can't believe how tight / small the rear bodywork is, the side pods practically disappear before the rear wheels

wow look at those mclaren side pod intakes
big shark fin too

side pods are incredible, how the hell can they shrink them that much without messing with the cooling

there was a similar story in australia a few weeks ago with a ford 4X4. apparently the key wouldn't turn to the off position whilst the car was in motion, the auto box wouldn't allow a shift to neutral and with a nice torquee V8 the brakes had no chance of holding it so he had a 30 min ride down the hard shoulder with the police clearing traffic till he crashed.

scarey really that these so called features were introduced because of idiots engaging the steering lock at speed ( don't laugh we had one locally that crashed after he took the key out whilst he was on the dual carriage way so his wife could unlock the glovebox !! ) or accidently shifting into neutral / reverse / park and blowing the engine / transmission / crashing and then sueing the manufacturer for not preventing their stupidity. all it does is take more control out of the driver's hands when you really need it. (and whilst we're at it have you seen how small the handbrake disc / drum is on a lot of cars today? sure it'll hold a stationary car and it'll hit that 16% efficiency the MOT demands but they sure as hell haven't got the heat capacity to slow a car down from speed, and of course these mini drums / pads are usually found on the more luxury cars which of course are the usually the more heavier / faster cars)

i see in autosport that sky are not / unable to renew their agreement with ESPn for the NASCAR coverage so the question is does this mean ESPN will show it or are we just going to have to find an online feed?

lol saw that in autosport love the idea of weather being sh!t becasue it's warm

think it was a case that if it was mounted upside down then because of the way the mountings were positioned the wing element in question was masked by another so reducing the actual area that was presented to the wind. the downforce reduction was due to the fact that effectively one element of the wing went missing rather than that element producing lift

Quote from Ivo Georgiev :

I suggest having the wings flipped up - it would limit the speed (if you exceed the limit, you will fly), and it going behind another car will increase your grip.

I'm joking, ofc

funny you should say that, there was a row a few seasons ago in GP2 (or whatever it was called then) at monza when one team decided that they could still comply with the regs on the number of rear wing elements fitted but by fitting the main element upside down they could reduce downforce and drag and still have a controllable car. as far as i can remember the scruteneers passed it but i think it was protested after the race, just not sure of the outcome.

for starters lets go back to what giles villenueve suggested to make it a drivers formula but with modern provisions

1 unlimited engines, but nowadays add in a max fuel quota to limit the power that way (but ensure there is at least as much power as today), if you can build a more efficient engine you get the benefit rather than currently where either you're pegged back or the less powerfull engine is allowed ot be developed, then make it so every engine maunfacturer has to be prepared to supply every team with the same engine for a fixed limited price. they probably won't have to but it will deter use of unobtanium (BTW nice use of the phrase in avatar mr cameron), engine ecu's to have no driver controlled maps, cars to be run on rolling road after race to ensure power curve is the same in each gear to rpevent traction control by another means. no refueling so if you can make the power on less fuel you benefit from reduced weight.

2 limited tyre size, no more than 15 inches at the rear, this along with 1 should ensure that throttle control is at a premium. 1 stock tyre compound (excluding wets / inters ) for whole year ok so it would be too hard at some circuits and too soft at others but guess what? it's tough learn to drive around problems like they used to, anyone remember hunt in 77 gambling and almost succeeding by doing a race on qualifiers and coping with the overheated tyres later on. if you cant work out how to look after tyres or work with tyres that don't grip then you're not the best in the world. 4 sets of tyres allowed for a race.

3 rear downforce to be reduced to 1976 levels. so thats simple single plane wings and a flat bottom from where it currently starts to the furtherst rear point so no diffusers, plank to be doubled in height to limit low running. front wings to be as wide as today but to be mounted higher so as to take them out of ground effect, once again a 76 average height would be a good place to start. the bottom of the body work at the point where front wings are mounted is to be lowest part of car (excluding the plank) if any part of the body work is higher than it then that becomes the lowest point reference for anything further to the rear, this eliminates the current high noses and once again simplifies underbody aero.

