Quote from de Souza :

on topic: never heard anyone call oval racing NASCAR

off topic: sounds TO ME that car racing the way it is in USA - drag, NASCAR, IRL etc. - are more for the show, more for entertaining the public than anything else..

Uh, yes. Racing is entertainment. All racing is. Even in Europe.
If you are trying to say it is dumbed down racing and somewhat fake, like the WWF for example, then you might be partially right when talking about NASCAR, but overall you are still wrong.

Quote from de Souza :

you don't care who's racing (even because there's a LOT of cars),

Uh, no. The drivers are the stars, especially in NASCAR. You root for a driver. You ask a NASCAR fan who drives the number 43 car and they will tell you who it is.

Quote from de Souza :

as long as they stay close and crash eventually.

That is part of the whole NASCAR thing. There are a lot of cars and they are bunched together closely. If one driver makes a mistake, or a tire gets cut down, it will lead to a big crash. It is the nature of the beast. Does it bring a certain kind of fan to that form of racing? Yes it does. But it is not the reason that long-term NASCAR fans go to the races.

Quote from de Souza :

European car racing seems to be more on the pilots/mechanics/skills side...
remember: there should be exceptions in both places

Well, in this case, the exceptions make the rule then. Many people's perceptions of US racing is only based on NASCAR. We do have other racing, although not quite as prolific as you see in Europe.

We have CHAMP car, Atlantic, Star Mazda, Mazda MX cup (really fun stuff), World Challenge, Formula BMW, Formula TR, USTCC, Porsche Cup, Grand AM Rolex and Koni Challenge, and my absolute favorite ALMS, home of the Audi R10, C6 Corvette, and many other wonderful cars and teams (who generally do very well at Le Mans) and big name drivers from all over the world . We also have more club racing than you can shake a stick at. None of the above mentioned series race on ovals. They are all road course based series. (and I am sure I missed a few. That was just off the top of my head)

Quote from thisnameistaken :

All american sports are dominated by stats. Even when they play sports the rest of us play, they are compelled to track all manner of stats. Watch coverage of an MLS football game one day - the commentators produce stats for things that don't even have names in the rest of the world!

That's because we are very sophisticated in our understanding of sports so we can expand the envelope with more data. Plus, our announcers are stuffed shirts who like to hear themselves talk.

If you do look at any really good racing team, they are obsessed with stats too, just a different kind. Engine performance, tires, suspension, split times, etc. It is actually the same thing with other sports' stats.

NASCAR is NASCAR. F1 is F1. The thing about both of them, and it is also true of other sports, you have to get into the history, teams, drivers, rules, and the technical aspects, to really enjoy the sport fully. Just 20 minutes of a baseball game can be very boring. But if you follow the team and the sport and understand the strategy and all the little nuances that makes it great, then you have a great time.

You can't just sit and watch 20 minutes of a racing series or even a whole race, and really say anything about it beyond your dislike for it. There is a lot that goes into all forms of racing and you have to spend the time to understand it all before you can really enjoy it.

NASCAR style oval racing is very challenging. If any of you have driven the old NASCAR 2003 game with a bunch of good drivers, you would know that. It is also a lot of fun.

I don't like NASCAR because they are the 800lb gorilla that dominates racing in the US where I would rather see more money and talent going into other series. But again, that is just my opinion.

Oh, and I have never heard anybody in LFS refer to oval racing as NASCAR. It is always oval racing. And then somebody brings up NASCAR and how sucky it is and we end up with a thread like this. Which I am enjoying immensely btw

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Actually, Americans tend to adopt genericised brand names more readily than we do in the UK.

The one that really baffled me was a recipe book that asked me to include a Parkay Spread Stick - I didn't have a clue what one of those was, so I had to go next door and ask my neighbour! Would it have been so hard to just write "4oz Butter"?

I just googled it, and there are loads of recipes out there that refer to butter as Parkay Spread Stick! "1 tbs Parkay Spread Stick" - how the hell am I supposed to measure a tablespoon-full of stick? What kind of lunatic cooks do you have over there?!?

illepall

That's because it was a cook book sponsored or written by the folks that produce Parkay Spread Stick, you twit. Stick to racing. You might have trouble with that cooking thing

Americans don't call butter Parkay.
We might call it oh, I don't know... Butter? Or if it is fake butter, we call it schmeer, oleo, spread, margarine (another brand name from France no less) and butter.

