INFO ON THE WEATHER - Not essential reading but, you may be interested.
I have put the server on changeable weather with practise session 1 having some rain and practise session 2 and qauily 1 being dry with 18 degrees ambient temp.
I created the weather file using the same weather generator that will be used for the race. It makes all the sessions have the same weather so I did change the weather for practise 2 and qualy 1 by hand so that we could have a bit of fully dry practise as well as changeable conditions. During Sundays race all sessions will have the exact same weather so we know what is coming up in the fist 20 mins or so.
The weather files was created using wunderground.com as a guide. There is a link above.
If you scroll down the page a bit to the blue bar that says 'Forecast', in the forecast box at the bottom it says 'View detailed hourly forecast', click on that to open up the detailed weather view. This is the page from which I will be obtaining the weather info.
In order to create the weather file currently in use, I looked at the temps from 2pm to 4pm today. 18 degrees to 16 degrees. I looked at the current conditions (this bit was taken from the first page actually) to set the start conditions and then looked at the forecast conditions for the next few hours. It said at the time current conditions dry and sunny with 30% chance of rain and 0.51mm precipitation (light rain).
I set the weather generator to 100% chance of rain to make sure we had some for testing but, if we had these conditions on Sunday I would put 30% chance of rain.
So, temps were taken from earlier in the day when it was actually 2pm at Le Mans but start conditions and chance of rain and expected rain level were taken at the time that the weather system was run. This is how I will be doing it on race day.
The forecast that the weather system gives is not 100% accurate (on purpose), the forecast breaks the session down into 3 parts, early, mid and late race conditions. Each session forecast is less exact than the last so late session forecast will be more inexact than early session forecast.
The forecast that the weather gen system made for the file currently in use on the server is as follows:
Weather: Dry and sunny
On line: Dry
Off line: Dry
Ambient: 18.00
Track: 21.15
Early Conditions: Dry
Mid Race Conditions: Light rain
Late Race Conditions: Dry
I will give this forecast on race day shortly before the race starts. I hope to get this forecast info on the server by 7.30pm Sunday.