SimRacing.org.uk

Season 32 Historic Trophy – Round 4 - Spa-Francorchamps

The fourth race in the Historic series takes us to Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium.  Designed in 1920 the original triangle-shaped course used public roads between the Belgian towns of Francorchamps, Malmedy, and Stavelot. The track was intended to have hosted its inaugural race in August 1921, however the first car race was held at the circuit in 1922. Spa was the fastest road circuit in Europe at the time, and it had a nasty reputation for being dangerous and very fast- it was a circuit known to be one for the brave, and most drivers were frightened of it. The old Spa circuit was unique in that speeds were consistently high with hardly any let-up at all for 3–4 minutes. This made it an extraordinarily difficult mental challenge (& ridiculously easy to crash).
 

Race List	=	IGOR
Server	=	UKGPL_4
IP Address	=	2.24.206.249
Race date	=	05-11-2017
GPL mod	=	66F1
60fps patch used	=	60fpsV2newmod
Track	=	Spa67 (http://srmz.net/index.php?s=448c71de31d5af327ee46f7dfc1fde15&showtopic=10443)
Qualification	=	20:45  UK time -> 45min
Race	=	race starts at ~21:30 UK time
Race length	=	~50 min -> 13 laps
Damage Model	=	PRO
Replay	=	here (ftp://ftp.ukgpl9.co.uk:32122/Season32/Historics)

Password: see above (#post_event_password)

Driver lists and divisional rules can be found on the championship standings page (https://www.simracing.org.uk/smf/index.php?action=LM2R&group=618&theme=6)

Only reported incidents will be moderated, there is no Red Zone.

Handicapping and chassis allocation.
This season the Historics will be using a token system which allows drivers to purchase any chassis of their choice, 2 litre or 3 litre, for a given number of tokens as published on the championship standings page (https://www.simracing.org.uk/smf/index.php?action=LM2R&group=618&theme=6). Drivers classed as Amateurs will be allocated an additional 10 tokens.  The token allocation will not be managed in SRou this season so (unlike the 67F1 Works and 67F1 Privateer divisions) the tokens available to each driver will not appear in the championship table (when the mouse pointer is hovered over the driver's total).  Rather, the available tokens will be published in the race announcement.  See below.

Available Tokens:
Note: These are the tokens available to each driver before the 10 tokens are added for making the race start.

Driver	Tokens	Status
AnGex	4	Pro
Arf Arf Arf	10	Pro
Billy Nobrakes	21	Am
DLogan	14	Pro
Doni Yourth	25	Pro
EvilClive	16	Pro
francesco	19	Am
FullMetalGasket	16	Pro
MagicArsouille	3	Pro
Phil Thornton	23	Am
Rainier	21	Am
bagrupp	14	Am
fpolicardi	14	Am
Gareth	26	Am
JonnyO	20	Am
Robert Fleurke	10	Pro
Ronniepeterson	31	Pro
Lalethor	9	Pro
Cookie	7	Pro
Syd Drake	20	Pro
Geoff65	20	Am
Kai J.Daum	20	Am

Hoping to take part in this race with my new PC.

 The last 48hrs have been a steep learning curve about the pitfalls of Win 10 and older software  :-\. 

The biggest hurdle was getting my G25 operational again, Win 10 did not want to allow the Profiler to initialise. But some deep digging on the web unearthed a carefully hidden piece of software from Logitech that removed all the old drivers, and provided an updated version that works.

I am now able to run GPL with everything maxed out and hopefully no FPS drops on grids where 10 FPS was the norm for most starts  :(

GPL did lock up and crash windows on one occasion and in the process it deleted my driver profile from GEM??? It still exists in the GPL Folder but no longer exists in GEM, despite restarting GEM and the PC??  Anyone got any smart ideas???

Look into your gem.ini in your Documents\GEM+ folder.

Made 14th to 3rd in 3 1/3 laps, then binned it into the shrubbery. :doh:

note: this report may as well have been copied from the many times I've done the exact same dang thing. I love Spa, but results don't show it. :P

Really enjoyed lap 1 then on lap 2 got very bad frame rate at Stavelot and I couldn't control the car and crashed out.  Very disappointing.  I always get bad frame rate when chat messages appear.  I have in-car chat turned off but if someone retires there is always a message that says someone has disconnected.  I can't stop these messages appearing but neither can I find a way of stopping them dropping my frame rate to 10 and below which makes the car too difficult to control.  Does anybody else have similar problems?

Can't contribute much Phil but in an early '55 race at Spa I crashed out early and then watched the rest of the race.  The screen stutters were diabolical, whilst I was watching, until I realised that I still had the chat window open.  When I closed it, all was back to normal.  My pc is only just able to cope with Spa67 at 60fps and the frame rate often dips to around the thirty mark.

I've loaded the chassis the drivers used into the token calculator spreadsheet.  For the next race the available tokens will be as declared in the table below (the table will also appear in the next race announcement).  The calculated values are automated but selecting the cars is a manual process so please check your tokens to make sure I haven't made a silly error.  There was no token overspend for this round so no one is disqualified.

Available Tokens:
Note: These are the tokens available to each driver before the 10 tokens are added for making the race start.