You know the really, really sad thing about NA$CAR? There are some drivers there that would be brilliant in sports car racing like ALMS and a few that could have even been good F1 drivers. But NA$CAR is where the money is in the US, so that is where much of the best talent goes.

Oh, and BTW, IRL stands for Indie Racing League, hence using the term Indie is proper. CART is the series that no longer exists. CART was broken up by Tony "I am taking my toys home and not playing anymore" George. CHAMP car and IRL were the results of that putting a major damper on US open wheel racing.

I can't stand IRL anyway. Ovals, if you have to run them, should be dirt. Open wheel cars don't belong on ovals, well except maybe sprint cars, but I don't consider them a real open wheel category. Of all the race track based racing, I think IRL is by far the most dangerous and the races are more boring than NASCAR. (Just my opinion, nothing more)


P5YcHoM4N! You're a Brown Coat??? Cool!

FE is more of a club style track. If you look at it from a real world view, FE would not be up to standards for professional level racing. The GTR cars are similar to cars you would see in professional racing. The super high curbing is something commonly seen on older, club type tracks (at least here in the US)

FE is too tight for the GTR's mostly.

Having said that, I really like most of the FE courses except for some of the goofy chicanes and the really high curbs. There are lot of challenging corners with off-camber issues and other cool things. GTR's are just a bit crazy there though.

I think some of you are forgetting something. This is a game and it is done for entertainment.

Making severe consequences for wrecking is good. It is important to reward sane driving and realistic racing. However, if you put in weeks of personal time, practicing, tweaking sets, testing tires, etc, and you get punted in turn 1 and end up on your roof, well, that just sucks. I would highly consider not putting in all that effort next time. I do realize that this is "real". But ask any driver and team in any racing series, and they will tell you the worst thing is having something like this happen. If they could change this they would. Also note that consequences like this do NOT stop them from happening in the first place. Dumb turn 1 accidents still happen even though nobody on the grid wants them to happen. (I know we are not talking just about turn 1 here, but it is a good example)

In a simulation, we have the ability to make some adjustments here to insure that everybody has a fair chance of winning, and everybody has a fair chance to have fun AND it is fair and balanced.

Take the XRR getting stuck in the sand with no damage. Should they be a DNF? In real life, I have seen hundreds of situations where cars stuck in the gravel getting pushed out by the marshals and they are allowed to continue if their cars can get back to the pits. There is a penalty because of lost laps, but they can still finish the race. This weekend's F1 race was a prime example. Lewis Hamilton kept racing and almost finished in the points after ending up in the gravel trap.

We know that the XRR getting stuck is probably more realistic than the FXR always getting out of the sand. But this league allows the push car to get cars out of the traps. Why is an unrealistic roll over caused by a curb any different? Yes, the car gets damaged, but I have seen many times where a car rolls, ends up on its wheels, and finishes the race without ever pitting to fix the damage. There are simply limitations to sim racing and leagues should make rules to accommodate some of this. It is one of the things that makes sim racing fun and flexible. (The current implementation of the reset rules also make this more of an issue IMHO)

So, a car that ends up on its roof should be treated like a car in the sand. They should be able to continue, but they will pay a price by a reasonable delay in the pits.

Bones is right about the finishing order. ALMS counts how many laps you have done over the time period and uses that to determine finishing position. To me, this makes more sense than DNF. If I have driven more miles than another competitor, then I should be placed higher overall than that other car. If I am a strange person, I could park my car in the pits after the first lap, leave the pits and finish the last lap, and be placed above a car that got crashed out (so damaged that they can't get to the pits) but finished hundreds of laps. Is that reasonable and fair?

I applaud what the IGTC team is trying to do here. Make a realistic endurance league that is fun and challenging. It is good that they have asked our opinion on the rules changes, but ultimately, it is up to them to decide. If you don't like the decision, find another series. Rule making is very difficult and things have to be spelled out precisely. There are always little things that leak through the cracks. Everybody just has to deal with it and realize that common sense and fair play must take precedence over splitting hairs on the rules.

Sorry about the long post

For short races and for very long endurance races, the fuel burn rate really is not an issue at all. The XRR eats front tires just as fast as the FZR eats tires. You are always lap limited on tires, not fuel. The XRR had to pit at about the same intervals as the FZR during a 24h race for tires.

