I’m surprised that was 30 seconds, usually I run down bystanders for a 7 second penalty. Maybe this guy was a bit farther away from the road.
This morning I did Stage 9 through the entire Portugese winter wonderland. That was so fun! 26 minute behemoth though. Have some time set aside!
Stage 10 is going to be interesting. I tried to baby my tires as much as I could in Stage 9 so that I would still have good tread in Stage 10. I suspect I’ll still be in bad shape by the end of Stage 10 though. Hopefully I’ll tackle that tomorrow if I can wake up early enough.
I messed up a little bit early in Stage 10, but I think I made up for it overall by not letting it be a habit. It’s tough to tell on these really long stages whether I’m doing ok without any times to compare to yet.
I’m sure you guys will let me know how I did when you get to tackle it.
Well as it stands I’m 6+ minutes behind you, and only getting worse as my car gets more and more beat up. On S9 I didn’t count how many times my car did a 180 and came to a stop in the absolute diametric opposite direction I was going, but maybe it was…20 times? 25? Didn’t seem to matter what I was doing. Going along on a straight? 180. Taking a 3? 180. Taking a 1? 180. Going from gravel to tarmac? 180. Simply trying to right myself after a spin-out while feathering the throttle ever-so-gently? 180.
I feel like I’m O.K. in the Alpine on dry gravel (I did okay back in June during the Greece rally), but apparently I don’t know how to drive it in the wet.
I’m sure @spiffy will have much better luck and provide you with some proper competition.
wow, that was a lot of driving! Almost two hours total, and you got me by 45 seconds, @Rock8man , well done. I thought I had an almost flawless stage 9 and you still came out on top by 20 secs, so I decided to take it up a notch in the finale and within the first two minutes flipped the car, rolled the car, missed a hard turn… settled down after that but yeah, not enough.
I guess my only thought about not pulling 180s is to always go slower than I think I want to be going, gas/trigger almost never more than halfway pulled, especially on tarmac, and if on tarmac stay in a lower gear, and don’t downshift until really sure I’ve slowed sufficiently… even then it still happened here and there especially when needing to slow down or turn suddenly after a straight. The straights are deadly in this game in Rwd, but I could turn all day.
There was a funny moment in the last stage where I skipped my car to land completely wheels off the ground on a low boulder… five seconds reset worth the laugh.
Estonia is always so frustrating for me, always with the penalties. 7 second for killing a bystander, 30 second penalty for killing another bystander, 5 second penalty for killing another bystander. Argh. If I could just get through these stages without a penalty, it’d be a miracle.
Yeah it’s a deceptive course… encourages you to go balls out on speed, but then sprinkles all kinds of ‘traps’ that’ll knock you dead all over the place. By the end of it there were a number of places like a chicane or a twist in the road after a mega jump, that got me in trouble time and again, I never learned. At some places I wound up landing amongst trees, weaving between trunks and driving parallel to the road for an entire stretch.
I did a lot better today. I started a minute and 5 seconds behind you, and we went back and forth a few times and I ended up … Still a minute and 5 seconds behind you. D’oh!
The “long” course in Estonia is not very long unfortunately. It doesn’t incorporate a lot of sections we drove earlier, only two of them.
Interesting that tire wear was a complete non issue on this course. I guess this kind of gravel just doesn’t wear them down much.
So if I tally up the difference in penalty seconds, it makes up the entire difference and puts you ahead. So if those big ones are hitting bystanders which I think are BS (and we both probably took a few corner cuts), let’s call this one a draw!
During the shakedown on the first stage in Chile this morning, it was so effortless in the 1:40 or so that it felt like the easiest game in the world. It’s all on rails, it feels like. Just drive down this well trodden path and you’ll do great.
Except then after the shakedown I discovered a million ways to mess that up. Arrrrgh. Brake too early, brake too late, turn too early, turn too late, run into a pedestrian and incur a huge penalty. That same section took me 2:07.
I think I had things more under control in the second stage. But I was so distracted by my door whose latch had come undone and it would swing open and closed the whole first and second leg.
Yeah my left door came off in the second stage too.
Have to say, the penalties continue to make no real sense to me. I went off the side of a wooded hill last night, sideways, going pretty fast, so if I had been left to settle in a ‘realistic’ way I would have been down a fairly steep hill (probably hitting a tree or two eventually), and getting up would not have been trivial… only 15 seconds. Huh. I remember getting ‘terminal damage’ in a similar curve but going much slower in that icy stage we did a while back. And then yeah, nick a bystander at 4 mph, sometimes 5 secs, sometimes 30. It’s bizarre, but given penalties most definately affect your overall chance of winning the course it’s irritating not having some kind of rationale.
