Quote from jwardy :

ok ive had the trial for 5 days and im dissapointed , its nothing compared to lfs

lfs just feels better
better comunity
cheaper price !!

Well at least you gave it a try.

Be sure to try the Spec Racer before you leave for good, though.. with Ian Lake's setup (attached) it feels GREAT. Best feeling car I've ever tried in any sim. Period. Official races start again on Tuesday, and it seems like this series will be very well populated. I'm looking forward to it!

He's been sharing this set publically on the iRacing forums BTW, so he won't mind that I pass it on.

How come 'everyone' has vouchers?

Quote from Danke :

I take it by "not lifting off the gas", you're leaving it floored and braking when you need to. If so, that's really bad news for me, suffering here in combined throttle/brake axis hell. It sure sounds like fun though for people with proper controllers.

,,


No, I'm using right foot braking, so I have to lift off when I brake. But once I've heel&toed for a corner I have to get back on the accelerator quickly. You don't want to go coasting through a corner, that's what I meant. (That's of course not often a good idea in any car, but this one really punishes you if you do!)

Tried it at Laguna now as well. It's a good 4 seconds faster than the Solstice.

Quote from Danke :

I'll be curious to hear how you guys like the SRF. That car was the most intriguing part of the original announcement to me.

All I can say after 10 minutes of testing at Lime Rock is...


YES!!!! THIS is what a race car should feel like!! It's more grounded than the Skippy, but it's still gonna slide the back end out in the corners if you're not careful. Force feedback wise it's defininitely more similar to the SKippy than the Solstice. You can feel every bump.

Word of advice: DON'T go off the accelerator on the faster corners! It doesn't like that very much. (just like the Skippy)

I'm going back to Lime Rock. See you in a few weeks.

Quote from UncleBenny :

You can't test it if the site is down though?

....



Forgot.

Downloaded.

Seconds after I finished downloading their site went down again.

Gonna test the SRF!

I've found out how it all started!!

Quote from anttt69 :

Seems you can only view iRacing stats if you are a current member. Bit of a shame that, I cant see why they would need to hide race/performance stats from anyone.

If your on the outside looking in you cant see anything ??. iRacing is a closed circle.

Well, that's not strictly true.. there are other sites which provide stats. This one, for example. You do need a password, though, but not your own iRacing identity.

Quote from amp88 :

What is the label on the Y axis here? Specific deaths per what? Per 100,000, or 1,000,000 or something else?

I don't know, but for this discussion it doesn't really matter. The point is that early observations indicate that the current flu outbreak shows pretty much the same tendency: a disproportionately high peak for young adults compared to normal flus.

Quote from Mp3 Astra :

The interesting thing about the dozens of deaths in Mexico is that all of the victims were under 45 years old; and were seemingly healthy beforehand. It's surprising that despite the many other cases that have popped up around the world, nobody else seems to be dying. Is there more to come...?

Yep. It's in fact very similar to the Spanish flu, which struck the same demographic.



FYI the Spanish flu was also a variant of the pig flu.

Whaaaat, SRF for free?!! OMG that's so cool! Can't wait to try it!

Not my kind of thing, really. I never was a Formula fan. I think the Mustang will be my next purchase, whenever it's out. Or maybe the Spec Racer Ford.

Quote from AlienT. :

I must say it's not that easy, maybe I should try some other car as most of the guys driving the Radical are way better than me unfortunately

To be in the top 250 you must have some Alien tendancies? Have you looked in the mirror recently? notice even a hint of green skin and large eyes?

Well it's pretty easy if you just drive the lower licenced cars. I've done most of my racing in the Advanced Solstice, and I'm # 111 in iRating! It's a bit silly that I should be able to join the pro series when I've never even touched the cars they're going to use.. I'm struggling enough with the Skippy, so I can't imagine what the top cars are like..!

Quote from Becky Rose :

Charging points are not the solution, it needs battery replacement to be of use for consumers, so there is no fear of being caught short. The way to do that is with a transfer hire agreement on batteries a bit like we have with wooden palettes, which requires a standardised battery.

In fact some major car manufacturers are looking into this right now. (finding a standardized size and shape of their batteries to allow for easy replacement) Electric cars today often have their batteries in inaccessible places, and this needs to be improved as well if this is going to work. At least it's good that they're working on it!

I did a google search, but I couldn't find the link I was looking for.

Quote from SR BaCkFiRe :

Hydrogen is not the answer, it is too expensive and too complicated to make and is also ineffecient.

Yep. I happen to take a course called Hydrogen and fuel cell technology right now. Here are some points to consider:

• Storage. Liquid and compressed hydrogen is a no-go. It's dangerous, requires too much energy and suffers from boil-off. (the content vaporizes at ~ 1% per day)
  Metal hydride storage is much safer, but the best can store ten weight percent of hydrogen. Most are in the region of 2-5 weigth percent. --> it gets very heavy. Here's a graph:
  http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/8093/utennavneen.png
  
• Hydrogen production. Electrolysis of water to form hydrogen + oxygen gas is normally ~ 50%.
  
• Fuel cell efficiency is approximately the same
  
• Transport and storage. The hydrogen must be transported somehow, most likely in compressed or liquid state. This, too, requires lots of energy for compression (again, see graph), cooling and transport, and suffers from boil-off.
  