4 manual H shift transmissions and clutch, i can cope with it so the best drivers in the world should be able to, no antistall clutch as it won;t be needed with the following point

all engines must be able at the end of the race, whilst at working temperature, to be started by an onboard starter motor, they used to be required to have one but it was dropped sometime after 77 as teams were fitting such small batteries and engines were so temperamental they didn't work but with today's engine management this won't be a problem, if it is then rethink your engine.

engine driven alternators to be banned, all electrical power from batteries (or other electrical storage techniques) which cannot be changed durring a race but it's up to you if you wish to have big enough batteries for a race or recharge these from an energy recovery system and if you wish to use the electrical energy to provide extra power you can (and no limit on how much or how long) but just make sure there's enough left to start that engine at the end, cars minimum weight to be measured without batteries / kers fitted to encourage development of lighter solutions. all storage systems to pass an extensive impact / fire / short test to prevent giant "bomb" capactitors being used and once again encourage safe solutions for road use . you can charge durring a pit stop so we may see the development of quick recharging electrical systems for road use.

mirrors / mountings to be a spec design, make them a senible size so they at least let you see the rear tyres and the mounts will make sure they're mounted in the traditional position not on disguised turning vanes.

apart from the front and rear wings, body work to form a smooth surface with no protrussions larger than the camera pods i.e no winglets, vanes, barge boards etc it there is any doubt about a part it must be agreed to by every other team. no part of brake cooling assemblies etc allowed to the outside of the wheel's spokes so no spinners etc, wheels to have be increased from 13" to 18" diameter, lets get the suspension doing the work rather that using tall tyre walls as suspension, also it is stupid to have wheels smaller than just about new car available today. wheels to have to allow a certain amount of light to pass through the area between the rim and the hub flange, this will mean spectators can see the brakes glow and prevent complicated areo fins as spokes.

brake materials etc to be as current regs, tyre size/ aero grip will limit how braking anyway.

suspension to be to current regulations with track width/ wheel base / car length / width going back to 1976 dimensions, this was when the maximum limits were first imposed and set by the simple expedient of taking the largest cars in each area as the maximum.

fuel type to be free with the provision that it must be provided by a commercial motor fuel supplier and be available at 20% of that companies forecourt pumps. sample fuel to be compared to fuel obtained from a random forecourt belonging to that company. if the fuel's legality is in doubt then it fails, no appeal.

hopefully we'd end up with a series where the driver matters and technology didn't take the skill out of driving but at the same time encourage the development of engine efficiency and better fuels / energy storage and inovative designers.

skippy suspension is real nice, there's a nice slow mo vid on you tube that has the skippy in it and you can see the spring coils compressing

found it, check out the suspension at 4:00

oh and the real lenses on the radical at 1:15

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI9dUeNpBV0

funny i felt the same but over time i've grown to appreciate them more and now a lot of other sims / games look cartoonish by comparison. think a lot of it comes down to just exactly what detail you have on and what the colour balance on your graphics card / monitor is

agreed , i guess we're lucky that with LFS being uk based they're far less likely to be dragged into court over hosting a copyrighted logo etc in a skin database than a US company is. plus of course the fact that iracing's race servers are hosted by them rather than third parties just adds to the potential liability.

throttle change is nice, dallara feels better now, you can notice the change in engine braking and the turn in is better. bump stops are nice to as you can tell there's actual suspension there now.

re inertia changes, the trouble with so much of a cars feel is it's subjective and it's very hard to quantify exactly how a cars inertia affects its handling, even with measurement you have the problem of ensuring the control input, track grip, speed, wind speed and direction etc etc are all exactly the same every time you measure it and then you have to measure at different fuel loads etc

ooh thats quite a substantial change in a few areas even without the transmission etc, love the fact that aero and engine breathing takes into account track altitude, shows nicely what levels of detail they're working up to (be interesting with mixed racing in the future with turbo's and norm aspirated cars being affected differently by altitude). also like how aero forces from body roll are being improved, presumably that'll give a bigger downside to running very soft springs.

the bump stop thing is interesting, presumably it'll close down one area of unrealistic setups with spring rates and runing on the stops from medium speeds upwards (unless of course they're fixed at the other end and we run on them all the time but i can't see that). and yes the brakes may sort out the alien setups / driving style on the corvette but they'll still be faster simply because they are. (edit: i suspect the changes to increase grip loss when sliding at high speed may hamper the aliens more)

Last edited by tinvek, Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:44.

Quote from 5haz :

With every year he looks more and more lilke Dick Dastardly.

lol best xmas present i got was a 3 dvd set of wacky races

being serious for a second, never understood the logic of forcing a driver to do skiing if he doesn't like it as it sounds like a recipe for a torn ligament or worse

i recon that if the cars are as evenly matched as they were at the end of last season we could have a good year, there's going to be a lot of setup compramises to allow for the substantial change in weight over a race and mixing in the fact that now a car after a pitstop will be quicker than one waiting to pit due to new tyres and no extra weight, we could see a lot of battles between drivers that are on different stratergies both for setup and pitstops with cars that are substantially faster or slower than each other. plus we should see some electrifying pitstop time this year with just tyres to change, top teams are expecting sub 3 second stops to be the norm and maybe the odd sub 2 second stop!!

