GRM Project Cars 2 - Series 5 *Insert Clever Name Here*

e30Matt said:

Anyone going to be on tonight?  I haven't done any LeMans testing but I kinda want to try out the Mono's.

My guess is that Air will enjoy the Monos. You can slide them in to a corner and power out. They can be entertaining. 

I won't be able to do any practicing until Monday night - that is why I frontoladed it all and practiced last week,

I did a bit of practice.  I did find that setting your tire pressures too high results in some pretty out of control pressures after a dew laps at Le Mans.

I tried out the Mono and it is a bit of a blast. A good amount of trail braking oversteer, power on over steer and a very controllable slide.. Braking in corners can get pretty exciting and there is a pretty serious example of that in the first track.

I think I'm going to have to mulligan for the this race, I can't seem to make the Ferrari work over the course of a race.  Heck, without being able to get the tires to temp even stringing together 3 clean laps in the dry is hard.  I really didn't want the last race to be Spec Toyota but at this point I don't see a way around it.

Looks like I am going to be out for the race tonight.  No worries, it's really Sauce and TJ that need to "work things out".

Since I will not be there:  Dean please run yourself into the wall at the end of the straight to simulate me missing my brake point while trying to draft you.  Sauce, please smash yourself into the wall at the tight chicane near the start finish to simulate me braking way to early and you smashing into me.  

If the points are up to date, it looks like a winner takes all situation between Sauce and TJ.  If the AI is super fast here, it could get weird if they both finish down in the order.

In reply to aircooled :

We'll miss you.

I did a practice race this morning with the AI set to 95/40 and lapped P2 on the last lap, so the AIs are not terribly fast here. They seem to not like the rain.

I have a severely uphill battle against TJ. I have zero time in the car, no tune, and no rain practice. I'll get on as early as I can to get some laps in, but it's TJ's race to lose. 

In reply to e30Matt :

I don't know about that. I did my practicing for this race two weekends ago, then was out of town all last week and last weekend. My 'setup' is essentially set the rear aero to zero, close up brake ducts and radiator and raise the cold tire pressures a bit. Then just do a few laps to figure out where you want the gearing to be. Not much of a setup. It really comes down to going fast in a straight line and surviving the turns.

What happened, what happened, what happened?

What happened is that I got super lucky with the car last night. I stumbled into a great tune and had a fairly clean race. TJ's car was a tad faster on the straight and better under braking but my car was faster everywhere else and I'm fairly certain easier to drive. 

Sauce beat me by a minute and 4 seconds. The rest of the GT1 field was at least a lap down. We were close on lap 1, but after that he just slowly pulled away. I had to slow for the first few backmarkers since I caught them in a bad place, and after that he was out of my sight for the rest of the race.

TJ, what was your fuel strategy? It looks like I gained about 20 seconds around the pit stops. 

In reply to e30Matt :

I added 49L I think. I wanted to be able to do 20 laps if needed. I pitted right when rain was just starting. Brad and an AI passed while I was in the pits to get a lap back (temporarily). Don't remember what happened around that time. I crashed going onto Mulsanne straight but I think that was a lap after I pitted.

In reply to T.J. :

OK, that makes sense then as I pitted a lap after you so there were 3 laps affected by pits. 

Looks like you had a gap of 26 seconds (lap 11) when I pitted. Then the gap went up to 77 seconds (lap 12), then you pitted and the gap was 28 seconds (lap 13), that must've been when I crashed going onto the Mulsanne and hit the guardrail on the outside. The gap went up to nearly 42 seconds (lap 14).  At that point, I knew I had a lap on P3, so I just tried to stay safe and get across the line, but knew I was too far back to catch you even if you had a big problem. Looks like I had 15L of fuel at the end, so I could've taken on less during my stop and still had enough for an extra lap if need be.

I wonder if running the wets the whole race and just getting fuel at the stop would've worked. I didn't get much tire wear on the softs or the wets.

In reply to T.J. :

You must have been getting better mileage than I was, I started with max fuel and put in 60L and finished with 14L.  As for the wets, there would be no point since you can do tires and fuel at the same time on these cars and the fuel took way longer.

I really just lucked into a great setup basically out of nowhere.  Dean had sent me a tune forever ago so I started with that but it was really slow on the straight.  I kept making changes to get it faster, but then would have to do something else to try to fix the drivability issues that caused.  Almost an hour into my own practice session I had touched every setting on the car except springs and shocks, and the car was better than it had been but the Ferrari was faster on the straights and in the slower corners it had understeer at entry, oversteer at exit.  My best theoretical lap was in the 3:08's, fastest actual lap was a 3:09, average was a 3:10+ because I kept getting out of shape or wrecking.

Then it occurred to me that the reason Dean sent the tune was so I could plug it into the suspension calculator but I didn't remember if I had actually put those values into the tune.  It turns out I hadn't so I threw those shock settings in, but while I was doing that it had started raining in my session.  I figured the rain would make any significant flaw in the tune very apparent so I slapped some wets on and went.  Much to my amazement the car was incredible, my first flying wet lap was 2 seconds slower than my fastest dry lap and it was so easy to drive.  I then hopped over to Brad's room for dry testing and picked up 4 seconds over my previous best and knew I was in reasonable shape.  

It's just crazy and lucky that after touching everything (tire pressures, aero, camber, caster, toe, brake pressure, brake ducts, ride height, sway bars, gearing, fuel load, engine braking, diff ramp angles) to no avail, shock settings made all those other changes to an already proven setup magically come together to work really well.  Had I not stumbled onto that when I did it probably would have been a very tight race with the edge going to TJ due to his test races and knowing more about pit strategy and long run characteristics.