rFactor 2 Round 6 Daytona 2.4 Hours - Sun Mar 20, 2022

@John vd Geest "better luck next time". Yes! When is next time? When can we do it again!? The guys on Twitch mentioned a new season starting in two weeks?....
Don't know what happened to your race, but commiserations on your DNF.

 

At least yours was worth reaching for, mine was just water.

 

I have to ask myself was that the setup I practiced with? No rear grip period. Also this was the first race I've done using triple screens and I hated it. To much screen chatter around the tight corners. Had fun the first few laps racing Gilles and Roger who appears to have loads of down force, where I had to drive 100% defensive through every corner then zoom away on the straights.
That accounts for 2 3rd place races in this series. Thanks all you guys who crashed and and moved me up 1 place at a time.
Thanks for the series, loved it.

 

Oh! I see - you're supposed to highlight the text and click 'reply'. DOH!....

 

Bitter sweet race I suppose as I wanted to do better but that’s the way it is sometimes.

Did quite a lot of practice for this one, plus a 60 minute race with 45 AI cars so I could get used to traffic as well. So prepared as best I could.

I enjoy this track, it lends itself to endurance racing very well.

I did a 35.3 in practice but couldn’t reproduce it in qualifying so 3rd it was.

first stint was ok, hung onto the front two ok and just looking after the tyres.

In practice I could double stint the tyres so fuel only at the first stop, which saved about 15 seconds.

then unfortunately during the second stint I got sideways into turn one, and didn’t get onto the brakes and I rolled forward. Got collected by a Porsche and lost the rear wing. Wasn’t a heavy hit but with the 100% damage it was a bit nasty.

lost a minute to repairs (and maybe 30 seconds coming back to the pits) but, just went as flat out as I could. I needed Johnny to make a mistake or have a few spins but it never happened. Lol

in real life I could get a lap back under safety car but obviously not in this situation. Which just made it a very tough ask.

well done to everyone who turned up, well done to the winners

 

Then some other time I remember some doofus ran into you in the pits because he thought he could go right through you. What a dweeb.

 

That's what happens when you try to change fuel mixture while taking turn 1. I was managing the low fuel I had and carried too much speed, went heavy on the brakes but steered too early and too hard, and the car spun. Didn't hit the wall (thankfully). I was already slowing down lap by lap to have a photofinish with Joe before the mistake. Then at the end of the race I saw him slowing down and knew he wanted to do the same. I was ok with taking P2 but he thought I deserved the win more than he did apparently and he gave me the position. Then while celebrating I was turning the lights on and off, forgot to turn them on again and got DQ, hope that doesn't count as I already had finished the race

 

I don't know if you've already tried it, but ...... VR. I just won't drive without VR now. From the very first time i ever tried it, I was hooked. Now, to be honest, I've never tried triple screen, but I can't imagine any number of flatscreens, coming anywhere near to offering an experience, anywhere near as good as VR. I also imagine the cost of 3 decent gaming monitors, wouldn't be too far away from the price of a half decent VR headset nowadays. Seriously, VR is the way to go at the moment. If you suffer from motion sickness - it's worth trying to fight your way through it. The benefits are amazing.

 

Had this one as well, another driver wrecking my race in the pits. But kind of understand, is it only rF2/AMS1/ where you can't drive thru the cars in pit?

Fun race even if I did lack that little edge to challenge Barret and Nigel, but 15 seconds off after 2.4 hours not that bad
Noted Nigel was short on fuel in chat afterwards, I had 2 liter left in tank at finish line but was not sure if the flag was out on the final lap but it was.

From my seat all LMPs did a good job waiting and passing safe when needed, appreciated as a GTE driver

 

Well... real life? But seriously, pit behavior - the game's, not the drivers' - is one of the reasons i soured on AC and never bought ACC.

I had a lot of fun in this race. The first stint w/Nigel and Jens, then the last 20 minutes or so with Nigel rank high on my favorite sim moments. Even the middle stint was tense as i was watching gaps, assuming by my shorter stop, that both Jens and Nigel had opted to fill their tanks at the 1st stop, while i was splitting the remaining fuel requirement. I knew their lower fuel and fresher tires might be my undoing in the final stint. And it pretty much was. But while i overfilled by 9L (3 extra sec if the general standard applies to these cars) at stop 2 (due to erratic predictions by Crew Chief), i guess Nigel may have under filled by 1 or two which let me reclaim 3rd.

Wish we'd had more cars on track, but the stream was still good! Thanks guys!

 

My goal for this race was to finish ahead of Jens to be 3rd overall.
After 15 minutes of racing, I had passed 2 or 3 cars (including Jens), good pace, everything was going well and... RF2 crashed.
Game Over

 

Disastrous race for me. Embarrassing performance to boot.
Sorry guys, I should have went with my gut and not started that one. Too many issues and I just wasn't with it at all yesterday and was not prepped properly either. I knew I couldn't manage 2.4hrs but I showed up anyways and boy that sure was the wrong decision

Managed to keep up with Johnny for the first few minutes there but then I got up on the apex curbing at the kink and it pushed me a bit wide...touched the grass track right and was along for the ride at that point. Car was broken all to hell and I just bailed out. Wasn't motivated to try to fix it and finish it out. Apologies. Glad no one else got taken out in that incident.
.... @Johnny Gutierrez ...since the series is over, would you mind sharing the setup you ran for this Daytona race with me? I'm interested to see how it was that I was losing so much in a straight line, yet gaining so much cornering. Strange considering I was on lowest wing setting running with no dive planes, so I must have been doing something seriously wrong. Your car literally walked away from me in a straight line and I'm having a hard time understanding how that was happening considering the setup I'd applied to the car. Idk if it was ride height related (scraping the racing surface) or just poor all around setup, but something was definitely going on and I'd like to do some studying on the whys and correct that, if you wouldn't mind. If you do mind though, just ignore me

Anyways, congrats to the winners and podiums of both classes.
Unfortunate that the grid was so small considering it was longer finale and being Daytona I really thought most would show up and race. ...but, such is the way series happens and it's getting into spring in some parts of the world so I assume that's got something to do with it.
Congrats to series champions as well!

