If you are interested in driving the other cars too, then look for NASSA by 500Servers. We often have Wednesday evening fun races. We are also supporters of The Original LFS League and the North American League.

I will check out the SimFIA stuff and see if I can fit it into my schedule. Sounds like fun, but it will be tough with the BF1, it is a lot of car.

Quote from Cue-Ball :

So people who don't like F1 are not intellectual or technical?

Don't take it that way. To be ignorant is not the same as being stupid. Ignorant means you lack information. There is a lot going on with F1 from the drivers, teams, technical, rules, etc. If you don't get into a lot of the off camera stuff, it is harder to enjoy the sport. Watching golf is a prime example. If you have never played, you can't appreciate the skill it takes to make those shots. It is a thing of beauty and can be riveting.

I love F1. I think BTCC is fun, but it is more like bumper cars than racing (just my opinion). I prefer ALMS. Super fast and technical prototypes, cool sports cars, great drivers, and lots of action. I also like the SPEED World Challenge. Very cool stock cars racing. I have never gotten into the Aussie V8 series. I don't know the tracks or the drivers and I have lots of other racing to watch, so I don't try to get into it much. I am sure I would enjoy it if I took the time to get to know the series. You see, I am ignorant about it

I doubt the BF1 will increase the number of people who like F1. I think it will increase their respect for the drivers or the cars, but it won't make the sport exciting for them.

Quote from BrandonAGr :

I think the timer at the end of the cockpit cam video shows 59.0. And it looked wet out there, so probably could drop a good amount of time.

Well, the red light was flashing and this usually indicates the rain traction program is enabled. But it looked like he had the normal dry weather racing tires on to me. They may have put the rain program on so he could keep the car on the track?

Quote from Woz :

Oval racing is very different to other forms of racing. Just watch a bit of NASCAR to see what I mean.

Cars are almost always near flatout and the racing is bumper to bumper and side to side at times. To be able to race at these speeds and this close you have to drive in a different way.

When you have cars very close you should hold your line through a corner. The car behind is the one trying to pass. It is their responsibility not to hit you BUT it is also your responsibility not to do something unexpected, like change line. When the cars are always as close to the edge at this speed you have to drive in a different way. This is why NASCAR has spotters that tell the driver where people are in relation to them on the track.

Oval is about drafting, team plans. Do you bet on a yellow flag and wait for it to pit or do you really need to pit which will cost you more laps while sat in the pit lane.

Hmmm, not really. Maybe the races you see are all the restrictor plate races on the super speedways? On the short tracks like Martinsville or Bristol, they are only on full throttle for a short period. They use the brakes heavily and actually do trail brake into the corners. There really is no drafting involved. It is all about mechanical grip and track position. Of course 43 cars on a mile long track is pretty insane, but that is NASCAR. The rest of your comments are spot on

Quote from Becky Rose :

The day the world salutes one flag will be a great day indeed*.

*Depending upon the colour of the flag.

DOH!

lol, well red, white and blue of course.
Hmmmm, how many flags are there with those colors?

Quote from wE1l :

Er...I mean what is an International foot? It sounds to me that both the English foot and the International foot is used in the U.S.

The standard used by pretty much everybody is the "International" foot. The "US Survey foot" was based off an older standard and is slightly different. It only comes up because many of the land surveys done in the US are based off of the older definition of the foot... Painful, isn't it?illepall

I was in the military for a lot of years. We used metric units for all distance calculations. For example, I used to know that at 90 KIAS (Knotts Indicated Air Speed) that I was doing 3 Klicks (Kilometers) per minute. All our maps were metric.

Quote from wE1l :

Don't Americans use imperial standard for one's height? Like five six, or six two. What gauges do you use in America, MPH or KPH?

Yes, I am 6' 2" as an example. We use MPH for all cars, but KPH is also listed on all of them too.

We use pound (lbs) for weight instead of Kilos, and gallons for fluid (which is different than European gallons).

For the majority of 'Mericans, there is only one system. But we do call it "Imperial".
However, when you ask about feet, depending on who you talk to, you might get the question of which "feet"? US Survey foot, or International foot. They are different. illepall
Then we could get into the Texas Vara. A unit of measurements that is exactly 1/3 of 100 feet. Talk about a pain to use, lol.

Personally, I wish we would just switch to metric. I work in a field were measurements are critical and using multiple systems causes a bunch of errors and complications.

I use Imperial in LFS. I don't like KPH because there is too many ticks per unit so to speak. A MPH analog gauge is readable, a KPH guage is hard to read.

Quote from BWX232 :

I'd much rather see Pixel shader 2.0 (direct X9) features for LFS than higher res textures.. So if there is a choice for spending time on higher res textures or updating the game for DX9... that s a no brainier.

Yes, that is what I would rather see too.

I love this quote...

"It MUST be optimised as a racing simulator, not a screen shot generator."
Scawen

Quote from gishuk :

thats stupid

whats the point of racing if you cant take a fair defensive line?

