I can just imagine the discussion in Honda Marketing: "What do you think, if we put a green paint job on our petrol-guzzling, worldwide jetting, 800 bhp enviroment polluters, would that be enough to make people believe F1 is green, even without any technology to back it up?"

For some people in this thread it seems to have worked. In fact it seems to have worked in general as the average reaction seems to be "WTF, it's ugly!" instead of "WTF, where is green technology in F1?". Maybe they made it ugly on purpose?

Smells distinctly like [url=Greenwash]greenwashing[/url] to me.

You need to lower the car sound slider in the audio options.

First Nascar race I ever watched from start to finish (last time I tried I fell asleep).

All in all it wasn't that bad. There definately is an element of exitement when so many cars are so close to each other, with only a handful of laps remaining. Also some drama in there with P1 and P2 taking each other off after several hours of racing. I think I might be watching some more races this year but I can't imagine watching all 58 or however many there are.

It's kind of the same as with NBA. I used to watch it a lot but after a while I got a tired of the concept: everything that happens in the first three quarters is pretty much meaningless because the game usually gets decided in the timeout/tactical-foul/free-throw orgy right at the end. Not pretty.

In Nascar the equivalent would be the stint from the last caution to the finish. Drivers that had been as far behind as P40 during the race were actual contenders at the end. But then the finish itself was of course as Hollywood as can be: sun gone down, unexpected winner, burning car crossing the line upside down...

So, as I said, not as bad as I was expecting and I can see myself tuning in a few times in future, at least for the start and the finish.

One thing I have to say though is that Nascar is head and shoulders above F1 in terms of coverage quality. The cameras never seem to miss anything, you get all the different views you could dream of, usually while the commentators are still talking about an incident, not sometime later, they have technology that allows them to overlay the live speed of any car at any time, they can show you incidents in a 3D rendered enviroment based on GPS data of each car etc. Compare that to F1 which keeps on missing important on-track situations because they had to switch to Zsolt Baumgartner making a pitstop. Then you have to wait till after the race hoping that you might get to see some of the things you missed or maybe even some new camera angles of other incidents.

And I haven't even mentioned the fact that Nascar has been in HDTV for years (which of course I can't watch in TV challenged Germany), which on it's own already makes F1 coverage look very dated.

The pitstops in Nascar on the other hand a way to messy IMO. When I saw them all rush in during the first caution I was already thinking that it just doesn't look right to have so many cars threading (or spinning) their way between all the mechanics, who are running around and are trying to concentrate on performing a pitstop. This isn't 1950, there's no reason to put these, undoubtedly hard working people, in such a dangerous situation. Needless to say later in the race one man was run over by a car exiting the pits. Anyone know how he came out of it?

Having said that, at least the caution system actually works, in F1 it has always been a complete joke, with leading drivers going from first to last if they were unlucky with the timing of the safety car dispatchment. I think they changed something about this recently in F1 but I can't remember when or what.

PS: does anyone have any idea where there might be some downloadable sample clips of HDTV Nascar on the net? You'd think that somebody must have uploaded something to rapidshare or a torrent site after several years of FTA availability.

PPS: What's a trackbar?

Last edited by J.B., Mon, 19 Feb 2007 18:35.

Looks like Loeb isn't racing after all.

http://rallye.motorsport-total ... ein_Le_Mans_07021506.html (German)

I know. I was just saying that the reason the wings on those cars kept failing was because they were attached to the moving suspension.

Some great pics here. I had no idea there ever was a Williams six wheeler.

Quote from Gunn :

Best pic I have of the P34 and a piccy of those funny raised wings.

See the cable going up one of the rear wing poles? I think that might be part of the mechanism for the driver to change the angle of attack on the straights. Banned today of course.

Quote from Shotglass :

they were more than just funny ... actually they were somewhat superior to todays design in the way that the downforce was applied directly to the wheels instead of the cars body

Which was also (one of) the reasons for this:

Quote from Shotglass :

thats pretty clever actually ... if its adjusted to the slip angle the rear tyres peak at it might be a bit quicker than a normal wing

Yeah, that's what I thought. Could maybe also be used to increase yaw stability. But on that particular car I get the impression designer probably just thought it looks cool.

Good stuff.

Here's a link to the interview via a machine translator thingie: http://www.tranexp.com:2000/In ... =&from=dan&to=eng

Good that he thinks there is some "fair and close racism" going on online.

From what I gather he hasn't driven LFS much yet because his wheel is broken and he likes GT legends and WTCC.

Trail braking is important for the simple fact that you can brake later if you do it. That's without taking into account any resulting effects such as weight shift or front slip ratio increase. Depending on setup these things can be good or bad for the balance but as I said, if you trail brake you can brake later which is good.

Quote from lerts :

... ive noticed WR dont trail brake

Is this true? I never noticed it.

OK, I spent most of the week using a different computer while my main machine was running memtest. Some things I learnt along the way that might be of interest:

-faulty RAM will usually fail in test #4, regardless of timings and clocks
-test #5 usually fails because of timing and clock speed issues
-most errors are caught within 10 passes but the latest error I saw was after 57 passes of test #4!