There's lots more points to that list.. at the end, you have to multiply all the efficiencies. We did a lab where the end efficiency of the whole system from water to fuel cell was 2%.. that gives an idea.

I'm not saying that batteries are problem free... far from it. But it sure looks a lot more promising to me. (Maybe I'm biased, as I'm studying nanotechnology with emphasis on materials, energy and the environment. :shy

Quote from kingfag :

How efficient is a power plant?
Exactly. More efficient than a mass production petrol engine will ever be. Not just the efficiency from fuel->energy, but the resulting heat is used for district heating and the resulting CO2 is used in greenhouses.

Where does a power plant emits it's exhaust fumes?
Exactly. Not at your door. Huge smog reduction.

How much easier it is to filter emissions from a single huge exhaust instead of thousands of small ones?
Exactly. Much easier. No more catalytic converter that needs to be warmed up before it sort of works.


But still, how much electric cars are for sale today? Th!nk, Gay-wizz and Tesla makes a massive list of 3 cars to choose from. 2 death traps and a sportscar...

Well said. I'm convinced that electric cars is the future. Forget about hydrogen.. it's too cumbersome and requires too much infrastructure. Electric is much easier.

The challenge is that charging takes too long. This is hard to avoid.. if you want to charge the whole battery in 30 seconds you'll need a power cable the thickness of your wrist.. not gonna happen. Therefore, the key would be that you simply go to a gas station and get the whole battery pack replaced every time you run out. Just as fast as filling gas. The gas station would trickle charge the empty batteries all the time, taking advantage of periods when there's excess electricity (at night, and when it's windy/sunny if they're using windmills/solar cells. Actually, one of the big challenges with using wind power is that it's so uneven.. the battery charging strategy could help even out the dips and peaks!)

Anyway.. enough rambling.. in short, electric = good in the long term, but if the government wants to spend money on it now, they should channel their funds into research instead of subsidizing people to buy 1st gen electric cars.

Quote from Jertje :

Good, I hope that with these cars they'll add a multi-class series to spice things up a bit and prevent the spread of the member base

I wonder how the iRacing users will deal with all the overtaking of a multi-class race, though.. some racers seem very impatient.

I'm very excited about the Mustang in particular!

Lol!! That was great. Moar, moar!!

Very nice! Good to see someone trying to fill the gap after CTRA.

Can you tell us some more about how licence progress is achieved? (Points system and so on)

Quote from DaveWS :

Edit: I'm getting some stuttering with iRacing during the races, partically at the corkscrew, which makes things interesting. Has anyone else experienced this? I'm getting framerates around 70 + normally, so it's not like my PC is struggling to run it. I'm gessing it's lack of memory, and the HDD is having to muck about with the pagefile or something.

I got rid of stuttering by reducing the number of sound streams in the .cfg file. Search on the iracing forums, you'll find plenty of different suggestions you can try!

Can someone who's used headpones and the Z5500 for racing sims (LFS or other) say a few words about how it compares? I've never used speakers myself, only headphones.

Quote from Rappa Z :

Was leading my skippy race with two to go, and I ran out of fuel. FML

So much for the "30 laps" estimate, barely got half that.

The estimates are crap. You need to run a bunch of laps, and then check the "laps remaining" stats IMMEDIATELY. If you wait, the estimate will get way too high. Silly really..

Quote from Slartibartfast :

After I used DXTweak, the braking got much better.

I was under the impression that DXTweak doesn't work with iRacing? It doesn't do squat for me anyway.

Quote :

After I installed the rubber stopper, I realized that even with DXT I was still over braking.

I've got the Nixim mod as well, and sometimes I would lock up with the Skip. But there is a trick: after plugging in the pedals, depress the brake pedal as hard as you can using your hand. Like you're doing CPR on an elephant. So when you brake fully in game you'll only reach ~ 80% of brake travel! Makes it a lot harder to lock up.

Quote from FlintFredstone :

but thats not my main gripe, its the sound, after 3 months i still get no feedback from the sound, infact i would say i get negative feedback, only the engine tone is of any use, there is essentially no difference to the tyre sounds for underbraking, overbraking, optimal sliding (front or rear) and over the limit sliding, ive learned to use visual cues and grinding the physical actions into my brain needed to maintain control.

Now this I just can't understand. Are you using headphones or speakers? IMO headphones are essential (unless you have really good speakers) for simracing. There's so much info! With the Solstice (which is the only car I'm really familiar with) I can tell precisely how close I am to locking up my brakes, and how close I am to exceeding the optimal slip angle, based on sound alone. I do agree that the sound (and force feedback, for that matter) with the Skippy is kinda weird when you're sliding excessively, but that's my only gripe so far. IMO, iRacing > LFS >>>>> nKP in terms of tire sounds.

I drove the RAC almost exclusively for half a year in the beginning of my LFS career. In my opinion it's the most rewarding car to drive once you get comfy with it. Also it feels a lot more real than the FZ5, which just slides around like crazy. The RAC's understeer makes it feel more "grounded" in a way, which I think is good.

So: give it time, have some patience, and I assure you the RAC can be a load of fun!