Paging Sauce and TJ

Nice race sauce.  Do you hear the announcers?  I suspect not.  The guy pronouncing “mmm sauce” is pretty funny.

To bad you didn’t go with hoof_hearted for a name...

No, can’t hear the announcers on PS4. Could listen to the stream live on another device I guess.

I just watched the stream. You can get a glimpse of me in the blue car flying through through the air at Ascari on lap 1. 

I ended up with 8 damage from the backup at T1, got rearended and drifted around Lesmo 1, then lost it going into Ascari and collected Driver13. It was a fun 30 seconds.

Thanks Air!  And to add to what TJ said, listening to them would be quite a distraction.  There's already enough going on without having someone in your ear hyping up things that may or may not even be going on around you.

In reply to T.J. :

Dude, I feel bad that you keep getting pinballed every race.  I was hoping that without the airstrike brothers you'd get a chance to actually race but alas 

I've decided to add to the chaos and signed up for Sugo.  I will actually do a bit of practicing before.

Any words of wisdom?  Are any changes allowed to the default setup (Brake bias, tire pressures,...)?

In reply to Argo1 :

The only things you can adjust are ABS, Traction Control and brake bias. Map those things to buttons on your wheel. ABS and TC each have High/Low/off as the options. I’ve been using ABS on high and TC off FWIW. 

You seem to have to set these each session. 

Fuel depletion is off and the amount of fuel you get differs from practice to qualli to the race. Practice is like 65L and the other two way less. So don’t practice in practice. Do your practicing in qualli, race or time trial modes as the car is less stable with liw fuel loads. 

I’ll be out of town for Sugo and Donnington, but should be available for Fuji. 

In reply to e30Matt :

Yesterday I was only a victim if my own mistakes. Not sure if I’ll run in any more of these races. Fuji is the next option for me, so I’ll have to see how it goes. 

In reply to T.J. :

Well, look at it this way, you have tons of time to get ready for Fuji.

My recommendation is to run more races with people. We've added quite a few from the series, the more we run with them in close proximity the better it will be for everyone. It wasn't on the stream, but I actually hit Operator a few times in that race, and one was a 3 way with the guy in 3rd too. Fortunately none were bad, but they could have been. 

Sugo is a track that should be better for me than Monza. Kind of bummed I’ll miss that one. The time trial community event is already up. 

I ran some laps at Sugo last night, it isn't easy. It's a relatively narrow track with narrow curbs, so it's easy to drop a wheel. Also, it's predominantly right hand turns, so you end up overworking the left side tires if you push it for too long. I'm still not sure on the line/gear in a couple places, I have a feeling that small differences will be huge on lap time here. 

I did a few Sugo laps. Skipped any sort of practice and went right into the community event. A couple seconds off the pace, but didn’t do very many laps. 

Well, no recap needed. TJ was one the road, Argo didn't make it either, and my race ended at T4 of the first lap. On to Fuji I guess. 

I just watched the stream. Pretty entertaining race to watch. Hard track to not make mistakes on, so there was a good mid-field back and forth battle. 

I was hoping to watch you chase down SmashingApex. Whatever happened to you, they didn’t show it on the stream other than the aftermath. 

In reply to T.J. :

Overall just a series of major mistakes on my part. I didn't get good starts last week or in the qualifying race yesterday and overcompensated by jumping start, and then compounded it by trying too hard to make up for it. From my testing I knew I could run 19's the entire race, and given that most of the field was barely there in qualifying I thought if I killed the out lap and took the drive through penalty that I had a chance to get back to the podium.  Instead I dropped a tire on the outside coming onto the downhill straight and went back across track and into the wall hard. 

All is not lost though, this track did force me to develop some better braking habits which helped me pick up a few tenths a lap.  Another couple of those improvements and I may be able to give Operator more of a challenge.

Good luck at Fuji today Sauce. I'll watch the stream.

Another P2! What happened when you slipped back to 3rd for a little bit? Good job getting back to P2 and then getting a gap to more than cover your penalties. 

In reply to T.J. :

Thanks man! I had another penalty from the entry to the chicane that I was trying to avoid, but apparently giving up 2 seconds and a position wasn't enough to avoid taking it. 

I'll give a full recap tomorrow, I still need to go through it and digest. I was just off pace for both qualifying and race and making numerous mistakes that I really need to clean up. 

In reply to e30Matt :

I thought that's probably what happened based on your lap time. It doesn't seem that hard to program the slow down penalty system to only come into effect if you've gone off track AND gained an advantage. Go off track, lose some time, get a slow down warning, slow down and lose some time, then get a penalty anyway. It seems to happen frequently. You make one mistake and pay for it three times.

