefano who was a bit wobbly and put in a few nose to tail (ish) laps until Nigel decided to stop for a picnic. I thought he might get away with it but no. So after that it was lonely. I nearly caught Phil at his stop but not quite and then he just pulled out 150 yards a lap until I was a mile behind.

After that it was a case of trying to stay out of the way of the leaders, which was fine until Clouds and Al caught me in the wrong place. Advantage Sergio and apologies to Al. Then a big gold bruiser caught me up and barged me off the track - the bully. And him a Waza :(

Great race though and for once I finished a GT race and I am sure I was catching Evil at the end... :D

Relieved to score a podium here after a disappointing run of results in GT's. Tried really hard to pull out a lead during the opening laps but couldn't shake off Cookie who was applying really strong pressure until his pitstop. After several frustrating disconnects while making pitstops this season, I was very nervous about taking the 65 second single stop but thankfully this time, having simplified matters by dispensing with GPLWait & gone back to ye olde stoppewatch, I finally managed to get it right. Rejoined down in 7th or 8th but with others still to pit my hasty Prib calculations revealed that a podium was still possible, providing I could get the hammer down & not make any mistakes :P

With Hristo seemingly too far ahead, the crucial gap seemed to be to Cookie who had a 27 second stop still to make, yet was lapping quickly some 35 seconds ahead - this was going to be close... I pushed pretty hard & managed to reduce the gap but then had a huge off in pursuit of Sergio's Porsche that undid all my hard work. Still, it proved to be enough & once Cookie had pitted I moved up to 3rd & set about trying to nick 2nd off Sergio. A full-on chase during the final laps allowed me to close up on Sergio but that Porsche looked pretty nimble through sectors 1 & 2, so I plotted a smash & grab raid down the straight for the final lap. The only slight flaw in my devious plan was I hadn't yet got close enough to Sergio to exploit the tow & then on the final lap just as I was lining up my final assault, we encounteed Paul at the hairpin, which worked out rather more kindly for Sergio than me. Not your fault at all Paul, I only needed to make the slightest of lifts, but that meant Sergio remained just out of reach. Congrats to Sergio & of course Hristo - also very nice to see Fulvio back on track again :thumbup1:

Echo that. I should have said so.

Sorry, Paul, but I really did not expect you to lift up and let me by there. It's a flat out corner with just about a single line through it, so even if planned, a side by side action through there is very difficult to pull off without slowing down a lot. I reacted as quickly as I could and slowed down as much as I could to keep the inside line, but the rear end stepped out a bit (the MK is such a big and heavy machine!). I didn't feel anything on my side, which probably means warp was involved as well and there was physically some gap between our cars. That or the thing is so heavy it cannot be affected by minor contact, lol. Anyway, feel free to submit a report if you must.

I've tried at least 3 cars to have an idea of which one to choose for this race and, I've noticed that Mk1 and Porsches were almost the same, with only marginal differences in my hands with maybe only the Porsche immediately fast at the beginning and the Mk1 recovering the gap in very few laps due his better top speed. I opted for the Porsche because it was more comfortable but with 31 secs handicap. Like I had already said, for me, it is not the right thing there is a cars with no wait time or at least a S&G, because for the other cars we must add the deceleration to pit and the acceleration out of pit to take in count so my 31 secs of wait time have to be counted as 6+31+6=43 (that at last, is almost the gap I had from Hristo, but taking also in count he have had not lesser than 2 spinouts) meaning that also this time the calculation of wait times was wrong. Based on my race time instead, the Ferrari wait time has been perfect (look at the gap between me and Al Heller) and if also the Mk1 wait time would have been right, we could have been 3 sprinting for the checkered flag. Obviously 5 or 10 secs of gap are also good but absolutely not 45 or more.
Anyway I made only a little mistake at Nuveau Monde during the beginning and no more mistakes for the rest of the race, and also with an almost perfect driving I had 47 secs of gap (on the 43 figured out due to the spot) !  :P
At 2nd lap on the brake to Scierie I've seen Hristo hiding on the Right side so I kept myself to the outside leaving him the space to brake. H was at the grip limit but it was a astonishing nice move and after that, I've managed to keep the gap close untill at 2nd lap, at the esses preceding Sanson, H had clipped the kerb with the inside wheel and making a spinout that involved another car and I was lucky to avoid the crash just moving to the extreme left.
After this event I remained on track 1 lap more and then I went to pit for my wait time. In a few secs Hristo has passed and has disappeared definitely. Exiting from the pits I begun to push hard. Pribluda shown me that I was 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 and...uhm...it seemed there was already one driver that would have to make the pit stop and the driver was Axel. After he made his pit stop I passed in 2nd place with Al Heller closing on me very very fast, so I had to stay on gas as much as in qualification to stay in front of him. At last my gap from Al Heller has been around of 5/10th of a sec WOW !

