I confess I've barely touched LFS in the past 2 or 3 years. To my own surprise, I found that I wasn't getting that much satisfaction out of on-line racing and lost interest, other than occassionally downloading major new patches to see how things were progressing, hear the new car sounds, etc.
I saw the latest patch X permitted 20 AI cars and my first thought was "what's the point, when the AI hasn't been improved years?", so didn't even bother downloading it.
So knowing that the off-line experience is now being worked on is great news.
As well as the main task of making the AI good to race against, can I also suggest that there will be a need to create championship seasons in which to compete with the AI, preferrably fully customisable (ie. we can pick which tracks comprise the season and in which order they are raced, how many laps to be raced at each track, qualification rules, whether or not pit-stops are compulsory, which cars the AI can compete in, points accumulation, etc.
It may sound a bit crude but it would also be great if we could actually customise the individual AI drivers to some degree by giving us access to key personality attributes of each AI driver which we can manually change...things such as aggressiveness, error proneness, ability to handle pressure, etc.
I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
BTCC is also my favourite motorsport. It's a shame that LFS doesn't quite manage to simulate the real closeness of the racing but it's about as good as it gets.
If anyone is thinking of trying a BTCC style server again, I'd be up for it. Nothing wrong with a bit of contact, so long as we all know that we're racing to the same rules.
btw, having watched Plato this season, it seems that blatant wrecking is part of the BTCC, so let's no get too close to the real thing.