For the most part, I agree with you. And in reality, drivers definitely do hug the low line to defend in most of the oval racing that I see.

Part of the problem here is the KY Oval is a "Super Speedway". You don't have to lift the loud pedal for any of the corners in any of the cars. This puts the race down to drafting. Drafting races are a completely different turkey as compared to smaller ovals. If somebody gets a draft on you, they are going to pass, there is nothing you can do about it. If you try to block, you will cause an accident.

On ovals with cars with exactly the same power, drafting is key. An overtaking car will draft you, then pop out to pass. If you then change your line to let them by, chances are, you just changed your line right into their line.

Defending the lower line is perfectly acceptable, if your are fighting for position, otherwise keep clear. The faster car is going to want to take the apex or the lower line through the corner if possible. This is one time when you do change your line, but only because the other car has already come up beside you in the corner.

The oval can be fun for a while. It is a different style of racing and not all road racing rules are relevant. It is not my favorite form of racing so I don't spend much time there.

This has been an issue with the LSD since it came out. It was especially a problem with the XRR, but happens on all cars. The drive axel basically gets locked by the brakes. Your tire might not be locked up, but the axel. is. The rev's will drop just like you say, and it usually results in a spin. I have even had this happen with the UF1.

Try moving your brake bias further to the rear if possible. If not, lower the brake force some. The other thing to do us to use the locked diff. For some reason, using the locked diff removes the issue.

Less camber in RWD rear wheels is because of more traction for power (as stated earlier) and because the rear is generally stiffer by nature because the lack of the steering requirement. In other words, the rear should have less overall dynamic camber change than the front does (at least in formula cars).

F1 cars typically run around 3° front and 1.5° rear camber. However, I don't know if that is a static or dynamic setting. (Steve Matchett book, Chariot Makers)

Teams often add camber to increase the heat in the tire. I am interested by this because if you try this in LFS, you end up with a very hot inner tire, but a cold outer tire.

I'll have to go read that other thread on the sidewalls in LFS. This could have a dramatic impact on just how much camber is effective.

Quote from Bean0 :

JOHN Player Special

Now go and stand in the corner :dunce:

:dunce: :tired: :sorry: :uglyhamme
Too early here, must have coffeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Thanks for the correction. But you get my point... right?

As far as the car sponsors go, I have seen a lot of people who like to do historic car skins. Like the Gary Player Special, and the old Marlboro Ferrari skin. You can't go back in time and whipe the tobbacco sponsors off of those cars, so why not show them on a skin now?

The problem with running a longer race on a public server is that people join and leave constantly. You get a huge mix of drivers from the alien, to the first-time driver. You get a lot of problems with some drivers just wanting to practice mixing with people who are actually in the race. It works out sometimes, but I have rarely seen a longer public race where more than a few cars actually finish the race, the rest either get bored and leave or just wreck out.

We do run occasional public races that are longer. We announce them on this forum, so they are semi-planned. We will usually lock the server down once qualifying is done so people can't join.

We also run some medium length races on a pickup basis. But, you really need an admin there the entire time to make sure things are running smoothly.

So, long races are best left to organized efforts. They rarely work well on public servers.

My problem with it is that I can drive a good line, not make any mistakes in the XRT, and have a FXO in front of me that slides big time through the corner and takes a poor line, and I can't catch them. They power out of the corner and walk away.
So, not only is it "easier" to drive, but good driving skills compared to poor, does not even out the situation. If one car is driven poorly, another car in the class that is driven very well should be able to beat the poorly driven car. It seems to not be the case right now.

Now, having said that, it could just come down to setups, but I don't think so.

I don't like the FWD cars as much as the RWD cars. I prefer to drive the RWD, but the way it is now, if I want any hope of winning I have to drive the FWD car (in the TBO class).

Quote from AeoIus :

I never practice offline and have never done so. It's an online simulator so that's what I want to use. And although I am definitely not a great driver I'm reasonably quick to learn a decent control of a car on a circuit.

And there we have the crux of this particular problem. It is a dilema. But just because LFS is an online racing simulator, you can't just take one of the words and make it manditory without the others. If you take "online" as being manditory, then you must take "racing" as manditory. Wandering around the track running multiple seconds slower than everybody else, taking wrong turns, not able to control your car at all is NOT racing.

Unfortunately, there are people out there that simply don't care one way or another. They have trouble controlling the cars so they just bang around until they get board. This behaviour does ruin races for us, but they don't care. You can be nice to them, but again, they don't care because they are not paying attention. You just have to live with it or do most of your racing in leagues.

Did you unlock the R or T versions previously? If you did, then you don't have to re-unlock the U version.

I used to have this happen with my older graphics card. Sometimes when I used shift+4 to go to windowed mode, and tried to use a different app, LFS would slow way down. If found that resetting the graphics driver by changing a setting would sometimes fix it. Other times it would just crash the program. It did not seem to be a LFS problem, but more of a DirectX / Graphics driver problem.