Driver	Tokens	Status
AnGex	2	Pro
Arf Arf Arf	10	Pro
Billy Nobrakes	15	Am
DLogan	8	Pro
Doni Yourth	19	Pro
EvilClive	17	Pro
francesco	13	Am
FullMetalGasket	17	Pro
MagicArsouille	3	Pro
Phil Thornton	17	Am
Rainier	15	Am
bagrupp	6	Am
fpolicardi	12	Am
Gareth	26	Am
JonnyO	20	Am
Robert Fleurke	10	Pro
Ronniepeterson	35	Pro
Lalethor	3	Pro
Cookie	1	Pro
Syd Drake	20	Pro
Geoff65	20	Am
Kai J.Daum	20	Am

Same for me but from the start,arrived at nasta i have faced the curve in the usual way but the car have had a strange behaviour.End of the race.

I solved chat problem with desable message in GPL_shift.ini, no total desable (maybe is not possible) but now the red written is very little and totally ininfluence on fps

For FPS problem in race I used the light version of Spa67 (or maybe server version I don't remember), and this is very good for old system like mine, now only a little fall at La Source and start/stop line when other cars are closer

I have a new system with GeForce GTX 960 but when there are a lot of cars seem that the FPS drop to lower value than 60.
I don't know if is only online,i must test a race with the AI.

Tired and unconcentrated i went to wide in Blanchimont. Wheel lost.
So I hope for better luck with 55mod on tuesday, my last race until Christmas.

Flyin to a New Zealand Trip until 22th December on Saturday.

My first race with a new mega PC and after that I might be booking a ticket to go with Bagrupp!!!

4.2Ghz, 16Gb Ram, Nvidia 1060 8Gb video card, SSD drive and 3 TB HDD ....and bl**dy Win 10!!!

I was loving the rock solid 60FPS even on the grid, where I was happy to start at the back so that I had all the cars in view to test the system...awesome  ;D

All the graphic content turned up to max and GPL never looked so good   ;D ;D ;D

Still had some issues with my G25 which was OK when I was applying steering input , but it would vibrate like a road drill in the straight ahead position..very tiring  :-\ :-\

All was looking great until the game locked.....and Windows crashed to BSOD with a message    "DPC Watchdog Violation" !!!!  requiring a computer restart.

A little digging on the interweb this morning reveals that this is a well known bug in Win 10, usually associated with upgrades. But mine is a new machine with a virgin install of Win 10 and only a couple of days out of the box. From what I have read so far, no-one knows what causes these crashes for sure and Microsoft are hiding their heads up their a**!!

It might be because GPL runs a lot of activity through the CPU and windows recognises this as a fault situation?? But as a lot of you guys are also running Win 10 successfully I doubt that is the cause. As yet I have avoided adding any AV, the only connection to the internet is for Igor ATM ( this post is from my laptop ) as I wanted GPL running smoothly before I clogged things up with AV and updates.
Another possible cause is the G25 as it is the nly external device that I have added to the new rig. There were some issues in getting it to function and I wonder if there is a software conflict??
Has anyone here got any idea/sexperience on this??

You're welcome...NZL might even have a better graphic than gpl on your new machine :D

Clive do you have Pro or Home Win10 version?
I have disabled Windows Update and Transferring in Background services, Windows Defender and Firewall just to keep things quiet, but there are other activities that start in background when they want. I think GPL isn't recognised as a running application by Win10 so it doesn't take it in account when it has some scheduled works to do during no busy time.
I noted that red messages give a little noise too, I'll try Alex solution.
Last night I had a Mobil Economy Run with my Cooper trying to focus to stay on track and it paid, I knew that with all those Fezza I had no chance on the straight, even Ronnie with his 6 cylinder gave me a race till he run wide, I thought that he had a 312 and I was asking myself why he was so cautious to not pass me on the straights, then I watched replay... ;D
Ciao
Ciao

If I ever announce that I am considering Windows 10 will someone please shoot me!

Clive L. you cannot install W7 on a recent PC system, as MS will not give you without tricks any updates for newest hardware pc's  ::)

Clive G. even a fresh installed OS is not up to date! You must make some online updates to get the last ones!
MS does not make new install files every week ;)

have a look here for your BSOD: https://usefulpcguide.com/17082/dpc-watchdog-violation/

With Patagaonia, NZ is one of the place that attract me.Do you go from south to north or only in one place?

Far too many 312's for me so I went for a 246. Unfortunately I got distracted in the real world and when I looked back I was upside down and out. Shame as it was good fun up to that point. Grats on the podium Fulvio.
 

This is my feeling too!
I love the '67 Spa circuit, but I think I have a sub-50% finishing rate here in any class.

I have a better crash/finish ratio at Targa! :laugh:

No  race tomorrow?I don't see the Spa with the 55.

I'm using GPLshift v0.79

Can't see how to disable chat but have found a font size setting.  So I set font to zero i.e.  Auto_Set_GPL_Font_Size = 0

Now font size is very small so hopefully problem is fixed.  Won't know until I start the 55 race at Spa tomorrow.

Could very well be talking out my arse here, but I recall hearing that it was GPL's problem rendering the specific font that was the issue (my system rightly chugs if the chat window is open), and there was something about forcing a different font into there that didn't cause as many problems. But that's going back to RaceSimCentral days... might be worth trolling SMRZ back issues if someone has time/inclination.

Yes, that is  :thumbup1:
From Axel's post on SRMZ http://srmz.net/index.php?showtopic=11708&st=15#entry123535 (http://srmz.net/index.php?showtopic=11708&st=15#entry123535)
After this no more problems for me, I use OpenGL not sure if this influence

South Island should be more attractive with landscapes. Landing in Christchurch and working our way slowly to North Island, where departure is at Auckland.
I'm startin to get really excited !