to be fair to WRC, according to autosport this week ESPN were the only broadcaster that were even interested in taking the WRC !! which is a sad indication of it's percieved status amongst sports broadcasters in the UK.
eurosport of course own the IRC so it's no surprise their coverage of the monte was so good.

the problems started when the WRC started hunting for the best deal from broadcasters rather than forming long term partnerships which encourage more effort in developing the coverage, the IRC's coverage looks an awfull lot like what dave richards envisaged for the WRC 10 years ago but thanks to the way the WRC media rights have been changed, then changed again on short term contracts, the WRC is still going on about coverage of one special stage live as a big breakthrough whilst the monte's coverage was so good it's easier to say what they didn't show live.

for me the WRC is now at a stage were it doesn't know what it wants to be, it's gone to shorter and shorter, more compact formats (the fact that solberg talks about how much better the "longer" events of just 10 years ago were says everything, at the time they were considered sprints compared to the events in the 80's or earlier) all to supposedly aid teams and media but with little effect on participation or coverage and now just as a new class of car is being introduced with the aim of increasing manufacturer entries. they're talking about going away from the central service area routes and back to more spread out events.

Quote from sinbad :

I'm Not arguing that hd is not a much more detailed and defined image. It sometimes is. I just think it doesn't actually improve the viewing experience all that much. There's a bit more detail, so what. SD is still perfectly watchable. This is coming from the owner of a couple of hd tvs and subscriber to an hd service.

best post on the subject it's nice, it's an improvement but it's not a huge development, certainly compared to the improvement when broadcasts started switching from 405 line VHF to 625 line UHF in the UK (yes i do just about remember it )

i suspect a lot of views on HD depend upon just exactly what is / was the quality of the SD picture in the first place as differing countires have differing standards, especially those where the roll out to digital has accompanied HD so comparisons are being made with analogue pictures on standards such as NTSB.

feeling a bit blue now, i had booked time off to be able to watch this on tv (work nights inc sat) but i had to bring it forward a week to take care of a friend who was going into hospital for an op. felt good about it at the time but kind of sucks now

Quote from Töki (HUN) :

Woot, new build today.

looking at the release notes it looks as if it's going to be the sort of update that gets all the usual suspects complaining that it's not big enough.

for most of us i'm sure it's a good solid update that puts in place the foundations for bigger changes in the future, especially with the basic introduction of F mod and, improved damping charecteristics of tyres and improved frame rates for most users. i can see the facebook function being usefull for those that use facebook a lot and want to publicise what they are doing which could add to iracing's exposure amongst non members, plus of course a load of car specific improvements.

with damage / repair changes due in the very close future before the world champoinships start and with john henry posting about how dave kaemmer is so excited about the way the tyre model is looking, it looks like being a good 2011.

Quote from DeKo :

F1 season looks really good, I'm going to concentrate on that and the Nascar class A series this season, should be a good one with tons of participation because of the Pro qualifying. I quite fancy running the Indy car aswell, especially on the ovals, with probably the Radical and C6R on the road aswell to give me a break from the F1 car. I quite fancy running a bit of Grand-Am aswell, but i'm going to skint myself with all the content I need to buy.

New build is being rolled out at lunchtime GMT tomorrow, should be interesting.

you need to sleep at some point in the next 12 weeks mate

know how you feel though, after finally getting back to the stage where i feel i can last a race i'm now spoilt for choice.

i'm doing the australian vitrual racing sports car challenge but everything else is undecided, really started to enjoy the williams so thats tempting even though i'll never be fast enough, then there's the skippy which i was going to do as i've always avoided only to find i like driving it but now they've anounced the mx5 / jetta series i'm so tempted by that as well. plus i really do enjoy the radical when i have time, lotus is fun but i always find i take time to re adapt to it after driving anything else so thats unfortunately out.

at the moment it's looking like skippy and mx5 just because the races go official pretty much every time and i can just use the same setup everywhere as it makes so little difference once your comfortable with it, then i'll add in the williams though it'll probably be a case of sticking with one setup for each downforce level and just adjusting gears for this season. ill practice the DP in grand am but thats just to work on it for the hosted series and maybe do a few radical races for fun depending on what track it's on each week.

