Argo has been at my house. He’s home now, not sure if he’ll join tonight.
Tonight is going to be interesting for me. We are rolling a new product to production tonight at 8 and our Ops team just asked me to assist. So, I’m going to be on and attempt to race but may end up retiring due to work needing my concentration. Also, no practice.
Practice? What's that?....
I just hope my view does not swap at the start of the race like it did a few weeks ago. That was VERY disorienting. I still don't know if I ran anyone off because of that.
I will try to make it tonight. Been under the weather for a few days. Also someone charged up a bunch of stuff on my credit card so I had to change it. Forgot that PS was using the old card for my membership so it cancelled. Will have to do a new membership to join tonight.
What's the best out of box car to drive with no practice?
In reply to Argo1 :
Probably the Merc
In reply to Argo1 :
In my opinion, I would not mess with the McLaren, Ferrari or Nissan if I had to come in cold and pick a car without lots of time working with it.
The Porsche, Panoz, Mercedes and Toyota all worked fairly well for me with their default setups.
Not sure exactly what everyone will run for the series, but I'm guessing we have a Toyota (Dean), a Mercedes (me), a Ferrari (sauce), a Porsche (Brad) and a Panoz (Air). There is a joker rule, where you can switch cars one time during the series, so if you pick something and end up not liking it, you can change for next race.
In reply to Argo1 :
I have setups for the Mercedes, Toyota and McLaren I can share if you go with any of these cars.
Don’t forget about doing a room reset right at 8:30. I’ll start a practice room in a bit.
BradLTL said:Don’t forget about doing a room reset right at 8:30. I’ll start a practice room in a bit.
8:30 central time, to be clear.
I will be driving the Toyota
Didn't get to crash Dean out this week but there is always next week. Brand loyalty has almost caused me to pick the Porsche but instead I will run the McLaren since nobody else is and - most important - it comes in yellow.
Decent race last night. Tire management was important. Other than finding TJ at the apex of the last corner it was uneventful.
Argo1 said:Didn't get to crash Dean out this week but there is always next week. Brand loyalty has almost caused me to pick the Porsche but instead I will run the McLaren since nobody else is and - most important - it comes in yellow.
You’ll have your hands full trying to get it competitive. It has the highest top speed but is the slowest around the track.
I was hoping to draft past TJ and then tuck in behind Sauce and let him set the pace hoping that I could give up a little in the corners to save the tires and make it up in the straits. Then just see what happened.
TJ and I came together was kind of funny. I was following and had let him gap me a little hoping for that big run down the strait. Everything was great. I go deep in the last corner turn in and power down and in front of me is smoke and TJ. If I had kept tight to him he would have probably spun out of my way and then come back on track.
What actually happened TJ? I never saw it untill I turned in and you were sitting sideways at the apex.
Good luck with the McClaren. That thing seemed to want to kill me at every chance it had. I never got it to drive so that I could repeat what it was doing in corners. Tough to tune a car if it does different things in the same corner on different laps.
I had a reasonable un-eventful race, except for coming around the last corner to find TJ and Dean doing some sort of Formula Drift exhibition. Next time guys, take it farther down the straight, kind of hard to see you there!
The Panoz seems to lack a bit of top speed. It does seem to come out of corners nice (fat torque curve), but probably a bit sub-par on brakes. I had not driven PC cars with worn tires, so that was a learning curve. Not nearly as harsh as GT.
Sakada will be interesting since the fastest way around the second to last corner seems to be a full on drift, which might be a bit hard on tires! (or I could just slow down)
The 2nd to last corner I can not make even close to full speed. I have to lift and / or drag the brakes. The last corner is lots of fun. I took a click of rear wing out of the car add it made that corner much more "fun" I could easily keep it stuck to the inside but there is a big wall there that if you judge wrong will stop you instantaneously!!!