Just for everyone's info. The stop times are calculated using the best info that I have on lap times. Each race that we do improves the accuracy and last night the race between Sergio's Porsche and Al's Ferrari produced a close finish.

Hristo's lap times last night were a huge improvement on the previous best lap I could find for the Mk1 GT40. If we were running this race again using the new data the pitstops would look like this.....


Rouen - GT

	Single Stop Time		Double Stop Time		Post Race Time Penalty
Ford GT40 Mk1	No Stop		N/A		0
Porsche 910	Stop and Go		N/A		#VALUE!
Mirage M1	18		N/A		43
Ford GT40 Mk4	26		N/A		51
Ford GT40 Mk2B	43		16		68
Ferrari 330/P4	55		23		80
Lola T70 Mk3	79		35		104
Chaparral Mk2D	76		31		101
Chaparral Mk2F	86		40		111

Hristo did indeed have a big advantage last night because he made no pitstop, any other driver could have done the same and use the Mk1 GT40 to get the same result. Providing of course that you can make the Ford lap at the same speed that Hristo did???  ::)

For the system to work, there will always be one car that has No Stop and all the faster cars stops are calculated using this as a base level.
In theory...and only in theory... all cars should arrive at the finish line together..........................but we all know that they won't  :o unless everyone drives a flawless race at world record pace.  ;)

Ahhh - that's nice... I was more releived that I didn't affect the race leadership tbh. I slightly misjudged your closing speed and although I tried to stay wide off the apex, the gap was closing and I was holding my breath...

Not going to bother the mod with that one - that was just racing.

Yeah, those more realistic wait times would have helped....

I made 2-3 little mistakes during this race that cost me about 15-20 seconds, so I never had a chance to come near Hristo...

Great fun for the first laps with Al and the last laps with the other Fezza burner Fulvio.

For me the car choice is just a matter of how comfortable I am with a car, would have taken the ChapF but that was unrealistic penalized.

I lost about 15 seconds in total from a spin and an off, so we're even.  ;)

That is what Clive is trying to achieve with the Pit Stop system.  Exciting racing with close finishes.  There is no other handicap system that can create a situation where cars of different pace can compete in the same race.  Over a season yes, but not in a single race.  As we have seen it is hard to get the Pit Stop times right, good data is simply not available.  Perhaps we should run the same set of tracks next season and use the lap times from this season to calculate the pit stop times?  Or we could just ask Hristo to test all the cars and use his lap times ;).

Years ago in the wireplay GPL league we used a system of handicaps based on driver and chassis performance. Basically the fastest guy would drive the slowest car and set a typical qualifying lap in it create a benchmark. Anyone going more than 1s/lap faster than the benchmark would be DQ'd from the race.. what that meat was that everyone spent a little time selecting the car that was right ( and adding extra fuel as ballast if needs be) and as result we often had side-by-side finishes....
/goes into to rose tint mode.... oh happy daze!

Unfortunately ballast gas is not checkable...I think none would base a race on drivers honesty  :P  (we in Italy say "raccomandare la pecora al lupo" meaning that you cannot use a wolf like a sheep dog), but on something perfectly definable and controllable.

