Quote from srdsprinter :

I dunno. In our most recent race a XRR qualified second just off the pace of the leading FZR. It won too.

Granted thats a 4 hour race, but it had outright speed and endurance...

The Dynamic Racing FZR (the only car that was really on our XRR team's level) easily outpaced us (1-1.5sec a lap). Granted, Prophet was driving it, but I don't really think the IGTC race is the best point of comparison.

For one thing, we had a rolling start (no huge position loss), and for another WE1 is a much better fit for the XRR than AS3, as krbn has been racing. The XRR really struggles in getting the power down out of extremely slow corners, like the double hairpin section at AS3 (and the final hairpin).

Im an XRR driver but it can be really depressing out there knowing you cant realisticallly aim for the win against 20 other FZR and FXR drivers.

I know how to drive the FZR too and Im about 1 sec. quicker with that car compared to the XRR (on AS3), but it simply isnt as challenging to drive, so less fun for me.

Please remove the ballast from the XRR to even things out a bit more!

stop trying to make the perfect balance on only one track !!
BTW, I'm clearly against the weight penalty way, I would prefer a lot something like that:
*remove the 20Kg penalty of the FXR (to have it having the same weight as FZR and XRR) (making it overall slightly more performant)
*add an intake air restriction to the FZR (some kind of 2-3%)

weight added do not only reduce performances, but more fuel is needed and the tires are killed sooner in long races, so it s not a good idea...

How about a little database how the diff. cars are performing on the various tracks after version X?
As a FXR driver of course my POV is that the XRR and FZR cars still are too fast...

Att. file from the 4 hour IGTC race. 30 mins. quali and 4 hours of racing at WE int..

Quote from Flotch :

stop trying to make the perfect balance on only one track !!

Without checking any charts or hotlap data, I’m still pretty sure that the XRR is the slowest car of the three on all Fern Bay tracks, on all South City tracks, on Blackwood, on all Aston tracks with the possible exception of AS4. And I’m not sure that removing the ballast is going to make much difference but at least it will be less far behind.

Quote from [TDRT] Spøgelset :

How about a little database how the diff. cars are performing on the various tracks after version X?
As a FXR driver of course my POV is that the XRR and FZR cars still are too fast...

Att. file from the 4 hour IGTC race. 30 mins. quali and 4 hours of racing at WE int..

Westhill is different from all the other LFS tracks in that it has no slow corners, just long sweeping fast corners with long straights which suit the XRR. So you found the one exception to the rule here.

but the XRR has the advantage of being able to do much longer runs than either of the other 2, which balances it out, and the FXR is much easier to drive. Its pretty spot on, the FZR should be the fastest, but hard to drive and has to take more stops than the others.

Quote from DeKo :

but the XRR has the advantage of being able to do much longer runs than either of the other 2, which balances it out, and the FXR is much easier to drive.

You are probably right that in league races that are done over long distances, the cars have different characteristics that even them out in the end. Most online races are between 5-20 laps though, so that long run factor never comes into play.

Quote from DeKo :

Its pretty spot on, the FZR should be the fastest

I’ve seen this comment from a lot of people, but I’ve never heard any motivation for why it should be the fastest. It’s not the most difficult car to drive of the three, so that can’t be the reason. Perhaps it’s just because that’s how it’s always been ?

Personally, I would like to see the GTR class a bit closer in performance overall with a slightly slower FZR and a faster XRR.

Quote from kbrn :

You are probably right that in league races that are done over long distances, the cars have different characteristics that even them out in the end. Most online races are between 5-20 laps though, so that long run factor never comes into play.



I’ve seen this comment from a lot of people, but I’ve never heard any motivation for why it should be the fastest. It’s not the most difficult car to drive of the three, so that can’t be the reason. Perhaps it’s just because that’s how it’s always been ?

Personally, I would like to see the GTR class a bit closer in performance overall with a slightly slower FZR and a faster XRR.

I think with whatever Y's physics changes bring we will be in the same boat again. FZR should be the most difficult to drive, Rear-engined.

Most online GTR races (5-20 laps) are on AS3, should we only cater to balancing that? We should gather as much info/combinations/%'s/speeds as possible.

