rFactor 2 Round 5 Road Atlanta – into the night

Q
Found a gap and nailed 2 laps.

R
I had no clue what tyres should try so picked meds at start and didnt change tyres. So went 2 stints with same meds.
In the end of the second, was getting hard + the transition from day to nite was heavy and laggy to drive clean.
Curious what @John vd Geest did, he was suddenly 5 seconds behind even with a little grass-shaving ;P
Decided to take just softs every stint from that point on and it worked great.

Took traffic super easy but once I scared @Oli Bateson wide off track into grass. And @Rob Milliken I dont know what
you did and have no clue what I did. Think we had mutual brainfart ;D

gz finishers, was a tough one.

 

Kind of a crazy race again...
The start wasn't bad did some mistake but overall I was saving fuel so much I wasn't too worreid about the leader distancing me. He would have to do a longer last pit stop.
Fist stint went very well in that regard. During the second stint that's were thing went crazy. At some point I ended up first, not sure what happened to the leader. But not long after that I ended up spinning up, and got hit by a car pretty hard. Since I had bad damage with something like 55minunte to go, I decided to pit refuel, change tires and repair all damage... and try to make it to the end.
The strat was going well... I had enough fuel to go till end and the tires were lasting well with only half hour to go at that point and with a decent enough gap to Michal to aim for the win.
That's when things went to shit ... A Lmp2 took my apex in a tricky spot, I'm sure it was a miscommunication but still, very tricky spot to take my apex since none of the lmp2 during the all race attempted a pass here at turn 2/3. Anyway, my bad for not being careful enough... got heavy damages again. And with Michal right in my tail, I was pretty sure it was first place gone. Still I tried a lap to figured out if it was possible to drive the thing, I was able to do under 1'19 so I stayed out and tried keeping the thing on the road.
Michal, obviously, was able to close to gap... I had some hope since it wasn't that easy for him to pass me since I was so much faster on the straight, probably a very different aero setup.
The race was his to win tough... sooner or later I was pretty sure he would pass me since my car was a nightmare to handle at this point, wasn't giving up tough. Michal put up a nice fight going through traffic... until he spun out in the last 6minutes of the race. It gave me the breathing room to be able to take the win......

 

Sorry for the missing 20 minutes of the race. Technical issues again.

 

I hate this track so much, I knew it would be a tough one.

Started on softs, but for some reason, my pace was just awful. Lost 40s to Toni and 20 to John on just 1 stint. Lots of cars crashing in front of me didn't help either... on one of those incidents I had some damage on the rear right bumper, which made the car very unstable, but for some reason, I wasn't able to repair it.
2nd and 3rd stints were a lot better, on meds, double stint, but nothing to brag about.
4th stint I changed to softs to attack John, who was 42 secs ahead of me... could shave the gap to 24 secs, when rF2 thought it was a good idea to synchro, or it was just a small stutter, at the top of the hill... hit the wall lightly, but had a FL broken suspension, 10 minutes remaining. Still I had an acceptable pace... 1:13, but weirdly John wasn't any faster than me... than I realized he had fuel issues, probably. 1 minute to go and he pitted... bad luck for him, good for me.

Grats, Toni. Brilliant pace.
Thanks for all GTE, very respectful, only a couple of mismatches, but that's normal.

 

Сongratulations on your victory !
I had contact and therefore I had to give 88 seconds to fix it

1:25:22 crash

UPD: edit

 

No worries Caitlin, this was a nice watch despite the missing piece. Nice job again, Mac and yourself.

Noticed that you spoke about the Rookie Monster livery, that's twice now. Let's unveil the mystery... I run for Rookie Monster with this car usually and we don't have a skin for the GEAR that I'm aware of, so that easier for me to just run the one I'm used to. And it's a nice plug for my team.

Now, some insight about the race, I was saving fuel a lot by running 'lean race' mixture and running the low aero package, probably a bit slower, but I still choose this option since it is very hard to make a pass on this track. So even without any 'incident' from any of the top 3 runner it would have been a tight fight at the end between us, I think. Turns out we all did mistakes...
I did 2 moderate mistakes myself but both resulted with heavy damage unfortunately... I managed to repair the first one by pitting early, cost me almost 30s repair time, but at least I was still in a good position. For the second incident I clipped the wall pretty hard, damage seem bad but I still tried a lap to judge how bad it was... it wasn't good, commentary was right about the curbs could barely keep the car on the road on some part of the track, let alone the curbs... but I choose to keep going like that. At least I'll have a chance to keep Michal behind, and if not, second place isn't so bad considering...
Turns out the low aero package strat did the trick, my car was blazing fast on the straight, giving Michal very little pass opportunity. The only spot were he was dangerous I took defensive line, because it didn't affected me at all since I was untouchable on the straight... compare to the risk of him sending his car to the inside. I'll do that every time.

A shame Michal ended up spinning out, but him spinning out there by pushing hard to have a good run over me, says a lot on the importance of that sector for him and why it was crucial for me to defend that spot every lap if I had to.

Hope to fight you again on the last round mate.

