When I first saw this track a month or so ago, I thought, "This is going to be a slaughterhouse." Still, the more I practiced, the more I began to like the place. I never did get a good setup, and I'm pretty sure I never figured out the optimum line around the town either, but it wasn't nearly as much of a bloodbath as I'd originally feared. I've never been on a track that ever made me feel as if I were going to be sick, but the sheer busyness of Ingliston --- how you get "Inglestone" out of that escapes me, and I'm a native speaker of English (if you believe that Americans actually speak English) --- at one point had me feeling that I needed to regroup my thoughts into a more positive direction. Happily, that uneasiness quickly passed.

I don't have many clear memories of the race, possibly because I couldn't think more than 50 yards ahead and practically no yards behind, but I do recall sequential duels with Francesco and then David for what seemed like half the race. Toward the end David began to drop back and give me some well-earned rest. I attributed that to car damage he might have sustained. I never did figure out a way to put Francesco away when I was ahead of him, and when I made an error and he got by me, I couldn't figure out how to reel him back in. Now that I think of it, that fairly well seems to describe my 25 years with GPL.  

In qualifying something was clearly wrong with my Cooper setup. I couldn't get below 1:39. I switched to the race setup and improved a couple of seconds but was still more than a second off my PB. I cannot explain it. I sat 10th on the grid when I'd expected maybe fifth.

For about five laps in the race I was sandwiched between Billy's and Albert's Ferraris. I decided to make Albert (and Paul behind him) work for their money. On the eighth lap the motor went to heaven. I'd not blown a single one in maybe 300 laps of practice. I cannot explain that either. With two DNFs now and four races to go, I think I'm going to have to be a little more careful. That needs no explanation.

I had this exact discussion when I got back into GPL in 2016 and joined an oAo team with Col Bentley as my team leader. I told him I'd read in one of the early GPL manuals that tweaking setups at best could make you a second or two faster than the default setup that Papyrus gives you on the original tracks. He didn't believe me, but he tried it. It's true. Setups don't make you fast, but they can make you faster if you're already fast. You get to be fast by coming out of corners better than the other guy. I'm afraid, like death and taxes, that's a fundamental law of nature. In the last oAo race at BA55N2 my usual exits from the last corner onto the S/F straight hit 128 mph. You were coming out consistently at 130 mph. That's why you lapped me, not because of ramp angles or FBB settings. As an aside, in their race at the same track a week earlier, Fleurke and Albrecht were doing 138 at that exact point (yeah, in Ferraris, not Coopers, but the point remains).

I've never heard of Asano. I used Schultze's setups from 2017 to last year, then began using knockoffs from Rob Fleurke because I couldn't get the tires heated sufficiently. Now I'm in a sort of no-man's land, ever trying to get at least to FBB = 50 with at least 60/45 ramp angles and always chickening out ten minutes before the race begins.

Are Asano's setups on the web somewhere? My initial Googling produced nothing.

Move his FBB from 49% to 53%, change his ramp angles from 30/85 (or whatever insane setting he's using) to something more moderate, and make sure his toe in/toe out aren't in the sixth standard deviation. You'll be OK.

If this league is going to throw away checkpoint limits that are automatically set by the computer to penalize drivers who cut corners at three specified locations, it has an obligation to replace it with an equally specific rule with equally specific penalties. The league didn't do that. It does, I agree, prohibit cutting corners by requiring drivers to keep two wheels on the track at all times, but it doesn't have any coherent, definitive method of penalizing drivers who violate that rule. As far as I can understand, the penalties could range from 1-2 seconds/lap, ten times that, placement loss of varying degrees in the standings, or possibly something worse. Or you could get a caution, a warning, or nothing at all. The section on riding rails and cutting corners buried somewhere on the league's website tries to give some representative examples, but any attempt to implement those whimsical definitions will be laughably subjective. It is nothing but a pile of words that is guaranteed to produce whatever outcome is desired. Call that what you may, but don't call it law.


That may look simple to Clive, but it doesn't to me. Sure, that's what it says in each race announcement: "Only reported incidents will be moderated." What that used to mean is that if another driver does something to you that you don't like, complain. But I don't know what the guys who are beating me are doing at those restricted corners. When did it become my responsibility to go through a replay and make determinations about the way some other guy is driving? Why isn't that the league's job, especially since it discarded the very method that would have made such a labor-intensive, time-consuming chore unnecessary?

But I did it anyway, and I reported what I saw in the replay in my post-race comments. Still, if I'm not going to report that a driver rear-ended me and put me at the back of the back, I'm sure as hell not going to go around looking for ways to rat out the same guys I'll be competing against in two weeks. That's the moderators' job, not mine, and I don't blame them one bit for not wanting to do it, those righteous vows of prosecuting repeat offenders notwithstanding.

The "Invalid lap" notations resulted from my exiting the server and returning three times.

You don't seriously think this is about my hope to win a race, do you? I didn't have any offs (having at least two wheels on the track at the three checkpoint corners), but both Dave and Roger beat the steaming crap out of me and they didn't have any offs either. No, this is about what happens now. We had a track file that provided for automatic penalties for course-cutting. Those penalties were discarded. We've been told that "repeat offenders" would be prosecuted. Do you know what that means? I don't.

For example, you think you had one off; I counted six. Who gets to look at 25 drivers in two races going through three checkpoint corners 19 times? Not me. What constitutes a "repeat" anyway? Two offs? Eight? A dozen? Even if you can define a repeat offender, what do you do with him? Tell him not to do it again? Penalize him? How? Two seconds/lap/infraction? Ten times that? Reduction in finishing position? DQ? League banishment?

