The Gentleman Drivers Club will be hosting events on 13 November and 14 November. We are a group who want to create a club based on sportsmanship, good attitude, and safety. More like the racing before 1970 when auto racing was a sport for gentlemen and not like it has been since 1970, that is, a business where the cut-throat tactics of blocking and crowding fellow drivers off the track are normal practices. For full details of the events go to our website, slowdrivers.net. The following is just a short summary of our plans.

These will be unofficial, "let's get acquainted" events to demonstrate our driver rating system (similar to iRacing), get possible future members familiar with our training cars and our enter level race cars, and introduce our safe driving ballast reward system. The ballast system will not be used in these events because of its complexity but drivers will be able to see how their safety ratings would be effected by their safe driving.

Drivers of all skill levels are welcome but, attitude and safe driving are more important to us than how fast you are. We intend to make driver instruction sessions a part of our future plans mixed in with fun races in different level cars to challenge both talented and not so talented drivers.

So please visit our website and feel free to ask any questions here in this thread.

The GDC Crew

Very nice job with the website, looks well maintained and informative, which is rare enough out there to be mentionned.

Good luck with the events. The rating system is an ambitious and interresting idea, but in my mind it'll represent an amazing amount of work, as you'll have to get enough admins to watch the race replay from each racers point of vue(I don't think it is possible to cover this with live adminning, as you'll end up missing too many incidents.. unless you have small grids).

Last thing, I saw you are racing heavily restricted cars. Haven't done any testing with this kind of restrictions so I can't judge whether it's interresting racingwise, but I belive it's a bit too much honestly, I'm not sure if you'll have enough interrest for them.

I visited your server and tested the FX1 and XR1 with your setups you provided. Felt totaly ok imo and I would love to test this in your practice race.
I assume it's ok to adjust things like brake bias, camber, tirepressure, gearings (as long as only use 4 gears), ABS on or off, ARB and such that isn't mentioned in your rules?

I really appreciate all your work for your rating system and looking forward to race these published races. Hopefully it's possible to test with many people during normal evenings as well.

EDIT: Just saw that if you drive Class 1 car you can choose between FX1, RB1, XR1 and FZ1. Is that right?

Quote from Cawwa :

Just saw that if you drive Class 1 car you can choose between FX1, RB1, XR1 and FZ1. Is that right?

Hi,

The FZ1 is a class1 car but it's quicker (and more difficult) than other class1 cars, it should be a class 1.5 :-).

XF1/LX1/XR1/RB1 are almost equivalent in lap times on tracks like AS1.

Thank's for your nice feedback !
Regards,

I have to admit I really don't like the LX and FZ5. They demand skill and precision, that's why I hate them ...

Maybe a good idea would be to run those two as a Class 3, don't you think? (I say this in pure selfishness)

@GreyBull: Thanks for the kind words about the website. That is due to sylbal's efforts and talents.

@Cawwa: Yes, all thinks not mentioned as fixed (gears, diff, intake restriction) are adjustable. We hope beginners (unlike yourself) would be cautious about changing from the standard setup until they have more experience.

The class 1 cars are intended for our instruction sessions and the class 2 cars are meant for a little more talented drivers. Yes, the cars are somewhat slow but no more so than the UF1 and they handle much better. They will be used on the smaller, tighter tracks and I think they will not feel quite so slow there.

We have written our own insim software that will automate the calculation of the driver performance ratings. The calculation of the safety ratings are partially automated but require that the drivers take responsibility for admitting their driving mistakes and accidents. Since we are club of gentlemen, it is expected that drivers will be careful of maintaining their honour and be honest.

Halloj, sounds like fun racing
Do you have to register as a member to anticipate in the upcoming test event?

Quote from sjoblom :

Halloj, sounds like fun racing
Do you have to register as a member to anticipate in the upcoming test event?

We have been discussing this. Our current feeling is that we would like interested people to register at the website. You don't have to be a member of the club or even apply for membership. But we do plan on using a password for the events and this way we can be more certain that people with a non-serious attitude don't spoil the event for others.

By-the-way, the race server is "[S-D] GDC School". The server will be public for the coming week and we invite you to come by and get acquainted and make suggestions. You can get setups and skins (not required) at our website. The skins have already been uploaded to LFS so you just need to put the skin in your skins folder.

As far as fun racing, we may be slow but we are an older bunch who enjoy each others friendship and have a good time trying to race each other carefully.

Quote from codehound :

... // ...

As far as fun racing, we may be slow but we are an older bunch who enjoy each others friendship and have a good time trying to race each other carefully.

Oh - you are an older bunch ... hmmm ... I dunno if this really is something for us youngsters in Team IRM then ...

Hopefully some of you have made it to our race server and tried some of the cars. If you have done more than four laps you may have wondered what those "avg = 65.023" messages were. We have software installed that averages your last 4 laps. Each new lap replaces the oldest lap and a new average is calculated. The reason we have done this is that we want to encourage fast, but consistent, driving. Quite often drivers chasing that new PB end up driving in a way that they crash on three laps for every time they manage to get that good lap.

Aristotle said that "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” In sim racing this means that if we drive fast and dangerous in our practice sessions we may end up being fast and dangerous drivers. So, by concentrating on keeping a good average rather than going for that lucky hotlap a driver can become quick as well as safe.

The races are this weekend so if you haven't had a chance to visit our site now is a good time.

Our first events are now over. Saturday had a few glitches but Sunday ran smoothly. The racing was fun, we made some new friends, and we learned a lot. The drivers drove like gentlemen. From looking at the replays I saw only one contact incident that resulted in a car spinning. The driver that caused the incident then slowed his car until the other driver could get back in front of him.

The results will be posted to the slowdrivers.net website in a couple of days, please check http://www.slowdrivers.net/ind ... etails/2-gdc-feature-race.

Those who participated are invited to email us any comments or suggestions by using the contact info at the website.

There was some concern expressed that our club's plan to assign extra ballast to drivers who drive in an unsafe manner will cause the slow drivers to be even less competitive with the fast drivers than they already are. But his view assumes that the slow drivers are unsafe and that fast drivers are safer. The fact is that the safe, slow drivers will be at no more of a disadvantage to the safe, fast drivers than they are under a system that does not penalize unsafe driving. In fact, the slow, safe driver may find a fast driver will have less of an advantage if his speed was gained by driving in a risky manner. The unsafe fast driver will either have to slow down or he will be slowed down my the additional ballast that he will acquire and keep until he does slow down.

What about the unsafe, slow driver. Here again another assumption is made. That is, that the unsafe, slow driver will not alter his driving style to avoid getting extra ballast. One would think that if he drives more carefully his lap times will increase, but this may not be necessarily so. If you look at an unsafe slow driver's average lap times for a race they may be something like 1:20, even though he was turning many of his laps in the 1:17 to 1:18 range. The off track excursions and the spins add time to his overall average. If he avoids those time consuming errors by lapping at a 1:18 to 1:20 pace then he will actually finish the race in less time than when he was trying to drive at a 1:16 pace and failing. And how do you factor into the lap times the races that he fails to finish because of his unsafe driving? Finishing races is definitely more competitive than not finishing at all. Also, I think that more consistent driving will eventually make the slow driver better in the long term.

I believe the system will only fail for those who see LFS as a game that can only be enjoyed if the player drivers full speed at all times. Anyone who has done real racing knows that this attitude does not work well in real life racing and that it is knowing that your actions will have consequences that adds the spice to the experience.

Unfortunately my wife came up with a last minute IRL event which prevented me from anticipate in the races on Sunday ... hopefully there will be more of this another weekend
Will tell wife to stick to TV then