So you are Cam Racing! One thing you have to tell me: How on earth are you this fast with a MacLaren chassis? I don't get it. Technically, I should be faster than you, but I'm ~0.130 seconds behind (that's at qualy in Malaysia and just an example, as you know, I'm slower than you on every track).

Not doing too well in div. 9 here. My damn chassis is just not good enough it seems. Oh well, maybe I'll have the luck of staying in div. 9 at least and win some races next season. If only I had a better test track. I was actually planning to skip the 2* test track, but it will take a long time to save up £50 million -- especially since I'm putting so much money into research. Maybe I need to rethink my business plan

As long as you're making profit, you can race even with £0 on the bank afaik.

And btw: div. 9 for me now. Unfortunately, my issues are still not resolved, pitting times have been the same as three seasons ago all the way, even though my tech. department has improved considerably. And Chris is not answering in the errors and bug reporting forum. I'm really annoyed by now.

Very interesting videos, I must say. But I'm always failing to see what's funny about other people's mishaps. Even if supposedly "nobody was harmed" -- which I doubt in this case, considering that most people didn't even have safety belts in the 70s let alone wearing them.

Interesting footage of the ring nonetheless.

I don't know if they offer it at Knockhill, but have you thought about an instructed Track Day? That would seem a safer solution if you're worried about the wannabe race drivers wrecking you ...

Inactice leagues are boring. Sure, you win, but that's too easy to be fun.

Well, I'm actually posting, because I somehow feel cheated, probably by the system somehow. Here it goes:

As expected, I finished 3rd and 4th in 1st race, which were my qualifying positions. And as described above, I don't understand why I'm not faster than my competitor Cam Racing. I should be better in just about every aspect except for test driver quality, so I'd expect to be at least equally fast as him, but I'm quite a bit slower.

The other thing I noticed (actually I already noticed this before, but I think I can call it confirmed now) is that my pitting times have not improved in a long time. Even though I now have a better tech manager and a tech department running at 140%. Last time at Magny Cours I had a worse tech manager and my department was running at 100% iirc. So shouldn't my pitting times be lower now? I should think so, as that is one of the main reasons for sinking all that cash into research.

I think I will be posting this in the bugs reporting forum over at GPMP, cause something is fishy here.

I'll let you know as soon as I have 20.000 km of real life racing under my belt.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Nope, dry weekend for me. Are yours damp times?

I'm doing a two stop race this time around.

Yes, damp times. I thought the conditions were the same independant of division, but apparantly they're not. I didn't keep track of my times until now, so I don't know dry times.

Two stops for me also. And btw, according to my experience, the pit calculator really makes a difference on tracks where four stops are the way to go, as most teams don't do more than three stops.

Quote from tristancliffe :

My Practice Times:
2nd: 1m14.943
3rd: 1m14.965
8th: 1m15.000

My Qualifying Times:
1st: 1.14.570
5th 1m14.599

So you're quicker than my 3rd driver in practice

I'm almost 1 second slower than your 3rd driver in practice.

Are those your times in damp conditions? If so, the reason for you being so much faster could probably be attributed to the fact that your tech department probably runs at 200% efficiency whereas mine is only at 140% and that your chassis is much better. So forget the comparison, it doens't make much sense, I suppose.

The question remains: Why am I so much slower than a team which is worse than mine? The only thing that seems to make any sense, actually is the poor quality of my test driver. Please, can anyone confirm that? I don't want to waste money on a 3rd 5* driver if it's not necessary.

Edit: Mustafar, try this calculator to figure out the best pit strategy: http://teop.org/stopcalc.php
It works rather well, as far as I can tell.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Are you drivers 100% all round? Motivation is a big slowness factor too - 100% motivated drivers MUCH quicker than 80% motivation.

Yep, N°1 and N°2 drivers both at 100% all around. My only week point is the test driver.

Edit: Who is Cam Racing anyway? Team owner is Honest T -- I hope that nomen est omen here . What are your times at Magny Cours, Tristan? I've got a 1:15.994 and a 1:15.995. Is that fast?

Last edited by Linsen, Fri, 16 Nov 2007 11:42.