Well, maybe no one will file a protest. I didn't. Did you? So this could all just vanish until the next time we have a track with defined track limits. I'm looking forward to that one. I bet you are too.

The advantage to the course-cutting driver of 1-2 seconds/lap is not my calculation. Cookie made that claim in a post at the bottom of the first page of this thread: "IMO the key point here is the chicane where you can hardly see the limits, but if you cut it you make easy an 1-2 sec advantage [Roll Eyes]." I merely deferred to his opinion because he's forgotten more about this sim than I'll ever know.

Anyway, does it matter if the advantage --- and there clearly is some advantage to the course-cutter --- is but one-millionth of a second/lap? The designer of this track put a trigger in the track file that would have had you visiting the pit six times and waiting for your pit board to release you. Those stop and go penalties would have added at least 20 seconds to each lap that you pitted. But wiser heads than mine concluded that was a rule we could forget in this race because shut up. I didn't much care for this decision, since I thought it would bring us right to the point where we are today, but I dutifully shut up.

OK, we were told that "repeat offenders will be prosecuted." Now, David, have you been a good boy or are you a repeat offender with six offs in 19 laps? I don't know. We have a pretty clear rule --- two wheels on the track through the three track limit spots --- but not a very clear idea of what it might take to be considered a violator of the rule. I guess we'll find out soon enough, huh? 

I've looked at the replays of the guys who beat me tonight. Of them only Dave and Roger, as did I, kept two wheels on the track on every lap at the three sections denominated as track limits. David cut the course six times, Matt managed to stay within the limits on three laps, and Eric cut the course on every lap except one. If I am not mistaken, cutting the course at the chicane gives a driver an advantage of one or two seconds per lap. If we were abiding by the guidelines established by the track designer, there would have been penalties exacted for course cutting ---  stop and waits amounting to 20 seconds or so per lap per infraction --- but here the administrators, in their infinite wisdom, decided against that. The view, as best as I can understand it, is that we don't really know where the track limits are. We need bales or posts or something to tell us. That argument has not comforted me much, to be honest. I figured how to get around those corners somehow without such help.

I've never filed a protest in this or any other online racing league. This is a hobby for me, something to while away my otherwise empty hours. I'm just disappointed that I spend a lot of time trying to do things right when it turns out that doing things right really doesn't matter.

When you show up in qualifying and turn in a PB by nearly one second, you'd like some sort of modest reward, wouldn't you? I would, and after doing a 2:19.5 on the fifth lap, I retired to play around for the next 30 minutes or so. I had a solid second place. I knew I would wind up third when Matt showed up with a 2:17 to justify my next scheduled visit to the psychiatrist. I pay him $300/hour to tell me why I spend my life playing GPL because my mother thought she was married to Napoleon or something worse.

But enough of that. My solid second on the grid soon turned into a solid sixth. OK, Pepe, go with the flow. This isn't a car-breaker track like Zeltweg, and they allow not only unlimited, unpenalized resets but training wheels and outriggers, but someone's got to go home early, right? So just sit tight and gain a couple of places with a snappy start when the green flag drops. That was the plan.

I lost at least three places with that worthless flag and spent the next forty-seven minutes trying to recover what I'd lost in the first five seconds. It ended with an epic battle with Paul that lasted maybe one or two weeks. I finally overcame him but the damage to my heart and nerves will have me in the offices of my cardiologist and neurologist at least for the next two months.  But it was worth it, right, to start sixth and finish sixth? Oh, Lord, please say "yes."

It seems that if the checkpoints are removed (or semicoloned out), the [80] turns into a regular [64]. Sigh. 

I'm not sure that's true. In the GPLRA lap reports, [64] designates an off-course lap; [80] is a cut corner. That seems to me to be pretty easy to detect.

We already allow unlimited, unpenalized SHFT-Rs in this league and now we're not going to enforce track limits at three places here? Say it's not so . . .

Online practice during the week told me that I'd be two or three seconds slower than the fast guys, so I didn't spend a lot of time trying to improve my speed. Zeltweg is a notoriously difficult track, despite having few turns, and in such cases I have but one principle: Stay between the ditches and let attrition do its magical work.

In qualifying I had a PB that put me eighth --- 8th, I say, with a PB --- on the grid. I knew this was going to be difficult, but I didn't think it would be harder than trigonometry. I made things even more difficult for myself with an unbelievably terrible start, losing two places before I'd even reached the S/F line. Still by the start of L4 I'd managed to creep up to 6th. Fabio, in front of me, went wide at Hella, hit the fence, and spun back on the track. I just nicked him unavoidably and spun, and also hit Walter behind me and putting him out of the race. The damage with the contact and smacking the fence didn't seem to have done anything to the Brabham. I continued, now in 5th.

On L7 Ruy spun exiting Hella. I overtook him, followed by Billy. And there we remained, Billy and I, in a delicate courtship that lasted until the back straight on L23 when we caught up to Bernie at the back of the pack. I got by easily, but Billy and Dave, immediately behind me, somehow switched positions. I never even realized that Dave had overtaken Billy in the process of overtaking Bernie, but it really didn't matter. I'd had Billy climbing up my tail pipe for what seemed like a week. The only thing Dave did differently was get even closer to my rear end.

With Eric's retirement on the last lap, leading the race with only four turns to go, I slunk into third and still managed to hold Dave off by less than half a second. I'd gained five places and hadn't overtaken a single car in a contested pass. Remember what I said about attrition? Yeah, it really is magic.

I've had no problems, but I'd never seen this version of Zeltweg before. Is this supposed to be more accurate for the era than zelt71?