 

Yeah I need to spend a bit more time playing with the RF2 settings as this track was stuttering badly for me. Stupidly I’d only really practiced by myself beforehand.

Thanks for the tip on the server (sorry didn’t catch the name), I need to experiment a bit more but I played safe with the settings in medium and the game just went all green and blue on me. Could be shadows maybe, no sure but something really upset it. So apologies for jumping in and out of the server like I did. Frustration more than anything I think.

With regards to tyres. I just remembered that in the first round, the softs on the revised cars seemed to last last forever so I just ran with those. Although I was lapping in the 11’s in clean air the wear rate was very good and I reckon I could’ve double stinted the tyres easy. Even more so when night time came and the temperature dropped. I know my pace wasn’t anywhere near as good as you guys up front but it was useful info for me going forward with these cars.

 

This was always going to be a tough one then with the added extra factor of lmp2s and into night thrown in too,
Qual didnt have much pace round here played safe and went with a stable set up and aim was to just finish and be consistant, manange a 1,19,532 which was a pb for me,
Made a big mistake for race went with mediums thinking they would get hot and i could double stint them as they would be worn and nice and hot when temp dropped into dusk, This was not the case they just wouldnt get warm and it was costing me mega time and positions, also the fact my ffb went 10laps in too and wouldnt reset, i had to stick with meds and do anuff laps till i could pit and get till end, then went to softs and had some pace again but got fuel wrong and had to dive in with 10 laps to go, was just happy make it to end of this one,

Sorry to anyone who i made hard to overtake it was a tough track to give a up passing room without loosing time, lmp2s were very respectful well done all

 

@Andrew Harper that day to nite is causing the laggin and graphics issues. Atleast on my low end computer.
Was same last season on Sebring i think.
It tthen eases up when full night comes.

 

Yeah it’s frustrating, my pc is not too old (couple of years, the processor is top notch the graphics are 965M SLI’s which is most likely the issue). However in Project Cars 2 I can run the game in 4K on medium to high settings if I want to (not an ideal comparison I know but just an example) RF2 is just more demanding which is fair enough but it spoils the enjoyment sometimes. I know for certain that the S397 car models do hurt performance. I can run a field of 35-40 cars from the URD endurance pack in RF2 with no issues. Their models are just not as high on the polygon count which helps a lot. Same for their DTM style cars, etc. I seem to remember that S397 have had to do a few updates to adjust the LOD’s on these cars as there were lots of complaints about performance.

Anyway I’m not moaning as such, I enjoyed the track, reasonable turnout just annoyed I couldn’t continue as the judder was causing my eyeballs to glaze over. Lol

 

It was funny, because as I was following cars through the turn 2,3,4,5 complex I was thinking to myself "did the IMSA guys lap others through here?"

I think they did but usually contact ensued or someone would end up in the barrier.

I wasn’t having much luck through there, I kept catching people on the exit of 2 and 3 so you just have to be patient

In a race that long it’s just not worth it.

 

Thanks for the info and congrats on your win!

 

They actually pass all the time on that 1st sector. Looks wicked seeing those drivers doing it irl.

 

Not your fault at all, I span on the previous lap in the turn 2 section and I think my rears were cold or going off. I took turn 1 a bit wide to let you through thinking Id have enough grip but just slid out onto the grass (again!).

After my early stint spins and a bit of damage my first pit stop came along just in time. After that I settled down for a mostly quiet race trying to put in consistent times. A few tiny errors in the night time period but a lot better. LMP passing was good from my perspective and they were all very patient through the turn 2 esses section - thank you!

Embarrassingly I miscalculated my pit stop strategy for this race basing it on 2 hours so that messed up my fuel calculations and maybe I should have gone with mediums to extend my stints. I probably did one too many stops and had to do a quick stop for fuel at the end. This was a tough race to keep concentration going, especially with the day/night transition - well done to all finishers and grats podiums

 

Fun race, the transition to dusk and then night was very cool looking with the shadows across the track.

Once again, I think i was carrying too much wing. I was much faster through sector 1/esses than most of the other GTE, but had nothing on the downhill straight in sector 3.
Had fun battles with Andrew and Jens for a bit at the start, but no matter how good of an exit i got out of that tight turn 7 at the top of the hill, they would just pull away from me down the hill.

Was fun battling Andrew, until he dropped a wheel off at the grass on turn 12.
Then started chasing Jens down. After a couple laps of watching where he was faster and I was faster, i planned on attempting a pass going into turn 1 where my bigger wing could give me an advantage going in sector 1. So to do that, i wanted to get a good launch coming out of turn 12. Well, got a little too eager and dropped my rear left on the grass and went for a lazy spin. Lost ~30sec, but managed not to hit anything. Then i started pushing hard to try to catch back up with Jens, and hit the right side curb too hard in the esses and flew hard into the fence. Took about a minute to fix damage and that put me way down.
Still had fun chasing down Oli and Nei Tasker for the last half of the race.

Can't believe Kahel was running low downforce package here, that takes some big "attachments"