Hm, so I've got a 200% engine, a 5* tech dep. with 250 assistants running at 140% efficiency, Pat Symmonds as tech director and a 75% chassis with 100% stability. Actual weight of chassis & engine is at minimum. However, I'm .260 seconds slower in qualifying than Cam Racing. I should actually be faster, though, considering that Cam Racing is not contributing (so tech dep. can only run at 120% maximum) and using a MacLaren chassis (which is definitely worse than my own chassis).

My question is: Why am I slower? I can only make out two possible reasons. One would be that I need a better Test driver to do practice laps and thus work on setups (a 5* driver?). Second possible reason would be that race/qualifying performance is dependant on years in sport. Those are the only two areas where Cam Racing is ahead of me. I suspect it must be the quality of the test driver. Can anyone confirm that?

I'd really appreciate an answer, as I'm a little lost right now.

Thx,

Linsen

Quote from 11SuLLy11 :

This might not be the correct place to post this thread but no point in starting a thread for this question

how do I download new cars on Rfactor ?

I got it today and it is telling me I used my maximum dowloads per day ?

You don't have to use the rfactorcentral downloads. There are usually plenty of others available. Only rfactorcentral's own downloads (marked with a little icon) are limited.

Quote from J@tko :

I've just realised why none of my engines have sold yet - the new server. The people who usually would be leaping at my engines are on Zanardi Server, and I'm not. I was 2-3 seasons in at the server change, and so the newest people on the server will either have changed to the other one, or be wanting better engines than I have at the minute! Damn!

You sure about that? There are still 49 divisions on the Hill server and quite a few people are in their 1st or 2nd year.

I think it's more to do with the fact that offer is generally larger than demand in the lower to middle ranges. Personnally I have only had one engine customer in 9 years and I really try to keep prices low. I never offered an engine for more than 5-8% over production costs, but they didn't sell.

edit: btw, 11th division now, I hope I can kick some behinds with tristan's engine

Quote from Leprekaun :

I'm curious to know to why this thread hasn't been closed yet

Very good question! I was just about to write a lengthy post about how an internet forum is not gonna teach a 13-year-old insight into life and how it works, and that it's his parents responsibility to do that, and why so many people think it's theirs ... blahblahblah

But Leprekaun summed it up, basically. This is going nowhere.

At 33 you shouldn't be halfway dead actually. I'm 35 and I just calculated my life span. Apparantly I've got 43 years ahead of me.

Of course I could quit smoking, stop drinking alcohol, eat less fat and more fruit, excercise more (although climbing and tennis once a week each is not bad, I suppose).

I could as well, to further increase my life span, stop driving a car, stop changing light bulbs or anything else that's accident prone. I might as well stop leaving the house altogether to minimize my risk of being struck by a brick -- but what kind of life is that?

Quote from Bladerunner :

maybe only a few seconds, but then isnt it better to WIN by 1 second than come SECOND by 1 second?

"Only a few seconds" would probably have meant a couple of more 8th places this season and thus 5th place in constructors championship rather than 6th and last. So, yes, it would have been worth it.

Quote from Bladerunner :

How 'good' are your pit crew? IF you have a TOP tech guy, and loads of guys in the 'team' (250 - level 5 HQ etc..) THEN your pit times will come down

Well, my tech department is 5* with 250 assistants. My tech-manager however was Patrick Head. I'm changing to Pat Symmonds for next season, but does this really make that much of a difference?

Quote from Bladerunner :

Still convinced that a SOOPAH POWAHFULL engine is NOT totally necessary in the lower divisions
...

I think you were lucky. Much like me in last season, where I won every single race with a mediocre engine. But this season, I had a 200/200/100/200 engine, a chassis with 100% stability and specs of 65% in the beginning and 70 to 71% in the end, my technical departement started out at level 1 and is now at level 3. (However, for some reason, my pit stop times were no better than the last time on the same tracks where technical department was running at only 100%. Isn't that a little strange?*) Still, I qualified last most of the time and my best results were 4th and 5th through superior pit strategy. In current season standing I'm tied at 5th with another team and will probably end up in last place overall.

