Totally motor racing unrelated:

I need to upgrade my phone...

The options:
1. Samsung Omnia,
2. iphone 8gig
3. HTC diamond.

I dunno what the hell to buy. the Samsung is 16gig.

Ive also heard that the Xperia is awesome, but quite a bit more. The above phones are more or less te same bracket. The iphone will be uncracked. Please bare that in mind

Quote from Zen321 :

I agree about the restrictions for the fast racers. It is very annoying to try to get points, when platinum or gold racers race with a pace 1second off the WR...
But not for the temp ban, this is what happens IRL with low-level drivers, so they'll learn after time

This seems a bit stupid to me. I started in April this year, having never ever raced an online sim in my life, and in addition, having only played the demo for about 3 or 4 days. 6 or 7 months on, im a gold racer with with every CTRA pb (in XFG) being within 1s of WR. I started just like u guys, struggling to get points. If it wasnt difficult, would we be having fun? i think not.

With regards to the crashing, sure the back of the fields are crash pits, but thats where the beginners are, if you race on hte sim, like you'de race in real life, you'de probably take 2-3 races to get into the top 10, from the back of the field in a full server. So why try and do it in 1 race, no wonder you gonna get caught up in prangs. sim racers who havent raced IRL, generally dont understand the concept of backing out of a mood or backing out of a corner and continuing the fight at the next corner, they'de rather go all or nothing, and 50/50 whether they and their opponant live another day.

I seriously considered a "how to progress section" because im a RL racer and started off as a total noob beginner, then i found becky's section, and she's covered everything possible, so take the advice, it'll allow you to progress, trust me!

Joe u impress me with all the ideas, could do with someone like u in my real team here in SA

I definitely think the ballast idea is a good one. It seemed to work incredibly well in the beginners cup. I dont think we had one repeat winner all season.

I also really like the idea of ballast to a newcomer. One of the slight issues i had is that a driver that joined midseason was almost "untouchable" for at least 3 races before he gained ballast, so im all votes in for the idea!

Something we did in SA production cars which i never picked up from your quote was the "reduction" of ballast on poor results, or "unsuccsseful" results. This could be granted from positions 6- 10 for example in the reverse order of the "sucsess" ballast perhaps.

I think this is gonna be an awesome series, im trying to get my fellow SA guys to join up as well!

Hey joe, i think this is a great idea. A neat suggestion might also be the use of success ballast like in WTCC whereby the top 3 points scorers (point scorers and not necessarily fastest) after a race weekend receive ballast, 4th highest scorer retains his ballast and positions 5 downwards are allowed to reduce ballast in different amounts.

If you dont mind, im gonna pass this link on to some other guys that race in South Africa.

Ok... ive just read through the post and realised that there is no "other'...

So, I was thinking last night. is there anyway to rank CTRA drivers. I was just wondering if i was actually anygood, and if so, am i in the top 100 CTRA racers or in the top 1000 racers perhaps. (I mainly race Race 1 which seems to have the highest most consistant number of racers at any1 time)

Looking at pb's is pretty neat, but there are thousands of drivers so this sort of comparison is impossible. ( and im not interested in the stats in LFS world as this includes hotlapping which im not interested in)

Then i thought of looking at points. Also impossible as this boils down to who has time to race more than who is quicker (also who earned points before x systems and all that).

Then i thought of looking at GP points but this is also influenced by the number of races etc.

So, i thought maybe there could be a system whereby each driver has a summary on MYCTRA whereby the system generates a simple calculation of "average #of points per RACE COMPLETED". I understand this might be skewed by the fact that points may be rationed based on number of competitors but maybe another graphic showing the average number of competitors per race completed?!?!

There could then be a ranking on a monthly/weekly/daily basis to compare your monthly performance to others with say a minimum of at least 15 or 20 races completed (this may need to be subjective and my numbers are thumbsuck)

And one other thing --> Is it possible/probably to rank your CTRA pb's in categories such as: Within top 10, within top 25, within top 50, within top 100 etc... This would also be a fairly nice guage as to your race pace relative to other racers.

Yesturday at South City Chicane, i thought i was schumacher by running sub 1m23 laptimes (Pb of 1.23.70) untill 2 other races bettered that by running sub 1m23.70. So it lead me to think how competitive i really am when there is some sort of competition around.

