Racing games - GTR, Race07, Rfactor, etc

Raceroom is what my league uses. It has a weird and fractured history where it started off as a free to play game with everything being a la carte and then finally switched over to making content packs.

The best way to dip your toe into the game is to run the free cars on one of the free tracks and then if something in the store interests you you can use the purple “Test Drive” button to throw that car around the (really rather good) fictional Raceroom Raceway circuit.

When you add something to your cart you’ll see it has a cash price and a “VRP” price and the VRP number is always lower.

This is their virtual currency, (another holdover from the game’s beginnings) and the best way to buy content is to buy a pack of VRP at discount, then use that to buy one of the packs. If you wait for a content sale then you can buy the whole thing with all the content for about $60 worth of VRP.

If you give it a bash and want to commit some $$$ then let me know and I’ll have a look at the currently available packs for which way to go.

What I was looking at was the Europe track pack and maybe a couple of easier cars. That should keep me occupied for a while and didn’t look terribly expensive. Didn’t know about the currency thing so good thing I waited.

If you get the starter pack it comes with five tracks and nine cars.

Because of the way content works if you own any one piece of something you can race with all the rest of it, so you’ll be able to race AI (or online) with the rest of any of the car classes included in the pack - so you’d be able to take the TCR and race against all the other TCR cars, for example.

The TCRs are nice to race because they’re fairly heavy with moderate power, but front wheel drive can catch some people out. The NSU TT has super low power but is absolutely brilliant to race - it feels like a world war one biplane dogfight in a pack - and you’d also get an open wheeler, a GT3, GT2 and the classic DTM, which is a really fun class.

.Also worth noting that if you ever decided to buy one of the bigger packs, the game gives you a discount for the stuff you already bought.

K maybe I’ll start with that. I having been messing around with PC2 and having a lot of fun getting used to the wheel. It’s been a long time but it’s so much better than the gamepad. Really like the pedals that came with the pro version. Doesn’t feel like the pile of crap Unused many years ago.

I played gt sport a ton over the weekend. I think this is the perfect game to start learning tracks better and to get some online play in. I like how it has a mode where you can focus on learning each track. Once I start to get confident there I will move back to the PC Sims.

The one thing I just love about raceroom is the sounds. It’s the best sounding racing game I’ve ever heard. It’s nuts. We’ll see how long it takes me to get my sim legs. I’m a pretty quick learner but racing was never something I followed very much in depth. So big learning curve for me.

I’m going to keep spamming to myself. :) I have been working on learning the tracks as that’s what I have always struggled with and then I get bored and do something else.

Yesterday in GT I used the track competency section to learn Spa. After a couple hours I’m confident that I know the entire track and can easily get around each time at a reasonable pace using the Mercedes GT3.

The way it breaks each section into a mini guide works really well for me. This is really the distraction I need with the way things are going right now.

With the wheel it’s way easier to hit the same points each time which is fantastic. If you miss your mark on the gamepad you really can’t adjust like you can with the wheel. And well it’s way more fun.

Started uploading clips to my youtube to keep track of progress. Got a 2:16:300 with soft tires in an Audi GT3. The world record times are low 2:16:000 on hard tires. I have no idea how they do that. I could have done sub 2:16:000 except I screwed up the last turn before the chicanes. You can take that flat out if you go wider.

SPA GT Sport

Was that in GT sport? The track looks awesome. Despite modesty, that was a very nice lap. Great progress!

Grand turismo sport on the ps4. It was pretty panned when it came out 2 years ago because of lack of content. Thankfully I didn’t jump in until this year. It’s the easiest one for me to get into as I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing before moving back to the pc sims.

Nice lap! GTSport has almost made me buy a PS4 a few times. Is 2:16 the GTS WR, or is that specifically the record for hard tyres? Is there a faster soft tyre record? I think the ACC record for Spa is just inside the 2:16s.

It looked like you left some time at Bruxelles/Rivage - that corner always gets me in these fat cars, because you have to get the entry perfect and then wait and wait and wait to go back on the throttle and my right foot doesn’t like patience.

In real life the GT3s are qualifying around 2:19.3, possibly because games default to a warmer track that is more rubbered in. I’d be interested to hear from eliandi what the SRO drivers are running at Spa.

GT doesn’t have proper leaderboards which is well insane for a racing game. So finding out what the WR is on softs is rough.

This is the one leaderboard same car. 02:15.446 so even faster than what I thought.
SPA Times

I’m assuming that’s hards, but I have no idea. On hards I only get around 2:19 so far.

I’m having a rough time with Laguna Seca. I just keep on losing time all over the place. I can get around with no issues, but Jesus every turn has to be perfect it feels like. I watch the track guides and try and copy it and end up 3 seconds slower. Sigh

The hardest corner at Laguna Seca is the one coming out of the pitlane.

This weekend my league is racing at Knutstorp, which might be one of the weirdest tracks I’ve run on. It has elevation and camber changes which is whatever, but the final corner might actually just be a discarded roller coaster track.

10 laps into a stint my front tyres are both bright red for temperature - my front left tyre is 112 degrees and my rear right is 64.

image

This is with tyre wear set to 1x. I also have 74kg (162lbs) of ballast for this race which isn’t helping my braking distances even before my tyres catch fire.

At least as all the rubber melts off the tires, it’ll tend to flow to and fill in the valleys on the track.

I couldn’t resist the Codemasters bundle for a crack at F1 2019. It is a dramatically more polished experience so far than was F1 2011, my previous series high water mark.

Watch virtual Le Mans live for the next 8 hours:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGzoLSmAvPY&feature=emb_logo

[ed]

They had at least one server issue causing a red flag event and requiring a safety car, as well as racers dropping.

I watched a little bit late last night, and they had a second red flag due to server issues.

They were using rFactor 2. Which is fine, server issues aside, but I’m a bit surprised the iRacing folks didn’t step up and offer to host the event.

Found a list of the teams online. Very cool to see so many real-world drivers participating. I watched the first virtual grand prix, and had the impression that most of the pro drivers who weren’t already heavily involved in sim racing were snubbing that series.

I could not make out the numbers on the cars most of the time. And the game software only rarely showed a car’s info on screen. Very frustrating!

Something like this would have been helpful:

Beneath the video was a link to a live-timing site which had more info about the cars and their positions. But they should have made that more obvious and pimped it more on the bottom of the coverage.

Yeah, I saw that. It didn’t help when identifying cars by sight though.

After not being on a highway for 3 months and having played mostly racing games I’m surprised I didn’t get a speeding ticket. I was flying this morning. ;) All I have is a little civic turbo so good thing I don’t have anything more powerful lol…

I’m pretty much sticking with GT Sport for now. I’m planning on trying some of the daily races this week. I looked up IRacing and while it sure sounds fun my god the prices…