just reading that back i'm as bad as you deko

have you had any ear problems, severe head colds, tooth / jaw pain recently ?

it could easily be a problem with your inner ear, see your doctor may just be an infection or it could be the start of something like menier's disease. i suffer from a mildish case, i'm ok but rollercoasters etc are a complete no no, even fairground roundabouts can cause me problmes with my balance and give feelings of nausea. alan shepard the astronaut suffered from it which was why it was so long between his first and second flights and why it was jim lovels crew on apollo 13 rather than his crew.

hopefully WRC and ESPN will have taken a long hard look at eurosports coverage of the IRC from monte carlo, more live coverage and in car footage than you could shake a stick at (what the hell does that mean anyway?), commentators that actually appeared to be watching the event rather than talking randonly over a coffee and nice simple interviews with drivers at the stage finishes (just enough without becoming an inconvenience to the drivers).

also for some reason the actual in car footage seemed to be of higher visual quality than what you see on the WRC, not sure if it really was, but maybe the equipment was of higher quality, at one point it was good enough to make my parents, who are in their late 70's, stop as they walked past and stand watching it for a good 15 minutes and my 11 year old son, who normally doesn't give motorsport on TV a second glance, quite happily watched the whole of the last two stages coverage without any encouragement from me.

Quote from DEVIL 007 :

This is the most ignorant post from developer towards the comunity I ever saw. What a real shame he puts everyone into same bin. It seems he dont understand that people who asking about updates, feedback are people who really care about LFS.

Its a shame some people here back in their post call someone who ask for something or make some critism as moaner. Wake up people. This was nice comunity. Please dont offend each other.

All the latest post from devs to me seems. "we dont care what you think about LFS". This is wrong in anyway. Respect goes both ways.

must admit i was real surprised to see this post by eric, whilst i can understand his frustration at some of the posts on this and other forums and i agree with intrepid's views, it does seem to be rather self destructive for a dev of a game to say if you don't like the delays go away, maybe he should just think how many S3 licences they would sell if by the time it's released the only people still playing are the demo users.

as devil says it's not on to lump everyone together like that, i've supported the devs and the time it takes to come out with something as complicated as a new tyre model (look how long its taking dave at iracing to do the same thing) and have always intended to buy S3 as soon as it comes out but now i'm not so sure, if eric's post is a true guide as to how the devs feel about their customers then i don't particularly feel any urge to give them any more business.

hopefully future posts will prove my past feelings about the devs were correct but only time will show

Quote from DeKo :

You'll be able to spot my car a mile away, it's bright blue and red with a massive Scotland flag on the bonnet .

i know, who do you think posted up the celtic logos for you mate

hope you do well, i'll be watching so your doomed, be nice to see how the car looks

Quote from Ball Bearing Turbo :

I like the connected organic feel of LFS' physical model but I find that under most circumstances iRacing is a little more believable in terms of consequence. Even having the Solstice snap into place after an intentional drift puts a smirk on my face after years of LFS' marshmellow brush model responses.

you just summed up exactly differences between the two sims modeling (both tyres and physics),as you said LFS feels more organic and a whole but iracing has that true to life snap effect and you can feel the weight of the car trying to take it the other way.

having seen this on insidesimracing i'm very tempted, even if it means getting a wheel for my sons xbox or a ps3 to go with my logitech wheel. ideally a pc version would be the solution but unless they change plans that's not going to happen .

ed martin seems to be going out of his way to praise up iracing so there may be a bit of not wanting to intrude on dave kaemmer's turf having worked together though personally i suspect that NASCAR 2011 on all platforms with it's scalability between arcade and serious(ish) sim may act as a great way of introducing possible future iracers to the concept of serious online racing.