Power is not really the answer. I do agree that the turbo lag might be a big factor. If you can't get the power down coming out of corners with the XRR, you are going to have slower laps and you will have slower top speeds at the end of the straights.

I also don't see how the FZR could be considered harder to drive than the XRR. They are different, which is good, but they both have their challenges. This is as it should be.

Tire modeling is a big part. Search the forums. There have been some great discussions with real evidence backing up a lot of it.

11:30AM Pacific Time would completely exclude me I'm afraid. Gotta work so I can get that triple monitor setup
Have you considered weekend races? I bet between NASSA and CoRe, we could get 4-6 drivers to join.

Potentially, part of the problem is that seat of the pants "feel" from experience was used to create these graphs. As the tire breaks away and starts producing less grip because of a slide, it will feel like the the tire just broke loose in a very abrupt manner. The tire has not broken loose in an abrupt manner, but the g load in the car will change abruptly going from a constant 1g lateral (in a constant speed corner) to something much less than 1. This is going to feel like you went from tarmac to ice when you haven't.

I think it is very similar to the misconception that if you go from tarmac to wet grass, the car actually speeds up. Well it doesn't. Your rate of deceleration decreases giving you the feeling of acceleration. (I know, deceleration is just negative acceleration, but using the deceleration term is easier to understand)

I think a lot of those graphs in those books were derived from bias ply tires and with cars with much less advanced suspension systems than we currently use. It is possible that those cars with those tires behave very differently than what a more modern setup will behave.

Also, people may equate tires to something like a solid heavy object on a smooth surface (picture a square block of metal). You push and push on the object, and once you get it moving, it slides along pretty nicely. Try that with a rubber block. With enough force, you will get it moving, but it is not going to just start sliding along nicely once it is moving.

Anyway, sorry for the long post. That is just my way of thinking about this subject.

No, we don't know of any other track development beyond some updates to current tracks. Anything else we say here on the forum is pure speculation or wishing

As far as the grip goes, it was covered pretty well in this thread.
I had never driven a car to the limit when I started driving LFS. It was good, but I thought that the cars understeered to easily and the back end would step out too easily.
After actually driving my car on the track, and actually putting a car on or near the limit of adhesion, I can say with more confidence that LFS is very close to being correct. Even with my paltry 170hp in a 3200lb car, I can get the back to step out if I pinch corner exits while applying too much power. I can get the car to understeer through corners. I even had my instructors compliment me on recovering a slide even though I hadn't even realized I had reacted. My muscles just responded appropriately. I attribute this in part to LFS.

You really can't evaluate LFS at the limit by comparing it to street driving. Unless you are a total moron, you just don't put your car on the limit and hold it there on real roads. If you take your car to a track day, once you get used to the g forces, you will start to feel subtle things that you can easily correlate to how LFS behaves.

Quote from Shotglass :

not necessarily
from my udnerstanding the main function of caster is to keep the wheel pointing in the direction the car is going ... if you have a human/servo behind the wheel thats strong nough to keep the wheel straight all by him/itself it shouldnt pose much of a problem

there will be some changes in how the car turns in and how much grip you have during the corner but for the most part it should be about the wheel not returning to centre by itself

That is what I meant by unstable. You would have to constantly be forcing the steering wheel to maintain your direction and the feeback would be extreme. It seems like you would also have the undesireable effect of turning the steering wheel just a tad, and have the front wheels want to turn very quickly to a much higher angle forcing you to fight to hold the steering wheel where you want it. It would be very twitchy indeed. (It would be just like driving LFS with negative force feedback. In other words, working backwards from what it does now)

Quote from Shotglass :

uh what ?
you shouldnt get much of any steering torque at all with 0 caster

Yeah, and wouldn't the car be amazingly unstable if it were actually set at 0? I am no car suspension geometry expert, but some small amount of caster (wheel behind the attachment point for the horn) would be essential for stability.

Le Mans is the track I have been using in rFactor lately too... for obvious reasons. Wistful thinking, but a Le Mans-like track developed by Eric for LFS would be awesome. 24 Hour races on Kyoto GP Long are great, but an 8+ mile long track with some longish straights would be cool.

Quote from Woz :

Well we DO NOT HAVE RALLY in LFS. We have Rallycross which is VERY different and also does NOT have marshalls OR crowd come out and turn you over if you flip so that arguement goes as well.