Things went pretty well for me overall. I had a bit of trouble getting a clean lap in qualifying but managed to put down a flier as time ran out to edge TJ by a couple tenths. I finally managed to sort out the Ferrari launch, the 1-2 shift at WOT was causing the car to go sideways and in test races keeping the car on track usually resulted in losing 2-3 spots. I knew I was going to lose a spot to TJ regardless and holding 2nd was the best I could hope for, but even with his jumped start it was closer than I expected. The Merc and Ferrari are about the same down the straight so the draft is huge so I just tried to stay close and get a good run which worked. After that I pushed pretty hard for the first few laps to try to create enough of a gap to drop the draft, but it wasn't until TJ's spin in the last turn that I had any actual breathing room. From there it was mostly trying to manage tires and minimize mistakes, but interestingly enough I almost went too far with that and had my front right tire actually cool off too much which caused some issues under braking. I also very nearly got the fuel wrong, I thought I had enough for 21 laps but I finished 19 laps with 2L left.
I think if we can get the AI to actually be in the Group A cars it will definitely make things more interesting. If you catch one in the wrong place it can easily cost you 2 seconds, in this race I was luckier than Dean and caught them at better points which helped me gain some time, but by the same token if that had been reversed (especially if there were more of them) it could have easily dropped me back into his clutches. That, and I both traded paint with one in the right hand sweeper going into the chicane and also very nearly hit one coming out of the last turn so there is also more risk.
Between qualifying and the race I decided to use my not fully tested experimental setup where I had hards on the fronts and softs on the rears. I planned on letting Sauce run off into the distance, manage my tires and try to not let Dean get too far ahead for the first half of the race. My false start messed that plan up. I decided since I was already in last place I may as well try to hang with Sauce as long as I could. That worked out ok for a few laps, but my rear left tire got overheated and I ended up with no rear grip and drifted my way through the final turns until that last turn where I couldn't hold on and spun. I never got the rears to cool back down and just kept spinning out. I would catch up to 4 or 5 seconds from Air at times, then spin and end up 10-15 seconds back. Then catch back up a bit, then spin. Repeated that for 3/4 of the race. I should've just pitted for softs - I would've had more fun. I did have over 50% left on my fronts at the end, but my rears were shot.
Bad idea to try something crazy without testing it first.
I panicked a bit at my false start and let off the throttle briefly before realizing there was no reason to wait since I already was 20 seconds down, so I didn't take advantage of jumping the start. Another lesson learned. If you get the false start, own it and take it for all it's worth to minimize the 20 seconds penalty.
Either the timing is a little different with the lights or I was just overly excited to get the race started.
Looking forward to a better performance at Sakitto.
In reply to T.J. :
I was wondering what had happened to you. From practice I expected you and Dean to be up my trumpets all race and until your first spin that's how it was shaping up. Actually, if it wasn't for your spin and Dean having some trouble getting past the AI I'm fairly sure he would have been within ~3 seconds pretty much the entire race. I definitely expect Sakitto to be a much closer race.
Spent some time working on the Ferrari tonight, turns out my shock settings were way off. Fuji was so smooth it wasn't readily apparent but I was really struggling with the bumps at Sakitto. The good news for me is that the car feels a lot better. The bad news for everyone is that the AI is stupidly fast. As in, when set at 90 is top 5-10 on the leader board fast. My qualifying lap would have been good enough for 4th on the leader board for the Ferrari and an AI would have still been on pole. There is some secret to sector 1 that the AI knows because the pole sitter put the better part of a full second on me there. They are slow in sector 2, but not enough to completely overcome the sector 1 delta.
Also, the Group A cars are an issue here. This track isn't as wide as Fuji, the passing zones are shorter, and the AI takes some odd lines in places which makes getting past slower cars difficult and also riskier.
I am not so good at this track. Never have been. I am thinking of going with a high down force setup with a softer suspension. My current low downforce setup is good but I think I am giving up to much in the first two sectors of the track. I am getting the Merc is going to do really well at this track.
My doctor just canceled my Monday appointment for an eye injection and rescheduled it for Wednesday with a different doctor. She went into labor and is going out on maternity leave. This seems like a weak excuse to me. The injection in the eye Wednesday may have a non-beneficial effect on my racing.
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