SimRacing.org.uk

Goran informs me he can't run a test race of his own on Tuesday, so I'd like to take this oportunity to run a test race at Sodeguara Forest Raceway. As the more curuios amongst you will have noticed this is actually a Beta so I want to be very certain before the season starts and the 65 circus reaches it.
Don't let that put you off though as it's a wonderfull circuit both Graphically and from a driving point of view  8)

Details then:

Date: 21st Sept
Time: 21:00hrs UK time.
Circuit: Sodeguara Forest Raceway (Download here (http://page.freett.com/polarblue21b/index.html), bottom of the page. Click on the program cover to download)
Mod: 65 F1
Chassis: Free choice

****PASSWORD HAS BEEN ADDED TO CHECK I'M DOING IT RIGHT!****
Password will apear in the normal place above, and for any randoms who join it's 'spam'. Will also display this in the race comments so no-one misses out  :)

Sodeguara Forest raceway was opened in 2008 and is a purpose built facility near Forest City in the Chiba Prefecture approximatly 48Km (30 miles) South East of the Center of Tokyo.
The full circuit is 2.4km (1.5 miles) long and consists of 14 corners with very slight altitude changes.
Since opening the course has been host to numerous forms of car and motorcycle racing ranging from Classic meetings to GT's and superbikes.


Hope to see you there!

whats with the pop ups aking for chinee speak d/l ?

Having just spent the best part of a week recovering from a nasty trojan attack I am somewhat  reluctant to donwload  :-\

why don't you run a ad blocker or popup blocker on your browser ?

for firefox try adblocker plus https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865/

john

I didn't get them Bernie so didn't know they were there - just ignore/close them. The track is fine and passed spyware/virus checking when I downloaded it  :)
It really is a nice circuit so I wouldn't want you to miss out  8)

Here's a teaser to help tempt the undecided  ;)
It's only me driving I'm afraid - so nothing special - but you have a couple of fairly clean laps to show the circuit and hopefully alleviate any 'it's a Beta so will look ugly' fears  ;D
Also shows what I think are more-or-less the right lines (lap 2 more than lap1, Still won't be bang on yet as I havn't done enough laps!)

Youtube linky (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrH2H_Htl88)
(hopefully the quality will improve with some time as it's shocking at the mo!

I've managed to scramble a few laps in  1m14 's bracket in the Lotus (AI doing 1.05 's ? ) so good to see your times are closer to mine , but with a 2 secs gap says i'm still a long way off the mark on such a short track  :-\

The AI are rediculous here, they take some very odd lines I found but have yet to race against one on it's own hotlap to see what they're doing.
Bare in mind though that the AI are always driving under the influence of full draft though so will often out qualify you. (I've never been done to this degree on a short circuit before though! even when in the BT7!)

Your laptimes will improve once you manage to work some drifting in - The problem with that is that hotlap style drifting (as I do in the vid) will cook your rear tyres in the space of 2 laps.
I'd argue that a slower pace may actually prove faster in a full race!  :ninja:

I've never had tire temperature problems in the 65 mod, you think this would be different?

sqweezed a low 1m 11's out of  it for one lucky lap so perhaps the AI times arent that faw away when you fast boys get to grips with the track .

must say it has a nice flow to it once learned , I cant help cursing the 2 slow hairpins which make it more of a "go cart" track .

Does concentrate the mind though  :o

I don't normally have 'real' heat issues in the 65's. certainly not in the BT7 but those two hairpins and the long 3rd gear left hander absolutely muller the rear tyres when you're going for it :D

I really like the 1st hairpin, it's not in my vid but I managed a proper drift entry to it while recording.
Entered the first right hand kink in 4th after a quick spot of braking and then slowed the rest of the way to 2nd without touching anything but the thottle  ;D
Tyres got so hot I crashed instantly in the nex turn  :D

Just drawing your attention to the fact this race will have a password (have edited the first post above).
This is purely for my own testing purposes so feel free to pass it on to anyone who's interested in joining us :)

Password will be 'spam'  :whistling:

I feel a song coming on  ;D

Did a few laps, I really like the track. Here's my PB lap so far, was a bit rough and going out of line in places, with sever corrections, but I still need to figure out some things about the track.

Used a Goodwood setup with modifications to tire camber to get more even tire temperatures plus made the gears shorter. More info in the video description.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk6Nw1Jqcq4 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk6Nw1Jqcq4)

Must admit I'm considering a 5 speed approach too - H-shifter might allow faster changes than buttons but that's still a LOT of changes  ;D

Band practice has been cancelled due to a sick singer, 30 minutes to the race, not even looked at this track but I do need some Coopertime so wave to me when you pass  ;)

With pleasure. ;)

its a twisty evil bugger...  2nd gear the whole way round :E

Doh! Screen freeze While chasing Hristo  :(

Was really enjoying that.
Can everyone report on wether they had any techinal issues please. Need to know if my incident was due to the track or not  :)

i had a freeze in practice, approaching the final hairpin.. otherwise no issues :)

No server problems for me, it was just my driving but the Coop is improving

not top of my list of favourite tracks! Server was ok, but did get a full red bar at one stage in the race for a few seconds.

Screen freeze occured about 5 minutes before the end of practice going around the second corner.

Fun track, good when you get the lap right but frustrating when you can't work out how to go quicker.