Last edited by tinvek, Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:47.

biggest advantage to the spoiler over wing ( and probably the reason it got changed) is when the cars get spun around the teams have been saying that the wing is generating a lot of lift with the air hitting it from behind causing more flips and flying cars, the spoiler just produces a load of turbulence etc. the wing would have been fine if they had made it with a wide amount of adjustment that could be done quickly in a pitstop as it would have allowed drivers to tune out push if it occured and / or take a gamble on a looser car, the advantages would have outweighed the problems

Quote from StableX :

interesting point, wonder how codemasters feel about this as they paid for the rights to F1 didn't they?

good point, i assume williams know what they're allowed to do, similarly BMW with the BF1 in LFS. im guessing it's something to do with it being the 2009 car and that codemasters presumably will be launching their game with the 2010 cars.

if peter windsor et all don't pull their collective fingers out, driving the FW31 on iracing may be the closest USF1 get to an F1 car this year

Quote from JPeace :

baby schumi vs real schumi.

don't forget toddle schumi (rosberg) and embryonic schumi (hulkenberg) if the williams is quick enough.

it will be very interesting with 3 young germans all trying to out do each other and schumi to prove they're the next schumi

on the whole the SR system is ok, yeah the 1X for dropping a wheel is anoying but if you think of it as incident points being the same as real world money then it doesn't matter who's fault a crash was, every driver still has to pay to repair their car.

eg gills4life lost some SR when the backmarker had brain fade but in real life he'd have had to get his car repaired and in the future he'll be cautious around other backmarkers (if a driver is that far behind in a rookie race then you have to think about his driving standard though it may well be that he had damage to his suspension etc and wasn't totally in control) personally on a last lap with a 2 1/2 second lead, unless the backmarker was real slow, i'd be thinking if i needed to pass him or could i run at his pace and still win

Quote from ColeusRattus :

wait, what? why on earth would you prefer a 3 door car over a 5 door one? .

apart from the looks of a 3 door which some people prefer and that traditionally sporting cars were 2 doors because the shell was tronger, which became 3 doors with the invention of hatchbacks, if the driver is tall or has limited flexability those longer doors can make it a lot easier for them to get in and out of a car.

i agree though that if the space is tight the extra length can make it harder to get out

has our forum developed a bug? join date dec 2000 !!!

despite playing this since it came out, it doesn't seem to be grabbing me at all and i find myself going days without playing it. i don;t know what it is but for some reason it feels a bit flat and just doesn't seem to have any atmosphere for me (maybe it's the lack of playing regularly with the same people?). i'll keep going till i'm at level 70 but i suspect after that it'll just sit there on my desktop.

i gather there may be some new maps in a couple of months, hopefully they'll give us a few which actually give some decent long views for snipers

nice job, totally pointless but a nice job, apart from the exhaust. there was a corvette that autocar mag tested in the late 70's that had a helicopter turbine in it and they fed the exhaust into a large diffuser under the car and mixed it with fresh air so by the time it exited under the rear bumper it was at a safe temp for pedestrians etc. that used to idle at 60 mph and would leave rubber form a standstill without using the throttle.

i agree about the A and B classes but obviously people must buy them as i see them being driven, usually by people who have glasses, grey thining hair, a trilby and cussions on the rear parcel shelf. the fact it's shitty and still sells proves the point about image selling as you can guarentee that if it was a kia and still at that price no one would touch it.

also don't forget that the on the road price for a basic A class is less than £15,000 so anybody thats in the market for a car at that price range is fair game for them and image counts for alot. if it didn't then the skoda superb would be a best seller as nearly every motoring mag sings it's praises in every test, autocar this week refered to it's limo size interior space and leather that is better than a jag's but you just know that most people wont consider it because of skoda's image.

there was a study done a few years ago that showed that even if you're at the back of the field and don't finish races, the fact that you are in F1 does have a positive influence on the way people think of your product regarding it's use of technology and general image. even airlines found that the crashing problem that kept them away from motorsport doesn't occure, people see a car crash with an airline's name on it and the don't think the planes will crash but they do think the airlines a more exciting, up to date type of company. we all like to think we don't let adverts/ product image affect our decission making yet i doubt many of us can honestly say we buy everything because of how good it is or what it's price is even with the most basic stuff.

if advertising didn't work then sport today would be very different from how it is, companies do not throw money at things just becasue they like to, they want a return and that return is image, why is that it's arsenal's stadium that's the emirates stadium and not a team in a local sunday leagues ground thats sponsored by emirates? because of tv / press coverage linked to an image they want to be associated with in people's minds

Last edited by tinvek, Fri, 1 Jan 2010 23:52.

lets face it, even if schumacher is no better than button, just by signing him, mercedes have ensured they will probably get a disproportionate amount of coverage in the first few races at least and at the end of the day thats what they are in racing for, to advertise and hopefully sell the road cars

i'm with barry norman when he was reviewing the film, so i'm going to refer to it as ten past eight