As for the endurance league as a litmus test, I agree its not ideal, but amassing a large amount of information is. (You were only .3 off in qual DWB, but the 1.5 off in race pace, were you using the R2's in qual? Prophet ran R2's in the race vs your R3's).

Quote from DeKo :

but the XRR has the advantage of being able to do much longer runs than either of the other 2, which balances it out, and the FXR is much easier to drive. Its pretty spot on, the FZR should be the fastest, but hard to drive and has to take more stops than the others.

In the screen shots of the results of the 4 hour race all 3 top teams stopped 5 times so does that really support any real advantage for the "legendary" fuel and tyre efficiency of the XRR? The stats from the AD3 server I quoted are after 100's of individuals have raced there over a period of time. The results from teh endurance race are interesting but we can't rule out that the best team won rather than the car having any advantage.

Are there no other lapper equiped servers out there running GTRs so we can gather real data from other circuits?

Maxim

Quote from MaximUK :

In the screen shots of the results of the 4 hour race all 3 top teams stopped 5 times so does that really support any real advantage for the "legendary" fuel and tyre efficiency of the XRR?

This is exactly what I was saying earlier too. Everyone says how the FZR uses more fuel and tires than the other cars, but I've yet to see a race where it actually had to make more stops because of it. Does this even happen in the ultra long 6+ hour races?

I have a feeling that the fuel usage really doesn't matter at all, and that the tire usage would only matter if we had changeable track temps and ran a race with very hot asphalt. Under those circumstances, the XRR might gain a bit of an advantage from a tire wear perspective.

Quote from srdsprinter :

As for the endurance league as a litmus test, I agree its not ideal, but amassing a large amount of information is. (You were only .3 off in qual DWB, but the 1.5 off in race pace, were you using the R2's in qual? Prophet ran R2's in the race vs your R3's).

Are you saying that the race winner was in an FZR running R2s, but the guys in the XRR were running R3s? I'm not sure who was driving what, but if the FZR is able to run a 4 hour race using R2s, while the XRR guys are using R3s, then the FZR isn't as hard on tires as everyone makes it out to be (in comparison to the XRR).

Quote from srdsprinter :

As for the endurance league as a litmus test, I agree its not ideal, but amassing a large amount of information is. (You were only .3 off in qual DWB, but the 1.5 off in race pace, were you using the R2's in qual? Prophet ran R2's in the race vs your R3's).

It's true, if we'd spent a little more time developing the race setup (which was exactly the race setup, but with R3s and more fuel), we might have been within about a half second of Prophet in terms of race pace. The problem is that the XRR is both harder to drive and slower out of slow corners than the FZR (and I believe has a little bit slower top end).

As for everyone doing 5 pitstops in that race, that came down to tire management. We were wearing out our R3s in 30 laps. R2s were molten lava by lap 10, R4s are and always have been useless. Again, more setup development and we might have gotten another 10 laps out of them, but probably at the cost of further race pace.

The winning team in question was only finalized less than 2 days before the event, so its understandable how their setup was not ideal (burning R2's very quickly).

As for fuel/tire wear, if you use less fuel, your pitstops are going to be quicker. Helpfull in an endurance race, less so in your "typical" lfs race, although less fuel/less weight is a plus.

I would think 20kg less pentalty for the XRR could be good, because it is not as stable a car as one would think (being FR). It might encourage some more usage, as it lags behind (ha, a turbo pun).

0/20/80 FTT (For The Try?)

[worthless conjecture] Physics improvent would make the FZR a more difficult car to drive RR, perhaps aiding the AWD FXR and FR XRR [/worthless conjecture]

OK, I've reduced XRR handicap by 10 kg so it's just 30 kg handicap now. That should make it slightly more desirable I guess.

This decision was based on what I read here, considering the evidence presented and not wanting any of them to be the car that no-one uses.

Quote from Scawen :

OK, I've reduced XRR handicap by 10 kg so it's just 30 kg handicap now. That should make it slightly more desirable I guess.

This decision was based on what I read here, considering the evidence presented and not wanting any of them to be the car that no-one uses.

Thanks Scawen. I am not sure 10kg will make much difference to putting XRR's on the grid but I will recheck how things are panning out (on AS3 at least) in a couple of weeks and make a new comparison.