About handicapping I only can say that in the GPFun championship where I raced for some years before UKGPL, were assigned fast cars at slow drivers and viceversa basing the choice on a reference time made from the faster guy with the slower car so the other drivers would choosen a car that would permit them to have a Best Combined laptime not lesser than the reference time in configuration for qualify (very light). That means also that usually the championship would have been won by a slow car with a fast driver like has been for Leo Grandis for instance. During the week preceding any event, the guys would tested the car right for them and they would have posted their laptimes on the forum and eventually would have changed their cars according to the rule of the reference time. In other words, a driver should choose a car that permit him to stay as close as possible to the reference time without going below it with the Best Combined lap time. With this rule often we have had 10 cars within a second and the reference time only a very few times has been beated during the qualify.

Ooh no... ;)

Ooh no... :D

I think it's wrong to use qualifying lap times for handicap calculations, because it doesn't take tire overheating and reliability into account. You can see how wrong it is if you do that with 67s F1 for example, where the Honda is slower in race pace than it is in qualifying pace, due to excessive tire overheating and the necessity to look after the engine. At the same time though, you cannot take lap times from an actual race either, because some of those are done with slipstream or may not be clean laps.

Qualifying times COULD work if you somehow take into account those other factors, but it will never be perfect.

nine cars, have nine races in a season, cars choosen at random, obviously you have use each car once. OR mabe car is own choice, still only use each car once, this would add a tactical emelant. just thoughts.  ;)

That is no handicap though, since everyone has the same cars overall (though I guess there is no real handicap with pitstops either), and at some tracks you're most likely to see spec racing, such as at Spa, Monza, etc., because people would be preserving their fastest cars for those tracks. Not that it's a bad thing, it may lead to intense racing with slipstreaming battles. With pitstops as we have now, the only time battles happen, most of the time, is at the start and at the end of a race. In the middle of the race everyone runs pretty much on their own due to differing pitstop lengths.

ok point taken. with the two variables of driver ability and car pace i doubt there is a definitive answer. mabe just the homogeneous  approach and refining stop times is the best way. Also if a driver missed a race they would in effect not have to use the porker, drivers joining mid way throuht season etc..............ok bad idea lol :)

GPFun always have raced 67's F1 with that sort of handicap (Fulvio could say something about this) and this is the 11st season !
The goal has been to keep the cars closer from start to finish overcoming the difference in performances of each one.
The difficulty is to get a good reference time, good in the sense of realizing the best performances of the best driver with the slower car.
In this condition, it is very difficult to realize a RBL better than the qualify lap time by the front row drivers maybe because there were also drivers in training all the week long. Slower drivers were always in the back rows with fast cars and this has always been a danger because often they are not good car managers so for this reason GPFun adopted rolling starts.
Honestly speaking I've seen only 3 drivers winners of races in a Honda, Leo Grandis, Cosimo Monti and Paolo Minotto.

And GPFun are all REALLY quick. Nice guys though.

We are confusing things a little here.  The Pit Stop system is about levelling the cars not the drivers.  The GPFun system is about levelling the drivers.

It all depends what we want to achieve.  If we want a system where the drivers are treated equally and are free to take any car they choose then Pit Stops or Tokens is best.  If we want a system where the fast drivers are handicapped to give the slower drivers a chance to win then chassis allocation, chassis restrictions based on championship position or the GPFun system is best.

Ideally there would be enough drivers to have numerous divisions of the same mod so that drivers of similar ability could be grouped together and a system aimed at levelling the cars is all that would be required to precipitate close racing (just like UKGPL in the early days when we had 6 divisions running the 67 cars).  Personally I prefer systems that level the cars; I don't want to win just because a better driver has to compete with "one hand tied behind their back".  I like to win on merit but if I can't I'm happy to try to compete with someone at the same or better level who isn't handicapped in any way.  I'd much rather be second to Rainier, Hendy, Dave Curtis or Bernie et al in a fair fight that beat Hristo or Evil et al because they had to take the BT14 when I was allowed a MS7.