Let me know your thoughts

It is true that there are alot of Hotlappers but i dont think we'll ever be able to get away from that. What im talking about is more the fact that people are leaving servers when they're set to Rallyx.

Started thinking bout this after playing quite a bit yest and this morning... anywayz, We got rotated onto on of the RallyX servers and immediately everyone voted to End race. And so it ended. Couple hours later, we got to blackwood Rallyx and again, ppl tried to end... but to no avail.

Due to a blister on my hand from playing golf, i decided to skip the side ways styles of rallyX... only to return an hour later to find that the server was still on the rallyX but there were only about 6 or 7 guys playing. when i left the server was full and ppl were getting race full msg.

Suggestion, why not having a seperate server for Rallyx rotations... from my experience, the majority dont enjoy rallyX. we dont have such a thing in south africa so i for one dont particularly enjoy it!

My 2nd point... after being beaten my a mate on South city chicane last night, i woke up this morning and decided to practice. so i logged onto race 1 and Ended race untill i got to SS chicane (i was the only person online). After about 25 minutes of Shift-X i eventually got to chicane layout... i think i saw blackwood bout 15 times and fernbay gold (or one of those) bout 10 times....

So what im questionning is how random the random track generator is... Does it randomly select, i dunno, 5 tracks out of the list. Then randomize those for maybe 2 rotations each, then another 5 and so on?

that was a problem when i firest started racing CTRA servers and Sam turned results and all that off. Todays problem is just random, within the first 3 or so laps.

hi guys. i am having connection problems today on CTRA all of a sudden. Im am racing with no lag and all of a sudden i lose conection. this happen 6 or 7 times and i started noticing the purple lines on the bottom left hand side of the screen. one line just gets longer and longer and then turns pink, then i lag and lose connection. my internet connection however remains stabel?

I think this is not a bad idea. Maybe its just me, but yest for example, i was having a bit of a meh...

I was 0.4 under my PB thru 1st split and 0.4 slower than my pb over full lap. Lucky for me it was a 2 sector track only so it was pretty easy to pin point hwere i was slow.

But this may come very handy for the longer 3 split tracks where you dont get the accumulated split time, u get the actual time between splits...

Or is this maybe old news?

alrighty boys... im gonna try bulldoze this one over my gf's head... which might not always work, so here's my entry:

Username: Dizzydarryn
Name: Darryn Lobb
Number: 104 (yes, im changing my number this time!)
Entry requirements: check check check...

Please put me on reserve list cause i cant promise how many rounds ill make... saturday night is social time. I def cant make this sat though! got an awards dinner... oooo fancy fancy

cant seem to download the replay file... says no file

Quote from Fastwalker :

oops didnt read that

LOL... thanks for the suggestion in any case :-)

Haha, that actually brought a laugh about to my day filled with studying... what a drag!

U shouldve entered all season man, u wouldve given us a serious hard time, as well as experience the difficulties of ballast... what a drag! felt like i was carrying an elephant around with me most of the time

Quote from Hypothraxer :

I got hit by Darryn's screensaver - then midjudged distance to Taha and shot him off. At this point the concentration was gone causing me to hit the tyre stack and damage the car. Then I received a stop-and-go for hitting Taha, additionally another stop-and-go for speeding in the pit lane (why it wasn't just a drive-through is a mistery to me). So I had to do 2 full laps with a totally damaged car and was pretty much off.

In any case - congratulations Yann for the championship and of course also congratulations for all the others who finished.

And last but not least: Congratulations Darryn for being (at least for me) the best driver in this championship. Don't worry about the bump - bad luck happens (usually to me ).

Congratulations Yann! consistency pays off with a great pass on joe in the final laps to make sure that championship was urs!

David, im terribly sorry for the screen saver/bump, i hate for the season between us to end like that!!! we were having an awesome dice untill then, and im very sorry for the way it ended!

Thanksyou for the great season though, and all the other great racing that we've had. (including being teammates at the 16hour).

Thanks to all the organisers for a truelly great season!!!

Quote from Laurent66 :

Mr Lobb! fancy seening you here!!! hows the racing going? what you racing next year?

regards,

Laurent Calkoen
www.laurentcalkoen.com

Laurent!