After the T1 fiasco (not my fault for a change, I kept a wide berth and was collected by an avoiding-another-car-Hristo), I kept a watching brief and worked my way back into the track groove. PB of a 1:08 (finally!) came, then people started falling off, so moved up the order! Bernie did his level best to keep third but had that snatched from him, so the poor sod finished 5th in a gallant effort. I ended up 2nd chasing Hristo until a tap with the outside wall on the penultimate lap put paid to that one.

Fun race, enjoyable.

Bit of a disaster for my debut with Black Night Racing. For season 18-19, the problem was my internet connection, but now for season 20, my main bugbear is my laptop! That ruddy Intel speedstep option, which I can disable within the bios but the only other option is a constantly low clock rate.

Despite turning off the function in GEM, I experienced numerous slowdowns during my short track time, with the S bar constantly going haywire on screen. I'm going to have to find a solution pretty quickly if I am to race at the start of this season. Maybe I could shift my old desktop from home, but for now, I'll see if I can dig up any other solutions. Hope the rest of you had a great race  :).

I think I was to blame for the T1 issues, I am racing with onboard graphics at the moment due a faulty cooling fan.  When entering T1 with other cars the frame rate slowed, I bounced off the inside wall and into the path of others.  I also hit bernie a couple of times while trying to pass, sorry Bernie  :oops:, these incidents were my fault and not technical issues.  I'll wait to get my proper graphics card back before racing online again.

Cheers,

Bob.

I had a very bad start for some reason and was passed by Jethro and Tim on the run to T1. Bob was also on his way to pass me on the inside, but as he explained there was contact and that spun me into Jethro's path. A few other cars got involved while Tim took advantage and set off into the lead.

I managed to pass a few cars immediately as they were recovering, but it soon became evident that my race setup wasn't so good - oversteer every time I touch the throttle and inability to drift smoothly as a result. This led to a couple of half-spins plus one full spin, so I thought the chance of winning was gone by then.

Still pushed as much as I could, trying to adapt to the car and that took a couple of laps to get used to. Caught up with Fulvio and Bernie who were having a dice at the first hairpin - they had a bit of a slow exit and I went for the inside, but Fulvio's car swerved suddenly towards the inside when I was already there and he got bumped off the road.

Bernie proved much harder to catch and pass than I expected - great driving, Bernie. He had a moment a lap later though and so I managed to get through on the s/f straight. That moved me up to 2nd, but Tim was some 10 seconds up ahead.

With another mistake on my behalf, the gap grew to 11 seconds with just 18-19 laps to go, so I thought it would be impossible to catch him anymore. For some reason the gap dropped down by 3 seconds 2 laps later - either backmarkers or Tim's own mistakes, I thought.

As the fuel load went down I could manage some decent laps and the gap shrunk to 5 seconds, with Tim now in view in the distance. Some more backmarkers and I closed up within 2 seconds a few laps later. Just when the battle was about to begin, Tim had a spin on the exit of T1 and I waited for him to recover, because it's a fun race and stuff.

Sadly he had a screen freeze a lap later, so now I had Jethro over 30 seconds behind. I slowed a lot for the next 3-4 laps and was then chased by Jethro for the reminder of the race.

Nice track for racing, but really tricky to get a lap right, especially with more fuel in race trim. I would definitely like driving on it again though. It might be great in the other mods as well.

-=Hristo=-

Think I discovered the source of my screen freeze - when I turned off after the race I discovered Windows had downloaded an update in the background.
9 times out of 10 that'll crash whatever I have running  :cursing

Think I may schedule the pc to only update on wednesdays as I don't tend to do anything then!

The dreaded Windows Update... and NO, there's BREASTS on Wednesdays!!!

some of us have access to breasts everyday   :o

my race was very interesting, mostly spent watching my mirrors and trying not to make others crash.  Somehow i got nerfed off at the first hairpin by an unseen car behind, otherwise no drama except for 3 own-fault spins caused through pushing too hard...
gotta say, i LOVE that track, its sooo Gran Turismo ! lets do it again sometime :)

Yes, but I can't race on wednesdays - Something to do with some other breasts......

I got the sort of start you dream about , every one seemed to do there best to let me by , but my swiftly inherited P2 didn't last that long  before I could hear the sound of a hard charging Hristo catching up fast .

My Lotus was doing fine on the twisty bits ,  It wasn't too good on the straights  ::) the one that mattered most was the start finish straight I just couldnt get this part right no matter how hard I tried and I could see H was a little ( actually a whole lot ) faster than me , so I decided to let him pass me so I could give the straight bits my full concentration .

All went well for a while, but then the straight bits seemed to somehow get shorter and shorter , until they weren't straights any more,  they had all become corners.  I couldnt believe it,  they definately were not the same straights I started the race with , where had they gone ?  I decided to go looking for the missing straights , searched here , searched there , everywhere !

Eventually I ran out of time and I never did find them  :-\

The End  ;)




 

Results up  :angel:
Well done the finishers  :thumbup1:

I look forward to the official race where I shall have updates disabled and can actually finish  :hammer:

What official race?

This is down for the Amateurs (https://www.simracing.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=8350.0) along with Mr Muttrams other dastardly (sorry delectable) choices  ;)

OH great! Compensation for running Monza.  ::)