Maybe, but marshals do remove stuck cars from gravel traps and in some cases help push start stalled cars. Tow trucks are used etc. If a car was on its roof and still drivable, the tow truck could drop it and the car could continue. You are dealing with absolutes when the real world, and even real racing, is full of variables. Don't presume to know it all and therefore dictate to everybody else how it should be.

Quote from Woz :

Everyone is in the same boat so it's fair. The racing since patch X has been FAR better with less T1 madness because people KNOW they can't reset. This is a POSITIVE STEP.

No, it hasn't. Turn 1 is a problem and will always be a problem. Racers who take things more seriously will always be more careful than somebody who is less serious about it, or who simply is having a bad day. A sim is only as "realistic" as you want to make it when it comes to rules and attitudes.

Quote from Woz :

Just wait until the driving view gets locked INSIDE the car when visible windscreen gets added as that will mean no more roof cam or follow cam. I can see the threads on that one already.

Yep, because there are options that are not "realistic" in the game now. But there are so many things that are absent from any sim that you do make exceptions to make the game playable and enjoyable. Draconian limitations only means that a very small subset of a very small community will be interested. It is especially pointless because organizations, like the STCC, can setup their own environments and rules to control this sort of thing all on their own without limitations being globally made by the developers who are being hounded by a minority

Quote from Woz :

All the people moaning post on the forum and the test patch area has been open for MONTHS with the patches that would become X. Why all the tears now, you should have paid attention like the rest of us.

Some of us did, some of us made comments, and some of us have stated our position on this multiple times in the past whenever this discussion comes up.

The point is this is a game. Oh, don't get all horrified, yes, it is a simulator of a racing. But it is still a game. It should be enjoyable. It should be flexible. Quick pickup races on a public server should not be hobbled by rules and restrictions designed strictly for league, or one form of racing. Offline use should also not be unduly restricted. There does need to be focus. This is a racing simulator, therefore, the focus should go there. This is not a crashemup game, this is not a carwars game, it is a racing game. If a by-product is other forms of motorsports, then fine. But development time shouldn't be focused on those things.

I just want to reinforce that he said "Scawen said there will be new cars soon"

Which does not mean that there will be new cars in Patch X.
It only means that we can hope for new cars sometime in the (hopefully near) future.

Great stuff though

Let's not forget about the Panoz Esperante either. It has a live rear axel and gee, it won its class at Le Mans last year.

Having said that, I still would like to see US car manufacturers produce something other than the Corvette that could tickle my fancy a bit more. The old Cadillacs are coming along, but they are still too big and heavy.

I do agree that the front wheel drive race cars commonly seen on the track in touring car races don't do it for me either. They are fine cars, I am sure, but I just like rwd cars better.

Quote from tristancliffe :

I'd love to see a replay of them/you driving where it apparently has no grip. I suspect they just haven't compensated for the lack of feel. I bet they've NEVER turned a wheel more than 90° at 50mph in real life.

Yeah, no kidding.

I can't express completely what a shock it is to actually drive a car on the track, in anger as it were. The braking forces, the lateral g's (even if less than 1) are brutal compared to anything you do on a real road (unless you are wrecking or just plain insane). When I say brutal, I mean brutal. I am not trying to use a word for shock value. And we are talking about my stock car here; not some race car.

You go a lot slower in a real car on a real track as compared to a sim because of these sensations. It takes a lot of time to get used to these things and to then start to feel what the car is doing underneath you. LFS forces you to feel these things using vision, force feedback and sound. All these things are present in the real car too, they are just masked by the noise, g loads, heat, and smells (yes, smells, brake dust, burning clutches, burning petrol, ah yes... heaven). Once you start feeling these more subtle things, it is very surprising how close LFS comes to matching.

One other thing to consider. LFS makes tires very slippery when they are cold, even the street tires. Make sure the tires are green inside and out before doing a comparison. Real street tires don't have a lot of grip change between cold and hot. Over heated street tires will get greasy, ask me how I know, but not too horribly bad.

Quote from joen :

The question is do they drive their real life cars, or do they race them? You can't really compare racing in LFS with driving in real life. I'm sure when they would really race their own cars it will be more similar, depending on the car type of course.

Is LFS 100% realistic? No, that's simply impossible. Is it pretty close? Yes.

