Round 1 Eifel Sudstrecke

Poor race for me found some pace but really just lost control over bumps.

Got a little quicker in in Quali but couldnt translate it to a stable race performance.

I nudged someone in first corner, did slow down but sorry

Stuck on fence and DNF , no excuses but I did just convert my pc last week from the old spinning plates to a nice SSD drive. Did affect the amount of practice as PC was initially a bit unstable.

Congrats to TIM and the rest of the podium and thanks to Caitlan as always ... I watched the broadcast later on.

 

Qualification
Not too bad for me that is but only managed 9th. Think I did a PB a low 2:50. Just can't get below the 2:50 mark

Race
This is my first AC race for a while. I still don't like this sim but this mod intrigued me as I love old school cars and its actually not that bad. Infact I'd go as far to say its a blast, a bloody annoying and frustrating blast but a blast none the less. The biggest problem I have with AC apart from the lack of immersion is the manual gear shifts with a H-Pattern box. In order to avoid gearbox damage you have to heal and toe and I'm crap at it. No problem in my real world car but on my sim rig I'm crap. Yes you can downshift without the clutch but sometimes I can without damage other times I get that annoying pop-up and crunching noise which ruins the immersion for me. Is there anyway of turning that pop-up off? In other sims like rF2 you can downshift without the clutch and OK this isn't simulating the real world but I can't help but wonder how much of an advantage driving these cars with flappy paddles would be. How many of the faster drivers were using flappy paddles? I didn't run any laps with flappy paddles because it again ruins the immersion. These cars were never driven like that. I must do a few laps with flappy paddles to see if I would be faster. 6 seconds is a hell of a gap. I doubt whether I'd close that gap but I bet I could go another couple of seconds faster. There's a good reason why flappy paddles were invented

Right the race. The grid was very tightly packed which meant not a lot of gaps formed before turn 1. Got up behind a car that slowed too much too early and in avoiding him I tagged another car and we both went off. Sorry to whoever that was . Settled down into a good rhythm and found that I was lapping faster than I did in practice. I had abandoned the heel and toeing as I was all over the place with it and opted for downshifting after the revs and fallen off. This meant a few missed shifts so whether I managed to complete the race was in the lap of the racing gods. Came across a car in the middle of the track and slammed straight into it. Sorry Andrew I couldn't avoid you . No damage done and I continued on my way. The final 6 or 7 laps I started lapping in the 2:51's which was good for me but I finished the race meeting without dipping below the 2:50 mark. The gearbox was in the yellow by the end so I think this will be my strategy for the rest of the series. Just wish AC didn't adopt this grinding tranny crap especially when there are drivers who undoubtedly use flappy paddles and clutch-less gear changes. That said the fast guys are always going to be fast and they were probably using the clutch and h-pattern gearbox. Respect to you if you were. . 6th was a goodish result but I only got this high up because of half the field falling out. My ego has been dented here and I may not be a racing god after all.

Well done Tim
Well done to all who finished this tough race in these brilliant cars. You never know I maybe a born again AC sim racer

Also well done to Caitlin who did an excellent job in the commentary. You caught my incident with Andrew and you mentioned my successes in other series. That massaged my battered ego a little.

 

You can turn off the notification indeed but I don't think you can turn off the grinding gear sound (sounds bad I know). It is very immersion breaking If you are using content manager I'm sure you can switch it off somewhere in the options. But otherwise you have to edit an .ini file.

In your assetto corsa folder : cfg/gameplay.ini

[DOWNSHIFT_PROTECTION_NOTIFICATION]
ACTIVE=1 ; 0 turns it all off, also in UI in options

I'm using H-shifter with clutch. I'm downshifting when the rpm's have dropped more often than not but I do heal-and-toe when I feel it is necessary. Not really thinking about it really. I think you just have to get used to it. I would say using flappy paddles is not necessarily faster when you can H-shift well. It does make it a lot easier for sure. I used longer gears for the race yesterday as I had some issues downshifting a few gears fast with H-shifter in some corners. And at one time during the race I wasn't sure I had the correct gear engaged, so I disengaged and put it back into gear. But indeed, using H-shifter it sometimes happens to me that I don't get the gear changed (grinding gears) and go out of the corner because of it. Still, I would never use flappy paddles myself unless the car has it of course. I'm sure it will get better quickly if you keep up with it

 

Thanks Laurent I will make that change. I will stick with it for this series and see how I get on

 

I supriced myself by beating my own previous best with 1s on qually. But 1st was propably the worst starting position of front row since it´s not on racing line and track gets narrower from that side so I ran out of space and had to lift off before braking point and had no chance to challenge at braking. Tim and Louis were so close together that I didn't want to risk to try pass and end up in three car accident. When Tim got pass Louis and pulled little gap I managed to get pass Louis quite quickly. But made little error and had wobble and was hit by Louis from behind. Little later got another hit to rear and after that car back felt little weird and could not push as fast as I would have needed to catch Tim that got 8s lead form my incident. Later on race my motion rig did weird jumps on fastest braking point and made me lock my brakes and lost control. Managed to catch first one and only lost 2s that I had been able to catch Tim but second time I went off track and lost about 13s. Would have been nice to race with Tim since our pace was quite similar. Thanks for Caitlin on excellent job on broadcast and everyone for racing.

Paul, I use H-shifter. I think these old cars are hard to drive with paddles (and feels wrong too) because I think they need that heal-and-toe and to not spin off when downshifting. Another chance is to wait for revs to go low enough and shift only then.

 

Yeah that's what I ended up doing dropping the revs and doing a clutch less downshift. It seemed to work about 80% of the time without damaging the gearbox. I tried same setup with paddle shifting and I was no faster so I can't blame lack of pace on that. Just need to try harder next time

 

Congratulations to Tim on a fine victory! A hearty 'well done' to both Jukka & Laurent for scoring podiums. Admirable stuff, gents.
I was not surprised to find myself largely overpowered by this event. Next to a rookie in AC, that lack of familiarity coupled with a new mod on a wickedly difficult circuit lead to me trashing the McLaren no more than half way through Lap01. The car was badly damaged and had a distinct pull to the right requiring my G25 steering wheel to work 10-15 degrees off-centre just to keep it going straight. Not exactly ideal for negotiating this venue. I did manage to hang on for several laps til a spin left me facing the wrong way and fearing someone coming up behind to find the road blocked, I chose to retire. Spared myself some further indignities. Despite the less-than-stellar debut, I'm looking forward to our next round in Spain. CYA there!

 

I use flappy paddles and im really rubbish . Ive got a shifter for my g29 but no bracket to fit it.
I watched the replay and realised how my accident caused great damage to another car after i bounced off the barrier into the path of another .
Very sorry
I will be puting in some practice this week in the evenings
Will host a server if anyone wants to join me
Will post when itx up

 

Forgot to mention that while I have the red #7 car for my offline work, on the server, I had a white #1 chassis. Any notion as to what's gone wrong here, chaps?