First up thanks to all for joining in last night - I was worried that people would see a speed/power circuit and not bother because we were in slow, not-so-powerful cars.
Obviously the GPL guys should recognise that as a recipe for an excellent race ('55/'65 mod on Monza 10k is utterly crazy fun
) - but you AC lot haven't been brought up to appreciate the finer things in racing
Hopefully I've put you all straight now - as a quick look through the replay's showed an awful lot of racing/fighting going on up and down the field
One to forget for me, cant believe I was so far off the pace. I started with default setup, then took off all wing and fettled the gear ratios but people were still driving round me on the straights. couldn't get below 1:31 all night
As already mentioned - the Estonia 21 is dog slow. Nearly 2 seconds off the pace here in my hands. As it's unable to get off the line with any real speed and can't compete I'm going to remove it from the options for the season unless I can find an earlier version that isn't so slow (I'm sure I have a version from about a year back that is more on a par with the rest of the field - if it is then that might be substituted instead - watch the season announcement post for details as and when I've had time to test it).
My own race went better than I expected, I found in practice that the Estonia 20 suffers a bit on very high speed tracks - it took me 15 laps or so to get down to a 1:25.7. And probably the best part of another hour and quite an extreme setup to get down to a .5!
Qualifying on 4th was therefore great news apart from the small problem that I'd had to lengthen 1st enough to cope with the 2 really tight hairpins - this resulted in my dropping from 4th on the grid back to about 8th or 9th while everyone else charged off in a cloud of tire smoke
From there I got to see, and better yet, avoid, some fairly innocent looking racing incidents and was almost in the middle of the pack by the 1st entry to the back straight.
From there it was a long fight up through the ranks until I was back in 4th and not too far behind Fabri. This is where I expected to finish - the AE2 and MTX1-06 are both faster cars and Fabri had already proved himself faster in both practice and qualifying. Luckily the draft is enough that I was able to slowly pull him in and then get a run on him (my fastest lap by 0.3 of a second!). as 2 of the 1-06's had an off in front that elevated me into an undeserved but welcome 2nd place.
Race 2 was just amazing to be honest - everything I love about the '65 mod in GPL combined with VR, better graphics, and better net-code. I forget how many times I ended up threading the needle through the Esses while alongside another car - glancing over my shoulder constantly to watch the gap and judge where I can safely place my car. Utterly exhilarating
And the satisfaction of playing the dummy hand to set up a pass on one of the RAF's onto the back straight some 2 corners in advance (I'm not sure I could do that on a monitor) was immensely grin inducing!
I forget what exactly happened to place me 2nd - but I do remember a long running fight with Lorenzo up until I properly stitched him up when we caught a backmarker
Sorry mate, but I'd expect no less if situations were reversed there!
Adam:
In the options menu for AC you'll find a section that deals with replays. Make sure you set it to autosave 2 or 3 races as a minimum to guarantee that it captures double headers. Sometimes it misses the 2nd race regardless of your settings, hence why I use 3 races.
If I have space to upload it then I'll put my copy up for you to download