Another big thanks to our hosts and broadcasters as well. Really nicely put together series and I enjoyed the racing/battles I did get to have in the few races I made.
Looking forward to the next series that I find myself joining here, and I'll see you all there when I see you. Take care everyone. Later.

 

Question to the management: I got DQ at Daytona for turning my headlights off AFTER the race was over, but I actually won the race. Why am I not considered the winner? Also, why am I not considered a HSR driver? My 40 points should count towards the team leaderboard

EDIT: just noticed that I've been considered a HSR driver just for the 2nd race (Patras) and haven't been considered a HSR driver for the Road America, Istanbul, Fuji and Daytona race. I wonder why.

 

HSR driver as in a bus driver ?

 

I agree, that DQ needs investigation. The stream clearly shows Davide finishing.

 

Hi Jason, guys
I am not sure if Johnny Gutierrez’s setup was like mine but I think I came across the setup change that propelled me away from Gilles and Roger, on the straights.
During practice I could not figure why my car just stalled at about 308km/hr and no matter what I did it hit that wall. So I decided to only change the ride height from as low as it could go to as high as it could go and I was doing, 320+ km/hr at the start finish line. The result was the car had very little downforce from the undercar resulting in my drive to survive the 2 follow cars that would eat me up on infield and I zoomed away from on the straights. I know my defensive driving was frustrating for them, but if I even thought about accelerating out of a corner I was doing 360’s.
I was surprised to find the race was 2.4 hours and most of it in the dark. So my hard tire, triple stint strategy was not such a good idea while only added to my lack of rear grip.
So now I have to find setup with a proper ride height and down force.
Also this was the first time I used triple screens. I haven’t figured everything out in setting it up so it wasn’t that great an experience. I was getting multiple micro freezes in the hairpin turns which drove me nuts for 2.4 hours.

Thanks for the series it was fun. A few firsts like the mentioned, 3 screens and driving in the rain, and 2 podiums. The goal, as always, to endure and finish.

Cheers

 

Congrats to all racers. Congrats Barrett for the GTE championship. Nicely done. Congrats to Jason Whited for the LMP2 championship. Nicely done as well. Congrats to me for the LMP1 Championship? I don't know, maybe haha. I think it was a great series. I thank the three broadcasters. I really enjoyed them. You guys put this series into another level of sim racing.

Qualification went good. I think qualification didn't mean as much here since the race was so long.

Race started and Jason Whited was on my tail for quite a bit. First and second sectors, he was on me with a faster car but I didn't mind as the race was long. But once the third sector came around, I would pull, even when he was getting a tow. We did this over and over again and every time, I would pull tenths between both of us. Down the straights, Jasons car was dragging so I know it was probably frustrating for him as we both were using wing 1. I actually knew this would be happening to most, if not all. Maybe feeling a little guilty? If I fixed the car to go faster down the straights and sacrifice sector 1 and 2, I'd still get better times than running a faster 1 and 2 sectors. So I just did this over and over again until the end of the race. I do want to thank Andrew Harper and Michael LabBelle for sticking with the race. When the LMP2 field started disappearing, I didn't want to be alone! Cheers to you guys.

Haha. I did share my setup. I hope he used it well. If you got it from him, I hope you used it well.

I don't mind sharing at all. I can always post it to SRO or to you? By all means, I'm not the one to come to when setting up a car haha. Not even good as some of you in here, if at all. I just setup the car as to what feels good to me. Just to give a quick gist of it. Again, this is a guessing game for me and what I say may not be true. Just saying. Normally on something like Le Mans or Daytona, you want to lower the car to the point where some scraping is ok but the faster you go, the more the car will squat, thus slowing the car down the faster you went. You could probably lower the car more at Le Mans but not as much here. So, the normal thing was to lower the car and then start raising it little by little. Noticed when I did this, the car would start dipping when braking or maybe lift a little when accelerating and lean when turning. Maybe in real life this would be ok, but the car just didn't feel right. So I just lifted the car to the point I felt it scraping somewhat (don't have motec), added some packers to stiffen the chassis/suspension, messed with the spring rate, front and back and then again, this would make the car bottom out again as the suspension would become soft. added packers again, messed with the bump stops and rebound settings, added/subtracted packers each and every time. Most of the time I would end up softening the setup when I didn't want to but I needed the car to turn while on the gas and turn while braking and bam, add/subtract those darn packers so the car wouldn't scrape . To the point I was just flying down the straights. Yeah, the car was stiff but it was fast and drivable. Also, the tires were a bit overinflated. If I lowered the pressure which I normally do, I could feel the car impacting the ground and the car was already stiff so I just added pressure and this lifted the car. Probably the opposite of what most want to do haha. But I didn't want to scrape while turning or going down the straights because it would just slow me down. Over all, she did good. From the Live Timing, I think I did about 250 laps or something like this. I didn't want to do the laps but needed to know where the car was slowing down down the straights.

Again, sorry about the long post, for it being so long winded. It's just what I did, that's it. Ohhh, and boredom also helped a bit.