Exactly, you really can't compare city or even country driving to track driving. It is also hard to compare LFS to track driving for normal people because you will drive LFS so much harder.

From some limited experience, I can say that LFS does a very good job of modeling car behavior on the track.

If you are driving the GTT, then the turbo lag will get you in the corners. It is actually a pretty powerful car for the tires it uses.

Turn 1 at Blackwood would be a 25mph corner in the real world, maybe less. But in the LFS racing world, it is taken at nearly 50mph in the demo cars. If you slam on the brakes and try to turn in especially if you turn the wheel a lot, you will understeer. If you still have massive steering input in and mash the loud pedal, you will spin out in the rwd cars. This is very true to life.

I would add to that post that it would be nice to have a way to control the flags externally. That way it could be customized for multi-class endurance racing. Something that tracks the overall progress like the Tracker, and can inteligently show blue flags. I would have GTR's sneak up on me too and we never knew if they were ahead or behind us.

I would like to thank the LOTA organizers for inviting me and Osoi to race in this outstanding event. We had a great time overall.

The 050 LOTA 2 team had a difficult time early on and lost some laps because of a few offs. We fought on and did the best we could. We got some great support from Team Mercury. As a result, we didn't have to drive in the ugly hours of 2AM to 6AM our time. We made great progress during the night coming from 27th back up to 19th by the end.

I would like to apologize to any LX6 or micro GTR that I may have abused. It took me a stint or two to get the rhythm of the passing down. I tried to be ultra patient and not push things, but still, some bumps happened. One LX6 I punted coming out of the chicane. It happened I think because they expected me to try and pass them in the chicane, but I wasn't going to try that. They took a weird line, got loose, and I couldn't stop in time.

Overall, it was a fantastic event! Well done.

Although I agree with most of what has been said here concerning suspension damage, I don't think that can be accomplished until the contact patch issue gets resolved.

Now, this is just from observation, not from anything Scawen has mentioned, but it seems the tire/contact patch model only handles one pressure point or contact point. If your tire is hitting a curb, it will be touching the pavement and the curb at the same time in two different places. Search for "exploding curbs" in the bugs forum.

The current model doesn't handle this situation so you get some very strange forces through the system. Just park a car on one of the cracks in the little kink curb on KY2 that is just before the turn onto the oval section. Your car will start hopping and vibrating. This is what everybody calls "explosive curbs". If you drive over them slowly, you will get suspension damage. This is because large forces are generated because of the double contact points on the tire.

Until that is fixed, more advanced suspension damage will just cause unwarranted problems.

I do agree that flying over the monster high curbs on the FE tracks (and others) at full throttle should cause massive damage to the car. I just don't think this can happen until the above is fixed.

Quote from tristancliffe :

23) How many exhaust outlets did the XRT have in S1? 12!

Do I win?

----------end test------------

No, the correct answer is 11.

Nice work BBT! I love the concept. But you know way more about LFS than any normal person should know.

I tried hitting P to restart. It didn't seem to work for me. I will try it again tonight.

I am using W23 at this point.
I was driving hotlaps on SO4. I hit p to pause the game. I hit shift+R to go to the replay. LFS is still responsive, but no replay is playing and the screen is blank other than the blue-ish background. I can hit escape to bring up the menu. If I hit shift+R again and I get a message of replay restarted and an error message... I now can't remember the error message

Using the escape menu, you can go to the pits or whatever else you need, but the replay won't play.

Quote from HeerBommel :

LFS is getting better and better, great job....
But offline the AI drivers are still stupid drivers, and now they have to qualify out of the pitlane they have a new problem, they don't know how to drive through the pitlane.

When I start a offline qualifiing session with AI drivers I have the following message:
S2 Alpha - AI drivers can't yet qualify - they don't know how to drive through the pitlane.

http://i166.photobucket.com/al ... /aidriverscantqualify.jpg

When are you going to fix the AI drivers in LFS ???

1) No yelling for features
2) Who do you think put that message in the program? Do you think Windows can magically figure out that AI can't drive the pit lane? It is WAD for now (Working As Designed).

Go to LFS World and download the world record hot laps. Watch what they do. You won't be able to do the same thing, but you will learn the line and what to look for. Test drive their cars to see what it feels like.

Go to the Team Inferno site and download some setups and see what you like.

Then, if you really want a critique, post a replay of your driving with a few laps in it.