*To elaborate further on this point: Even with a tech dep. running at Level 3, my pit times are worse than those of other teams who can run at 120% maximum (and yes, that is when they are stopping on the same laps). Strange, huh? Anybody know why this could be the case?

Yep, that's the main problem with rfactor, imho. The lack of predictability. While your experience with one mod might be all good and fun, some other mod could be totally crap. You try to tweak it and you might even succeed, but switch to a different mod and you're tweaking again. And I'm not even talking about mods that are utter crap, just your average mod that gets high ratings by a fair amount of users. And experiences differ between different players of the same mod. The PCC2007 mod for example, I can't get to feel even remotely right, but tons of people thoroughly enjoy it obviously. Of course, I'm using realfeel, so that would account for my bad experience with many of the mods, but default ffb I could never get to feel right. However, there's a plugin called LeoFFB which seems to work with most mods and is imho much better than the default ffb.

So the bottom line is, I would recommend rfactor to anybody who is willing to invest some time in it and doesn't mind fiddling with all kinds of settings and trying out tons of mods only to find out that 80 % are not "for them". It's just not nearly as accessible as LFS, imho.

Thx for the answers and offers, guys.

Seems I really have to go for a 200 all around then. And 3.2 million is a very reasonable price. So, I'll gladly take yours, tristan (sorry, herki). Will you let me know the password via pm as soon as the season is over?

Thx,

Linsen

Edit: Anybody else got the impression that the introduction of clubs raised the overall level of competition, or has it always been like this once you got to a certain division?

Last edited by Linsen, Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:17.

Anybody got a nice engine for next season for me?

I will probably need something like 200/200/150+/~200. The lighter the better, of course.

@herki: Thx for your engine. It was pretty nice actually and reasonably priced, but most teams in my league had something better -- or lighter at least , so I sucked. I think it's because many teams get good deals on almost perfect engines through their club. It seems to make competition more fierce.

Making a new post now, because I need an explanation for this.

As already stated above, I'm in 13th div. now and, at least in qualifying, I'm the slowest team (of six who have already qualified). What I don't understand is this:

I'm using herki's 200/200/100/200 engine, which should be pretty fast, I think. My chassis is at 65% to 66% on all stats, stability is 100%. I've got a 5* construction hall and technical dep. is running at 120% with 250 assistants. Technical manager is Patrick Head.

All other teams (except for one, which has not qualified) in my division are not contributing, so they're tech dep. can't be operating at more than 120%. Most teams are using their own chassis, so I don't know their stats, but Cam Racing is using a MacLaren chassis which should be considerably worse than my own chassis, yet, I'm 0.4 seconds behind in pace.

Anybody got an idea, why my performance would be so bad compared to the other teams? surely they can't all be using 200 all around engines, can they?

Made it!

180 pts in constructors championship and both drivers tied for first in drivers championship! Perfect season!

I passed Cam Racing in the LFS Club ranking. And, here it comes: I've got the most kudos!



What a season. We'll see how it goes in 13th division now.

Edit: Oh my, it's not looking too good now. So far there are at least 2 teams faster than me in qualifying -- one of them is Cam Racing .

Edit 2: This is rather disillusioning. I've got herki's great engine (200/200/100/200) and I'm slower than at least three other teams in qualifying now. Most noticeably I'm 0.4 seconds slower than Cam Racing, which is using the MacLaren chassis, which is worse than my own chassis. I guess this would rule out engine and chassis as the reason for my crappy performance, right? So, is it all down to my technical department operating at only 120%?

Last edited by Linsen, Tue, 6 Nov 2007 10:31.

Well, I'm definitely in my most successful season ever. 162 points in nine races and 96 pts ahead of second place in constructors championship is pretty good I'd say. If Carel Godin de Beaufort wins tonight (he qualified a tad faster than James Anthony Murphy), I'll have both my drivers tied for 1st in drivers championship.

I really want that perfect season, so I'm hoping everything goes as planned tonight.

Quote from Ricerguy :

Linsen...you stinker, Im on a free account and almost keeping up with you...for now.

-.-'

Cheapskate!

And since you're trying to make excuses: I really don't have anything you couldn't have. All of my facilities are operating at 100%, except for two which are at 110%. I'm just contributing out of pure philanthropy.