rFactor 2 Le Mans single event June 20 2020

That was a fun one. Q was a bit unusual after having to do a extra rolling lap.
The car also wasn't so keen on keeping it's rear on the track when pushing in the Porsche curves.

The start of the race was a bit silly. I thought the race was certainly going to be 41 laps and I wanted to do an 11 lap first stint. Did a lot of rolling around on formation lap and used a lower engine mix to save fuel.
But I missed turn 1 whilst still calculating fuel like an idiot Would have been less silly if I didn't do the exact same mistake my last time at Le Mans

Rest of the race I could just power through with softs. No idea if double-stinting would have made more sense, but there was no point in risking it.
Of course the race was just 40 laps, so I just made it complicated for no reason

The lapping part was really uncomplicated. Allthough sometimes I didn't really trust my car with taking fast experimental inside-lines so some lappings maybe took awkwardly long.

Day-Night transition would have really helped with keeping the concentration up I think, otherwise that was a nice event.
Cya at Daytona I hope

 

Put in a great Q lap sub 1:36. Used a low TC setting good for a lap or 2 but no way I could keep it there during a race. I guess the fast guys were though. The race was a disaster. Had a bit of a fight with Csaba and when I got past him on lap 3 or 4 I binned it at the Dunlop chicane. Totally bent steering had to wrestle the car back to the pits. At Mulsanne corner I cut the corner to get out of the fast braking zone and picked up a drive thru. Pitted for repairs and waited 297 seconds. Then the stewards thought I hadn't suffered enough and gave me a stop go penalty for speeding. So 2 more visits later to get rid of the penalties I was flat last and 2 laps down on the Lmp2 field. Very nearly hit the escape key. Had another spin late on following an lmp2 into the 1st chicane must have lost down force being so close to him and I lost the backend. The damage was minor though. The last few laps were fun. My body was seized up after that. I suffer from fibromyalgia and am in constant pain so doing a long race like this really is an endurance event. But I love it so much not the pain the racing that I'll be back for Daytona and for the endurance series later in the year.

Well done to the winners and all who finished

 

It was only 13secs I think. That's why I wasn't sure about it. 23s+ would have been an easy choice imo

 

Tyre time was added to the fuel in the GTE also.
Tyres were not 'free'

EDIT - I am wrong, they were free

 

Yep,just tested, and they are free.
Though I tested also, and they weren't when I originally tested, or so I thought

34 sec for full tank
34 sec for full tank and tyres
14 sec for just tyres

Lucky I went softs and changed anyway then

 

That makes the mediums and Hard tyres totally pointless.
As the softs can easily last a full fuel tank, nobody is ever going to use the meds or hards.

 

Did not put in too much time into the setup. Was able to do constant 4.00 lap time in practice with full fuel load. Somehow I could not or hardly get below 4.02 during the race. At some point near the end I saw my fuel flow was at 3/4 so I was wondering if that was the reason. Nevertheless I quallified 5th in GTE. After start I was passed by some beamers on the straight. Did not put up a fight much since there were 2.4 hours to go. In lap 6 or 7 I was in a fight with Barrett. I let him pass me on the inside just before Indianapolis, He overshot the corner a bit so I did the cross over underneath. When he came back we just touched and I was put in the fence. I had damage but decided to continue not to make an additional pit stop. My lap times at best were 4.04 and I could not hold off porches like the one of Joe, so let him pass and go. After my stop with 57 repair time and fuel only I continued after 45 minutes and for the remainder of the race there were only big gaps of 30s or so to the guys in front and behind. From this time on I found the race pretty boring, but I wanted to make it to the end. At my second stop I fueled and changed tyres, because they were pretty dead at that point. In the end finished in 5th like I started. So not too bad all in all.

The length of this race and my setup. Just a PC and a normal chair is not too convenient for this endurance type of races. My rear and knees were hurting in the end. I have project to build my own rig during summer holiday or fall. Tips for building a rig are welcome. Now my idea is to build a rig from Bosch Rexroth profiles (can get those for free from my work) and see them a lot in rigs in various youtube reviews.

 

I think in fairness it was good to just do this one with an all day race on this occasion.

I've done races in the past during the night and it can be chaos (not on here, on other forums) mainly when the LMP's come up behind the GT's and not being careful.

There is also one other issue, everyone's systems are different but I know that although my PC is not very old it will struggle when the sun starts to set (admittedly only on certain tracks). If I have to set everything to low that's fine but I would advise that anyone who wants to do the day/night races just test this to make sure everything is ok. In relation to the above, when lapping other cars the sim is trying to render, lights, shadows and all the other stuff which can put quite a lot of strain on the hardware.

Shame Project Cars 2 isn't a better overall sim, it has lovely day/night immersion. Did a simulated 24 hour race in the Group C's the other day. Looked amazing lol

 

Nice one, you're a lucky guy to have access to that sort of material.

You could probably do a bit of mix and match, sim-lab supply some of them parts separate from the rigs which may help. Seat brackets and so on.

On my playseat challenge (I need a setup that will fold/move away) the foot section broke so I made a new one out of aluminium profile, cost me about £70 in parts and is rock solid now. Works well.

 

PC2 came oh so close to being a really good sim. They just stopped dev just before that point. Hopefully AMS 2 will be provide us with that. Although no modding means no Group C cars and no tracks like Le Mans sadly. Well not for now anyway. Lets hope Reiza does tonnes of cars and tracks in the future.

 

I do understand this argument you put forward but there are also people that have good PC's and would like to see Day to Night transitions. I would like to see at least one race with this. Maybe John can setup a server with a short test race with day to night transition so we can all test this. If the majority of people who are entering the series have problems then we can decide what to do. The real WEC series has a prologue race at the beginning of the series. It's not a point scoring race and I think the idea is to give everything a shake down test. We could do this.

 

Yeah exactly, my only suggestion was if people are planning on taking part, run a race against AI and make sure everything is ok during day/night modes. Even if it's a simulated 24 hour 20 minute race.

It does very much depend on the track, some tracks I'm 100% fine on and others (usually just to large amounts of detail) can put a bit of stress on my PC.

It's about 6 years old now, so due an upgrade anyway, but I need to save up first, haha

 

The server traffic will put extra strain on the pc. So e times it can work fine offline and not so great online. To be honest there are tonnes of reasons why pc run slow not all to do with hardware a simple tidy up of what's running in the background can be enough to clear a bottle neck. Maybe we could run Daytona as a day to night race John

 

Try Razer Cortex Gamebooster:

https://www.razer.com/cortex/boost

It kills all unnecessary programs running in the background.