I do get stutters from time to time now, but that has been happening since S2 alpha came out. I think it is realated to another app trying to do something in the background.

In your case it sounds like it only happens while online. I don't know the answer, but if you system is a bit on the old side, then you could be getting too many packets from the server. It might be set at 6, where 4 is better for slower computers. Try running in a window and watch the CPU meter in the task manager to see if it is peaking out.

The biggest problem is most of us want to encourage new racers to learn. We are willing to allow exceptions for them, even when they brake way to late for turn one and take everybody out. The wrecker idiots take advantage of this niceness in all of us. This then in turn makes a lot of us react negatively to honest mistakes. Our first reaction upon getting hit is to call the other driver a wrecker. I personally think this is the biggest damage that wreckers do. Not ruining a few pick-up races on a server, but they cause disention and disrespect amongst honest racers.

So, the way I see it is to do one of two things: Be very liberal with bans and realize that if you make a mistake and take out other cars, that you most likely will get banned from a server, even if you are not a wrecker. Live with it and try not to make big mistakes in the future.

Or, we can just keep trying to be nice and deal with the wreckers like we always have. Once they are identified, ban them and try to spread the word with other server admins. This can be frustrating, but is probably still the best way to go.

One thing that would help is to have a website address in the welcome message for all organized servers and on the website have a "contact the admin" email link. That way it would be easier to contact admins. Or, just post that email as part of the welcome message.

If you don't feel like you are just about to lose control, then you are not going fast enough.

However, the more you practice, the more it feels like you are in control, and you push it just that little bit further. During a long race, you step it back a bit to maintain consistency.

I love some of the comments here, it shows me that although we are all different, some things are the same everywhere.

There are some briliant cars out there, and there are some real duds. There are some that are sad, because they could have been so much more and some that are sad because they were in the first place.

I have seen great stupidity in design, engineering and service from all parts of the globe. Nobody has it perfect, but every once in a while, things just click and you end up with something special. I think LFS is one of those things.

I'm sorry Tristian if I came off as just a bit defensive. After I posted, I thought to myself, why am I trying to defend the US car makers? I don't like most of what they do and what they make. The best thing that has happened to them is the competitive pressure from European and Japanese manufacturers.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Yes, and there's a reason. America is still in the 1920's with car and engine design. Mmmm, pushrods and leaf springs. I know, lets call this car the sports version...

P.S. I know it's not so bad now, you're probably in the 1970's of European car design. But come on, America has yet to produce half a dozen good sports cars. The Newest 'vette is suposedly the best yet, and it has a time on Nurburgring to prove it. But optimising a car for the Nurburgring doesn't actually means is necessarily any good in real life. I'd bet a Mazda 787B is quicker round it, but I'd also bet it's utterly useless on an open public road. So don't use the 'it's good round a track' argument here, it cuts no mustard with me. When America makes a good chassis/engine/body I'll be the first to admit it.

Overstatement or just plain ignorance?
America has a huge market for a very wide variety of cars. I doubt you will find push rods in many cars now... except for NASCAR where it is mandated by the rules. Plus, pushrods can be better for certain applications just like live axels are. It is all in what you want from a car.

The big American manufacturers are slow to respond and they do have a tendency to follow trends instead of taking risks. But that does not mean that we are without some alternatives. Check out http://www.panozauto.com/

I own a Chevy... truck. It's a good truck. I also own a BMW 323. It is a great car. In some ways I wish more American manufacturers would produce something more innovative. But, they mostly produce generic boring cars that are geared to the mass-market here in the US. And they do work fine for that purpose. Somebody has to make cars like that. I do get annoyed at the Marketing hype calling certain cars "sports" versions when all they do is add bigger wheels and a useless spoiler, but that is true of a lot of car manufactures.

I am not defending the big three manufacturers, in general, they suck for sports cars, but there has been some good movement in the right direction over the last few years. It is frustrating because they can do it if they push for it, but they always manage to screw things up. The latest trends are nostalgia muscle "pony" cars, Mustang, GTO, Charger. They look cool, but they are still big and lacking in a really good suspension system.

Of course, you can slam any manufacturer for lame ideas and features. The BMW "no maintenance" gearboxes are just plain stupid and the E46 model of the 3 series does not even have an option for a limited slip differential.:pillepall

Quote from danowat :

Not bashing Americans, just their cars, big difference my friend .

As for the Brits having a superior attitude to cars, its a bit difficult to have that when we have little or no car industry to speak off.

Dan,

lol, and that is a sad thing considering the rich racing history.

If you have ever driven here in America, you would know why things are the way they are. I have driven across this great land a number of times. There are roads of all types, but the fact is, there is a long, long way between stops in some places. I have driven for hours without seeing a town and in some cases, another car. I used to commute once a month 3/4 of the way across the state of Oregon. That is almost like driving across Germany. This kind of trip is common here.