ok in all seriousness

when i bought s2 i was quite pleased with my progress, could usually finish at front of fwd ers in demo and in top 3 on rwd turbo (sorry cant remember names)

went to s2 and no problem, quickly found limits with fwd thingie any multiseater apart frome raceabout, not competative but safe

then i tried fox and fo8

oh dear now i cant even stay on blackwood in the demo cars

back to a bit of heavy practice to relearn cars i guess

also i noticed i find all my earlier setups hard to drive after fox so im scrapping them all apart from downloaded / shared ones and working from there

does everyone goes through this sort of thing or is it just me ?

Everyone has that "I love this piece of virtual metal"-phase with one or the other car. I fell in love with the FZ5 after I got my LFS license.
After a while you'll notice that you can't improve anymore and spread to other cars. With the new experience you will come back and have magically improved. At that stage you can drive about any car in a competitive pace after 20 laps.
That's how about any LFS career works. Except of course for oval-racers.

Vain

I would concure on both points. Very often the experiances you have learnt with one car you can take with you to another car/track combo. You preferences will change over time. Maybe you have learnt a paricular style of driving in the S/S and are now trying to place that style onto the GT's for example. Very different beasts but you like the way a car handles in a certain way. You put that into your setup but you have to learn to drive the cart again. It happens to us all. We change things, change cars, tracks and setups and our 'goodness' factor goes up and down. But eventually you will sort out your setups and become more at ease as to how any given car will react and how to manipualte the setups and you'll soon be back on top form.

It's all part of teh learning curve . . .

Quote from Vain :

With the new experience you will come back and have magically improved.

When i got my s2 license i was determined to learn the FZR, so i roamed the Aston National servers and in a few days ended up driving ~1:45's. I then took my FZR to westhill, struggled in the 1:40's until some kind person forced a setup upon me which brought me down to 1:37. Few months later, after wearing out the FZR on Aston and moving on to other combo's, i found myself on westhill in the FZR again. I picked that very same setup, and after ~10 laps i managed a 1:34, very surprising.

I've also felt that i could hotlap the XRT faster and more relaxed if i pre-drove the circuit in a much faster car, suddenly getting alot more time to think.

Yeah, if you race a track in a faster and much more twitchy car and then go back to a "slow" one you feel like it's driving on rails. Shortly after and in complete disbelief you then remember the times where you thought that car was undrivable. It is a mystery.

By the way, I experienced that fast cars help to find the correct line through complex turns (like those where you can't see the apex or end, etc.). In slow cars you'll tend to make inconsistant or edgy turns. The faster cars will force you to drive a smooth line, which will be much closer to the ideal line. So I often prepare a combo by driving the FOX on that track and switch to the slower car later.

Vain

I must admit. I'm not a huge fan of the single seaters. At least not at the moment. I've been driving the FZR pretty much solidly since I got S2 and I've only now got it to a point that I consider it drivable and capable of turning a good lap time. But even now I'm still tuning the setup. It's amazing how just little changes in the suspension can make so much difference. I love that about LFS. If you feel the car understeers into a corner you can adjust the damping, go and run the car for a few laps and actually feel the difference.

But I've kinda lost my thread now . . .I'll come back to this.

Yep I have this same. Started driving XFG again and its harder than ever. But after few hours I can get back to the old cars.

I race the fzr, and it's like a dream, I got a nice setup from someone, and my laptimes ain't to shaggy. I always drive on Aston National. My best laptime so far is 1:44:11, what I consider pretty fast, my average is 46s. But the bad thing about my driving skills are, I always lose them after a few laps, especially after a good one, than I just keep spinning around and around.

And to stay a little more on topic, when I drive the demo cars again, it all feels so slow, but I still run outta turns, gonna drive with the turbo tomorrow, I wanna know how it feels on as National.

The funniest thing to do is go back to demo with all the n00bs in T1 after running the GTR's and the open wheelers. Start dead last, then it's like slow motion and the parting of the red see when you reach T1 and everyone is crashing. You're just calm and relaxed threading your way easily throught the carnage.

Another thing to do is to join a demo server that most are running the turbo. Then jump in the GTi and smoke them all as usually the n00bs grab the turbo car first thing and can't drive it.

What fun!

Quote from thisnameistaken :

I've avoided the GTRs until now because I could never quite get the FZR to behave how I thought it should behave, but I gave it another bash tonight and suddenly it clicked. It used to be the lift-off oversteer that threw me off the circuit, I just didn't understand how to control it and spent all my time trying to stop it from ever happening, and I only just figured out it's like backwards power oversteer, and the treatment is exactly what logic suggests it would be.

Looking forward to racing this car more often now

Moving up a bit on the coast lock will help with liftoff oversteer as well.

yea. I run the coast lock at the full 80% with the power right down around teh 40% mark depending on the track.