-and most important of all: DON'T BUY CHEAP RAM! It will work fine but it will begin to fail earlier than quality RAM. Even if they are chips from a good manufacturer on a no-name circuit board. This doesn't mean you are getting quality chips from a no-name supplier, it just means you are getting the chips that the original manufacturer sold off after testing. And spending your time with memtest to find out what's going on is not something you want to do.

Bottom line for me is that I had 3 Broken DIMMS, 2 good ones, and a dying GPU. Luckily all the components should be under warranty so the only thing I've wasted is my time.

Phew, this time I managed to finish the post without the artifacts suddenly taking over while I'm typing how everythings fixed.

Quote from J.B. :

Loeb is also driving [for Peugeot]

Have to correct myself here. Loeb is driving for Pescarolo again and is doing so for free due to the limited budget of the small team. That guy's a class act.

http://www.eurosport.com/carra ... 06/sport_sto1044883.shtml

Great to see Audi finally getting some competition. The car is beautiful and the driver line-up is world class (Loeb is also driving).

Good suggestions, I think Fan, RAM clock and PSU are OK. I'm now using an older 6200 GPU and will wait for about a week to see if the artifacts are gone.

Who are Fusion interactive? Have they proven to have an understanding of physics? Would that be enough to get anything useful out of the ISI engine?

Quote from Bob Smith :

Perhaps you still haven't spotted the minimap in the corner.

*me hides, ashamed

Last edited by J.B., Sun, 4 Feb 2007 03:51.

Quote from Bob Smith :

Look again at that image you attached in the first post, J.B.

lol, that's track knowledge!

This is getting ridiculous. I let memtest run on my brand new RAM and it failed at 5 passes out of 11 after running for about 6 hours. I think the the only reasonable assumption for me to make at the moment is that both my RAM and GPU are broken. I guess I need to return my "el cheapo" RAM again and pay more some more to get RAM that actually works at it's specified clock rate and replace my GPU while I'm at it. This is really annoying me and I don't understand why there is no software that can automatically tell me which part of my hardware exactly is failing!

Well I'll report on how this issue continues and thanks to the people in this thread who didn't convict me of being some kind of cracker/hacker just because of the specifics of my forum account. BTW, how did you know I raced at AS3?

I replaced the faulty RAM this morning and just finished a league race without any problems so, yes, I'm pretty sure now that it really was the RAM. Thx for the hint though.

.....

DAMMIT! Just while I was writing this post the artifacts came back! ****in PC's! How the hell am I going to find out what the problem is! I'm gonna do another memtest right now and if it doesn't fail I'm getting rid of the GPU.

Quote from al heeley :

Where do you think the energy comes from to charge the batteries every 2 or 3 days?
Think about the significant losses every time energy is converted from one form into another.
Oil into gasoline into car into miles
vs
oil into power plant fuel into electricity into car into miles

Which do you think burns the most oil in the end, and puts more pollutants intot eh atmosphere?
The marketing works well as the happy owner drives round with a warm feeling that he's doing his bit for the environment, yet he doesn't see the extra wasteage and inefficiencies further up the chain that in fact add more environmental problems than previously existed.

Well large, modern power plants are better at dealing with pollutants than little cars, each with their own little polluting engine. But you're probably still right about overall pollution, due to the inefficiencies you mention.

But for me the thing is that an all electric car at least gives a choice about how to be fed with energy. If it gets it's power from nuclear or solar sources or whatever then it's definately a lot better for the atmosphere than a conventional, fossil-fueled engine. If power companies insist on producing dirty energy then of course electric cars won't "save the world" but then the underlying problem is more one of energy politics than one inherent to car technology.

Anyway. By driving cars in LFS you'll always be polluting the atmosphere in the same way as an electric car, regardless of the type of engine simulated. But since LFS runs fine on low-end machines I guess we can already qualify LFS as a "green" PC game.

Last edited by J.B., Sat, 3 Feb 2007 11:04.

Dunno. But whatever it is, I'm sure it's better than irreversibly releasing them into the earths athmosphere.

You can't blame the car for people who think coal and oil are good energy sources.

I wouldn't say no to this car in LFS. Only two gears because of it's great torque curve. And I've always wanted to know how the lack of internal combustion explosions affects driving enjoyment.

Well two things:

-The artifacts still haven't reappeared since I removed one of the RAM sticks.
-The RAM I removed does indeed fail memtest!

So by the looks of it these artefacts were caused bay faulty RAM. I wouldn't have thought this to be possible myself. Thanks for the help guys, if anything new happens I'll report.

Does anyone think that these kind of artifacts could be caused by faulty RAM? I removed a stick and haven't had any problems since.

frokki:
What exactly would I be trying to fix by heating up the card with a hot air gun?

Quote from J.B. :

Not yet, no. I'll try drivercleaner next. Will take a couple of days before I can confirm if it did anything though.

Only took 5 minutes: I just got artifacting when there wasn't even a driver installed, with the standard Windows driver.

Quote from Ku-sama :

try updating the drivers and also blow all of the dust out of your PC, your GPU could be overheating

Already done that, temp is 60°C, which is very low for a 6600 GT.

Time to check the warranty, methinks.