Donnington GP is the next track. It is a lot more narrow than Fuji. I'll try some practicing there and see how it goes. May sign up for that one.

In reply to T.J. :

I agree, though defining advantage via programming would be the sticking point. In solo driving it's easy and just the time delta, but when other cars are involved it gets quite nebulous.

That said, the penalty system really is too aggressive, especially at corner exit. There are only a few corners where running wide would actually be faster than staying on track. The design team creates the track limits, those corners should be programmed to have strict enforcement and the rest loosened up. 

Ok, my recap.  First let's start with the excuses.  On Saturday I was doing some practice during Sauce Jr's naptime but he woke up early and came to watch.  As I was quitting he complained about not getting to take his turn, and given that we're working on that ahead of Sauce Jr the II's arrival I conceded and let him use the wheel while I used the pedals.  Well, somehow while doing this he ended up in the settings menu for the wheel and jacked it all up, and in my attempts to fix it I accidentally did a factory reset.  So on Saturday night I had to restart my wheel and pedals from scratch, recalibrate everything, etc. 

I tried it out with the settings suggested by Yorkie (which I'm almost positive I used the first time) and it was undrivable, I couldn't take 3 corners without losing it and it just felt terrible.  Also, the brake pedal had a grand total of 2cm of travel from zero to full, so modulation and trail braking were impossible.  It turns out that there was a firmware update for the wheel released a few months ago that I had never installed, and now didn't have a choice as it's the only version available.  The update completely changed the characteristics, but fortunately there is a thread on GT Planet that suggested new wheel and game settings post-update that helped tremendously.

After playing with a lot of settings both in game and on the wheel I actually picked up a bit of time with better feel while sliding, but lost feel at turn in which caused issues with consistency.  I ran some practice races with the Airstrike brothers and felt really good.  I had run a 1:37.3 in my own practice room, set pole in one of those rooms with a 1:37.5, and in the last race was able to run 38's pretty much the entire race.  I wasn't sure if I could catch SmashingApex, but felt like I could at least be close enough to capitalize on any significant error.

Aaaaaaand that all went out the window in qualifying.  The first flying lap the tires aren't up to temp so the 2nd flying lap was where fast lap was to be found, and in a 10 minute session you get 2 chances.  Ony my first I dropped a tire at the exit of the chicane when on pace for a 37.6, and on the second I got a slow down penalty when on pace for a 37.5.  Neither would have been good enough for pole, but would have been enough to assert position and bolster confidence/rhythm.  

The race itself was more stressful than I expected.  From qualifying where I was 0.6s off my own pace to have a 0.6s gap behind I didn't think I'd be under much if any pressure, but that's not how it played out.  I made a mistake early and had a 2s penalty which I took on the chin not wanting to give up a position to a slower car and figuring it didn't matter, but I was out of rhythm and making small mistakes that were adding up.  That kept P3 pretty close, though I had about a 2 second gap until I cut the entry to the chicane ever so slightly and got another slow down penalty.  I coasted a lot of the way up the hill but the penalty didn't resolve, so I figured I would coast to the last corner, let it resolve and P3 get through, and then I'd get back on it and draft back past.  Well, the penalty resolved by getting added to the existing penalty, meaning I gave up 2 seconds and a position and also took a 1s penalty for what in a best case scenario would be a 0.1s gain.  The draft back past also didn't go quite to plan, but I did get through and created enough gap to hold the position.  Overall I'm not displeased with P2, but I really didn't drive all that well.

I think I may be able to get into the 1:27’s at Donnington for my qualli pace. So far my best lap is 1:28.7, but 27’s are possible. Not sure how this track will be to race on. Seems like it will mostly be a track where you follow someone and wait for a mistake to get past. 

I need to do some races with people to get that experience. 

I’m guessing you and Apex will be in the 26’s or even 25’s for qualli. 

In reply to T.J. :

I've hit high 26's so he'll definitely be low 26's or 25's. I think I'm going to focus on race pace and clean laps rather than outright pace. The track limits are super strict here and it's easy to get penalties, I have a feeling that staying clean will be worth more time overall. 

In reply to e30Matt :

If I see you on this week, I'll open a room up. Interested to see where I am losing time. There are a couple corners that are tricky to get just right. The blind apex right hander leading on to the back straight is the trickiest for me. Still need to work on my braking and turn in point for that one.

In reply to T.J. :

I'm on most evenings starting around 8:15 or so, I'll start a room and send you an invite.

That corner is deceptively tricky and worth almost half a second. The line past the apex doesn't seem to matter as long as you keep it on track, but getting the brake point right and hitting the apex isn't easy. 

So how did yesterday go?  

In reply to dean1484 :

It's every 2 weeks, so next weekend will be the race.