How things bud... I see you've also stumbled upon LFS... its bloody awesome, so make a plan and change that demo status to S2 licensed and jump on some CTRA servers.

Next year is interesting at the mo, got an irrisistable offer to race a ferrari F430 in the gt series with the potential of doing 2 rounds in Italy at the end of the year, andthen something else prod car related...

Ill PM u!

Quote from Fastwalker :

i think im going FXR..
it got the most torque so u lose less because of the ballast

and ill be driving FXR in 16h (GT2) and MoE (GT1)
so its good practise

Also racing in the 16hr in FXR, thats what made my decision easy for me! we gonna have a party, see u on track sat!

ok, just to clarify, when are we having this race?

Im racing in the 16hr on sat and would hope that its not gonna clash, or we can maybe change the race?

As for the race, ive decided to go with the FXR because thats the car of choice in the 16hr. i managed to do a 2m33.4 on a 10 lap run but with no ballast. i think im gonna be at a disadvantage with this car, but it looks like the tyres will last comfortably, and its pretty safe to drive!

Do i stand a chance?

WOW, i really made this difficult for myself by missing saturdays race hey...GRRR

Hi,

I know this is random, but i am going to racing a Ferrari F430 challenge car in South Africa's GT series. I am however, desperate to find some technical information on the cars as the series is currently running in many countries in Europe.

If anyone has any information or contacts within a team that i could contact, pls PM me.

Thanks

cant believe i missed it, but ive had some very interesting developements in my real life racing career which forced me out of this round, and possibly the last round.

I will be racing a Ferrari F430 challenge in our local GT series, with 2 possible races in Europe next year. In addition, i was invited to participate in the sports car category that i won the championship in last year by my old team. It was the 2nd last round of the SA champs and i just didnt make it home intime last night... oh dear

Quote from Bandit77 :

talking about trail breaking...

that's something lousy drivers do a lot. *

average drivers don't.

good drivers do it too...



* makes me think of brake-lights flashing even after the apex.

I think you got it spot on! Trail braking is something that happens to a new driver by mistake, due to lack of... well, everything. Generally, if you attend any advanced driving course, you're told to get your braking and gear changes done BEFORE you enter a corner.

But then, as you get better and better, and maybe never... You may start to trail brake. My understanding is that any FAST racing driver will trail brake, because other than all the benefits of helping the front to turn (either by stiffing the front end, or with the help of rear brakes, turning the car with the back), it allows a driver to brake later than the average driver, but in addition, being able to apply the throttle at the same place or earlier than the AVERAGE driver...

But then again, thats my real life experience, but based on my limited LFS experience, the same applies.

ja you should. you'll grow your ego quite a bit. I really thought i had you through the last corner, i got a better line and better drive, but u slowed on the apex leaving me nowhere to go. A very experienced move and i was pleasantly surprised!

So i figured i might as well jump on the bandwagon and at my version of the race.

Qualifying went fairly well, managing to beat Novak to 3rd by 0.01s!!! I struggled with pace in qualifying, managing my best time on my final run.

The race was fairly uneventful up untill lap 29. I got a fairly decent start, and just paced myself untill the safety car was deployed. Things stayed static for a few laps untill Mathei (sorry for wrong spelling) started having some serious handling problems. This allowed Jelink and myself to close right up and i attempted a half hearted overtaking move by trying to cut inside jelink on a tighter line, i got onto the curb and just clipped his back wheel going into a half spin...

This just gave Yann and J@tko thru, i still smelled a chance of gaining back my 3rd place, but it wasnt to be as J@tko managed to be the owner of the WIDEST mini FBM ive ever seen. Very fair btw.

Anywayz, i went to ed feeling very grumpy due to throwing 4 points away, what shouldve been a 16 point lead, now a 8 point lead....

Bring on the rallyx, what is that again???

Quote from Fastwalker :

ohhhh its reversed ((
dammmnnnn

epic fail

BWAHAHAHAHAHA... thanks for that bud, u absolutely made my day at work. i was killing myself laughing. very funny!

Check the photo's, alot meaner than a golf could ever look, if only we were getting the race version. (cars raced 24hrs of nurburgring earlier in the year.