Maxim

Quote from MaximUK :

Thanks Scawen. I am not sure 10kg will make much difference to putting XRR's on the grid but I will recheck how things are panning out (on AS3 at least) in a couple of weeks and make a new comparison.

Maxim

Thank you for your info Maxim, and thanks for the Tweak Scawen!

Thanks, Scaewen!

Thank you Scawen. 10kg less is a step in the right direction, it will be interesting to see how much difference it makes.

10 KG less has improved my lap time by 0.3s on AS3 so far.....

No one seems to have realised what a big difference the high fuel consumption of the FZR makes in long races. To drive the same number of laps in the FXR or XRR you use a lot less fuel, the FZR uses about 50% more than the turbos. This means that over a long distance, the FZR will be a lot heavier for much of the run. So while the fuel consumption may not result in longer stints for the turbos, it does result in an additional and large weight penalty for the FZR in longer races.

the XRR uses so much less fuel, even in a 5 lap race on KY oval, the xrr uses 0.9 a lap and the FZR uses 1.4. quite a difference over a long run.

It is an accepted fact that the FZR uses more fuel. What has yet to be shown is that this does anything to reduce the current speed advantage this car has to the point it is of a similar speed to the other two.

The idea is the bring the car's performance closer together. Before the ballast a good driver in an FZR could beat an alien in one of the others. One of the cars will be the fastest and I don't think anyone believes this should no longer be the FZR, but that the size of this advantage needs to be pulled back so a mix of cars gets used.

Prior to the ballast you could regularly see a full field of FZR's on AS3 due to the size of the advantage this car enjoyed. Now we are seeing a good mix of FXR's and FZR's which suggests that the balance (around 1 second) is about right for these two cars on AS3. The ballast in the XRR has been reduced by 10kg and in a few weeks 1000's of more laps will have been done on ConeDodger 2 server and the relative speeds can be compared again to see where the XRR now slots in the mix.

I would really like to look at stats from other circuits as I am trying to compare using real results not just feelings. Unfortunately no-one has yet suggested a server where the number of laps being done is high enough and they are being recorded by lapper so for now I can only compare on AS3.

Endurance racing is a small % of the type of racing done in LFS. As such it is done in leagues and in those cases if the organiser thinks there is an imbalance then they can use the voluntary ballast to even things out. It would be wrong to balance the cars over 4 hour races if this meant they were out of balance over the distances used for the vast majority of LFS races.

Only Scawen knows how close he would like the cars to end up. If the ballast could be added to hotlaps then he could have used those to generate stats. However the ballast only affects online laps so I believe he needs the community to present real stats for him to consider. Unfortunately this is only AS3 so far which is far from ideal but apparently the best we can do.

Maxim

[CD]Dimo did a 1.41.02 last night in the FZR !!
are you still running the XRR maxim?

i have not used it since 1 race about halfway through the last season and last night after about 20/30 laps i started finding the old lines, i also started getting close to my old PB time

i kept the old XRR setup i had but started playing about with the weight restriction and found 40% was easier to drive

Remember the other possibility is that people just have mroe experience driving the FZR, so know much better where they can push it to the limits. If they've only recently started driving the others it's unlikely they'll have reached their peak yet.

balancing the gtrs makes no sense. in the end we have 3 cars which are the same speed but look different. which means we have 1 car with 3 body-kits. WOW....

the only difference: FXR is 4WD and the FZR uses a bit more fuel... these cars should be much more different in my opinion, not balanced out...

Quote from MaximUK :

...
Maxim

Well said.

Unfortunately, aside from CD's lifting the iron-curtain on GTR races @ AS3, we're just won't get the same sort of numbers on other tracks. Even if they did a "trial day" at BL, WE or KY_National, it wouldn't get the same results as the extensive 24/7 races of AS3.

While I wouldn't want to disenfranchise the majority of the GTR races (10L @ AS3), the GTR class is built for endurance racing, more-so than anything else in LFS currently. Therefore I believe its necessary to weigh this into the equation.

(That said, I doubt the XRR's suddenly start winning every race > 1hr in duration)

I hope a few more people go out on a limb and start to explore the XRR online.