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…
In my slightly younger, slightly dumber days, I would tear along the gravel road up to my sportsman’s club in my Mini, rally driver-style. I stopped after I almost put it into a ditch.
In other news, two race weekends into an F1 2019 career, I’m enjoying myself to no end.
Having never driven an F1 car, I can’t speak to the realism, but I’m really liking the atmosphere of it. I’m playing it less like a full-on sim than a Formula 1 driver RPG—no ABS or traction control, but I am keeping the dynamic racing line on, on the theory that F1-driver Fishbreath would have a better sense for the edge of control than random-schlub-playing-F1-game Fishbreath.
Having objectives in practice is inspired, and ‘here is where you can save fuel’ or ‘here is where you’re especially hard on tires’ are great things to know for the race. I’m enjoying the practice minigames almost as much as the race itself, and my natural completionist’s urge to do them all has yielded better track knowledge than I typically get.
Shanghai’s next, and I’ve been fast through high-speed corners so far, so I’m looking forward to it. Still tuning the AI difficulty so that my middle-of-the-pack Racing Point car is actually middle-of-the-pack.
This sounds pretty interesting to me. One of my beefs with a lot of racing games, is that especially early on, they throw you from one track and one car to another, before you can get any sense of WTF is going on. I really miss the early GT games, where you started in a honda civic, and spent some time with that car and that track until you really had a handle on it. Progression in racing games often starts at horrible, and gets worse from there.
So, for each weekend, you have six options for practice programs:
- Track familiarization, where you drive through gates on the racing line and get a bonus for chaining together good corners (i.e., on pace).
- Tire, fuel, and ERS conservation, where you drive laps in under a target time while keeping tire wear, fuel consumption, or ERS discharge below a target threshold.
- Qualifying pace, where you get a few laps in qualifying configuration to try to hit a target time appropriate to your car.
- Race strategy, where you drive five laps while the team tracks your tire wear and fuel consumption. When you’re picking your strategy for the actual race, you can use the data gathered to personalize the team’s recommendations. For instance, I’m apparently pretty gentle on tires, so instead of a stint on soft tires and a stint on hards, the team recommended a soft-medium strategy for me, which worked out brilliantly—I ended up picking up several places while other drivers were in for their second stops, and had enough life left in the tires to maintain a lead of a few seconds at the end of the race.
Ya I really like the career mode in F1. It’s a great way to learn the tracks. I really should play that again this week. I tried it when I first got my wheel and was having issues adjusting after playing with a gamepad for so long.
Unrelated as I have an Origin sub which i should totally cancel i tried out Need for Speed Heat. I uninstalled it 20 minutes in. Wow not my cup of tea at alllll… I barely made it through the cut scenes.
Oh stupid teenage memories! Where I grew up, the town’s method of “paving” was to wait for a hot day, dump loose gravel and tar on the road, and then wait a month for passing cars to tamp it down into a smooth(er) tarmac. The first week was awesome for playing rally driver, but I also quit when I nearly smashed my mother’s Toyota Corolla into a phone pole.
I’ve long since graduated to “nice” cars, but I’m also old so I make an effort not to drive them beyond the envelope. Side comment: modern cars with traction control & etc. are really hard to drive as dangerously as we used to.
Diego
Ah, you see, the Mini has a switch on the dashboard to turn traction control off.
(Still useful sometimes in the winter, when I’m okay with the wheels spinning a bit under power while trying to get up a snowy driveway.)
The E36 M3 we had & my current 987 Cayman have switches to turn that off too. Those switches are getting more rare & they increasingly only turn off parts of the stability management systems, however.
But I’m glad these nannies exist regardless. They have, for sure, saved my bacon multiple times in the rain.
Diego
The switch in my Veyron does the same thing.
Really? I can’t find the traction control switch anywhere on my Veyron.
Never mind. It’s not the Veyron, but my Agera R that has the switch.
Sorry, I would have checked my tricked-out wood-sided Reliant K wagon instead, but it was in the shop as usual:
I grew up in northern Illinois, in a small town surrounded by endless numbers of gravel roads that went on for miles. Add to that, a 1972 buick LeSabre, with a 350 v8 and a 4 barrel carb. If all that wasn’t enough for trouble, the favorite pastime of kids in that town was “road party”. V8 + case of beer + snow, what could go wrong? It did teach me to drive really really well though.
Holy crap, that’s some danger! Lucky you found snow banks & ditches and not trees or phone poles.
We used to go on vacation w a friend who learned to drive in the 70s in Alabama (I learned in the 80’s in the northeast). He honestly saw NOTHING wrong with driving to the beach with a six pack on the floorboard next to him, drinking ‘em as he went. It was just “normal’ for him and what he was used to. We were shocked and pulled him right out of the car!
Diego
An old boss would come into work drunk sometimes. He lived in a neighboring town.
I spent the past week or so watching long Le Mans series races on Youtube. It’s kind of messing with my ability to perceive/process time. I may be addicted, or something like it.
:(