I run a mid 1.43 on As. Nat and a mid 1.09 on BW-GP (With a mouse too). ButI havn't got close to that since I started messing around again. But It's coming. One thing I have learnt is that if you change your set, give yourself a chance to learn it before getting frustrated and changing again. Quite often, I find, I'm going to fast and that just by slowing down and taking things a little more steadily will actually bring down my lap times. Then I can work the speed back in when I have learnt my Setup again.

I'm actually working on a way to try and keep my tyres a little longer even at the sacrifice of lap speed. Sorting my setups into Long runs or quick sprints and trying to develop a setup for every occasion now that I have my 'base' set where I want it.

But it's taken me along time to do that on the FZR and swapping to another car is quite daunting knowing that I need to do that all over again. But I guess when I am ready that is all part of teh fun.

experience can be a double sided sword cant it, overall more experience makes you better and faster driver but it can really throw you short term when you go back to an earlier setup

It's the same for me, when I come out of the OWs and back into GTRs. It does take a few moments to get oriented, and I initially curse the lack of downforce.

I totally empathise with the slo-mo T1 on demo servers. The thing I find most frustrating is that, with all the driving experience I've gained driving S2, something at the back of my head tells me that I should be able to blow those demo drivers off the track. My bad! Some of those guys are really good! And there is definitely a skill to driving the XFG that a few months in S2 has erased from me, if I ever had it at all. I am nowhere near my demo hotlap times at all.. and not what I would consider to be competitive in demo at all.

I do love the downforce of the FO8 and FOX. Sometimes it's difficult to coax myself into something else, but at the moment I'm hopping between the FO8 on Aston GP and the FXR on South City Long Rev. The latter I find to be a really good combination for "bringing me down gently" from the FO8. A few good laps on SO Long Rev, and I'm back into thinking there's more to life than just downforce

he was probable one of us . . . .*Looks around in suspision* That is if I can be counted as one of us, otherwise he's just one of you. Which means I'm not one of you, so therefore it's just me. Me agianst all of you. Argg. It's a conspiricy.

Quote from Funnybear :

he was probable one of us . . . .*Looks around in suspision*...

Yes, surely one of us. Did you give him the signal? You know, tap him on the rear quarter panel three times in quick succession and shout "BLUE FLAG, BLUE FLAG!!!!!". After that he'll realize who you are and you should get along famously.

There is a batch of 1:23 XRT/BLGP demo drivers circulating on the demo servers, if you join them in the XFG, i know who they'd figure is the "noob".

There are 4 or more that can do 22.x too. You just have to know which server to go to, because most good guys go to the same one/ones, and it's wrecker/noob galore on the rest of them. And most are demo racers. I could be considered one too for all practical purposes, since I bought S2 almost a month ago and I have only 68km online. And I spend 10-20hrs/week online. I still have far more fun on demo servers than on S2 (perhaps if the situation with S2 servers at evenings US Eastern time wasn't just plain sad, I'd be more often on S2, but that's another issue).

hey visitor!!!! we are on almost every night(us eastern time) on s2!! come join us!! i miss our s1 demo days i didnt know u got a license!! come join us! @filur, i had a blast last night, make sure to stop by again sometime so we can do it again!!

sorry for going o/t again, i wet myself when i saw visitor had posted :P

Hi th84, I'll try to catch you and other [noobs] online some time. I don't go to oval servers and I don't like formulas, so you may have gotten filtered out. And I changed my nick again (obviously).

Quote from jtr99 :

Yes, surely one of us. Did you give him the signal? You know, tap him on the rear quarter panel three times in quick succession and shout "BLUE FLAG, BLUE FLAG!!!!!". After that he'll realize who you are and you should get along famously.

Is that the same as blink left indicator once, right twice, both three times, left twice, right nine times and turning your head to the right all the while performing hand brake turns and getting a PB on the same lap?

No. I'm not in that club.

Quote from -V17- :

Hi th84, I'll try to catch you and other [noobs] online some time. I don't go to oval servers and I don't like formulas, so you may have gotten filtered out. And I changed my nick again (obviously).

lol, well i hate the oval and dont care for the formulas either, so im not sure why you havent seen us! keep looking, were there let me know your new nick so i can add you to my buddy list okay dokay

:ices_rofl

Quote from th84 :

sorry for going o/t again, i wet myself when i saw visitor had posted :P

That isn't the only time he wets himself either...

Hehe, can't believe Kev left that one alone.

reading these replies i feel left out by saying... i race the UF1 and only the UF1

i sometimes try to race the FXR as im hopeless at driving RWD cars, no matter how much i try i just cant get up to speed with them! when i race the faster cars i just cant, im too used to the leasurely slow pace of the UF1, shame there's no servers running FE Club with them anymore