Quote from mrodgers :

never shit on your own.

i assume you mean on your own time and not to have someone in there with you to talk to.

looks like spa is a real system punisher at the moment, hope the end of season update gives the promised 30% improvement.

apart from that it's f#@*&^g amazing

+1, moose it was david brabham who commented on driving it with your wrists in the autosport test of it at lime rock earlier this year, mario in a side bar pointed out that when he tested it in it's current spec he had to get them to run the car a lot lower than they used to run to produce ground effect since the loss of the side skirts so that seems to suggets our ultra low ride heights are fairly accurate aswell.

i posted a (poor) scan of the test on the lotus forum, here's the link to the scan

http://s284.photobucket.com/al ... port%20lotus%2079%20test/

EDIT: i suppose that gives away what my real name is as well if you look on iracing for the thread

just spent 30 odd minutes laughing my head off.

our local hooligan boy racer, the one who's always wheelspinning, handbraking round the village all night, never goes anywhere but drives all night. anyway his super low, super wide tyred, super bodykitted saxo got stuck on about 4inches of snow whilst all the grannies etc were driving past him. took him 15 mins to realise that just sitting there spinning your wheels doesn't help before he had a bit of a dig around and then to cap it all he first managed to loosen his front spoiler by using it as a snow plough then ripped his rear bumper kit off completely before loosing his rag and kicking his door hard enough to put an big dent in it and break the window which was wound half way down.

made my christmas

first time in years we've had decent snow on anglesey, normally even when orth wales is covered with the stuff we escape due to being stuck out in the sea that little bit.

funny to watch the people who've never experiencd much snow driving, one car just went past doing about 5mph, the next was doing 30 mph, i'd say that 30mph was closer to the safe speed than 5mph as the main roads are pretty good.

also have you noticed that the people who are so scared of the snow when they are driving are usually the same people who are scared to actually clean their windows first, saw a vectra last night that only had about a 6 inch clear strip across the top of his windscreen, unless he was a basketball player i can't imagine he could see anything much at all. about 15 years ago a woman having driven 10 miles to our village and parked on the hgih street with just a "letterbox" to see through manged to start off and drive straight into the lorry parked in front of her as she hadn't seen it, apart from her windscreen, you'd wonder how she didn't notice it when she got into the car

ok this is for an AOl 8mb connection

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1074053501.png

AOL get a load of stick, but for me they've always been the best connection for our location (as long as you don't use their software), when we were on dial up the connection was often reported by test sites as being an ISDN connection and the sped advantage compared to neighbouring houses seems to have stayed on broadband

i seem to recall the idea is that when they are within 1 sec then race control makes the drivers control of the rear wing operational, not that they automatically adjust the rear wing. basically it gives the driver the option of reducing drag if he wants it and presumably if they are allowed to operate it mid corner (wasn't very clear when i first saw the proposal) it will help redress the aero balance issues caused by the loss of front downforce when close behind another car, though if the loss of overall grip is balanced by better balance will i suspect depend on the bend, car and driver.

rather contraversial charector but he was definatley a charector !!

RIP tom, i'll always remember the description of him as the worlds only "oversquare" human due to how wide his shoulders were.

anyone else see the picks of what the next "smaller" "lifestyle" range rover will look like ? they put it against the 4WD mini and the mini's bigger FFS !!

what part of the word mini don't BMW understand? i'd hate to think what their idea of raunchy clothing's like as i'm pretty sure any mini skirts will start at the shoulder and have 3ft of material dragging along the floor

anyone else hear the landon interview on iracing today ? interestig what he has to say about the cars and tracks. basically the tracks are spot on but the cars are mixed, the grip apparently is spot on to the extent that he used exactly the same turn in / lift points at charlotte as he uses in iracing and qualified 12th with his first flying lap but the physics and setup options to achieve that grip are different, in particular the amount of setup options compared to real life but iracing has helped him with setting up the real car. all of which fits in with what iracing have been saying about the tyre model and how the new one should change things.

if the manufacturers are happy then in theory it has to be a good thing, at least it's better than a set of engine regs that non of the manufacturers like, then we really could be left with just one engine supplier who can only manage to supply half the field and the rest will be reduced to looking round for something that fits the regs even if it's not competative.

haven't any of these drivers ever heard of patrick depailler ? if you're challenging for a title you don't do anything risky outside the car. especially if you're complaining that your team isn't backing you 100%

deko is there a variation of your first name you can use or a middle initial you can put in ? after frank became neville anythings possible, personally give neville's obsession with driving in a pink car i'm expecting him to change again to penelope