Uhm...I don't agree very much about the cars or drivers or both leveling that you said, just because in any case the best driver won the championship, the most regular, the fastest, in other words the best one despite his handicap and pay attention that each race was long 90 mins with further 30 mins of qualify time having a 2 hours event each race. I never have seen an amateur driving a Lotus or an Eagle win more than only 1 or 2 races at max and absolutely not the whole GPFun championship and last but not least...Fun is to be intended as Fun to close compete with others, not sailing alone in the ocean like Sir Francis Chichester. Cars are not all equals and drivers are not too. Making divisions is only a further fragmentation of the community leading to have races with no more than 10 drivers when things go right. Actually the GPL community is slowly dying because there are simulators games modern with graphic more advanced that are a call for people.I think you can manage things encouraging drivers to have a motivation to persist in their skill enhancements but, securely, this will not happens if a driver finishes a race lapped 3 or 4 times.
If a driver is better skilled than you his state will not change also if he will use a slower car but...you could at least finish the race nearer him and...if he will make a mistake, you could also have your chance to win.

Edit:
To complete the scenery and just to have an idea of what happens in GPFun, we have 5 or 6 car classes and each class is composed by 3 cars (i.e. class A: Cooper; BRM; Honda. class B: BRM; Honda; Brabham. class C: Honda, Brabham, Ferrari. class D: Brabham, Ferrari, Eagle. class E: Ferrari, Eagle, Lotus. Each car in a class, has a proper percentage of success of being chosen). In each car class there is a car considered a bonus(faster low percentage of success of being chosen), a normal and a malus(slower with high percentage of success of being chosen) car. When the reference time has been decided, each driver will choose a car class and a program randomly will assign him a car taken from a list of  the 3 that compose this class. The driver begins his test with the car assigned and if he is far from the reference time, he CAN request to try another car extraction from a faster class or, if he is below the reference time, he HAVE to request to choose another car from a slower car class. In any case a driver can choose the car class not directly the car because each car is randomly assigned. If a driver is faster than the reference time, also with the slowest car, the reference time is established by his lap time subtracting a few tenths of a second. The last thing is, we have a Low reference lap time and a High reference lap time (usually 1.0 or 1.5 secs above) thus a car assignment is considered good when the best combined lap time of a driver is in this range of lap times.
Like has already happened, someone has tried to cheat adding considerably fuel to the qualify car and keeping the reference lap time high enough to avoid the other guys would have used faster cars. In race, coming low on fuel, such a car have got advantages, having lap times in race faster than in qualify. Those people were banned from the championship.

I hope I was clear enough.

That won't work here, because not everyone practices or not everyone enters the server at the start of practice, nor are times in Qualifying always actual flying laps on low fuel. Some people want to just turn up and drive, some only practice with race fuel load and so on.

And some of us try race load and quick laps and find that the mistakes manage to make them both the same ;)

I agree with Phil though. If I win I want it to be because I did the best job. Amazingly I have actually won one scratch race and that felt awesome. If I had won because the other guy had to start from the pit lane it wouldn't have felt so good.

Yes you were, thank you for taking the time to explain.  Obviously a lot of time and effort has gone into organizing the GPFun races and I'm sure it resulted in some very exciting battles.  I wasn't trying to criticize the GPFun system I was only trying to point out that it differs from the system Clive is using and in what it is trying to achieve. 

If you take out the random element, then the nearest system we have to the GPFun system would be chassis allocation.  When doing chassis allocation, the moderators put in a lot of effort into trying to place drivers in cars that will result in evenly matched races.  They use their judgment and knowledge of the driver's abilities in order to do that.  I suggest the GPFun approach does the same thing but with a methodology rather than relying on the moderator's assessment of driver ability.

So in UKGPL terms it is like saying do we want to use Pit Stops or Chassis Allocation for the GTs.  Which system produces the better races is another question ;).