My Diaries

A Lurid Tale of Obsession, Depravity, Wits and Attempted Wit

Thu Jun 10, 1999

I finally won at Autumn Ring ii, in the Abnormal Series

The Autumn Ring is really bad backwards, I think. You do not see the view where you would be looking when driving in real-life as you go past the start/finish to the esse just after it.

But last night I finally won there in the Tuned Series, with a Viper RT/10. Cranked final drive way down (up in number, from 3.8 to 4.5).

Funny thing was I won with 5:58.323, but the next time around I spun on lap 2 at the hairpin leading to the start/finish, and only finished 3rd. But the winning time was 5:55.xxx (and my time was 5:59.571).

Although I came close, neither time did I match the Cerbera lap record of about 1:09.6xx; also I did not get pole either time.

And although I won the Abnormal Series twice, I got a white Trueno the first time, and a blue one the second. I.e. no new prize cars. (I.e. not the remaining one--the yellow Skyline).

My favourite course is Grand Valley East ii. I like to think I use the style which is appropriate for each corner. If you like throwing a car into a corner, you might actually want it to understeer. You want to be able to *provoke* oversteer, to spin it around, but after that you might want a nice drift on both ends to carry it sideways around the corner. That can involve final understeer. (More efficient than using lots of opposite lock, and helps prevent spin-outs).

I examine tracks to see where I should go slow to go faster later. E.g. at Grand Valley East ii, although you can go very fast through the first corner, the next corner you should pull-up a little early, and hold tight, so that you get a wider smoother line for the next turn and thereby a faster run into the tunnel.

After the tunnel, it is quite tricky. You learn just where to brake to go around that near-hairpin with a minimum of lost speed, then smooth out the next left-hander. Then comes the really tricky part. You clip the next slight right-hander, and turn a little early for the left-hander after it, and allow your drift to take you to the outside (right-hand side) of the track. The AI cars nearly always come off on this corner!!! You gain a lot of time in the Normal Series right there. After that, resist the temptation to straighten up early, but rather let your car drive across to the left-side of the track and smoothly bring it parallel, and then back across to the right-hand side. Ghosts showed me you lose a lot of time if you try to "straighten" the corner by pulling right early, because you actually sharpen it. After the straight you throw the car into the hairpin in a manner which suits its particular handling (must prepare a lot earlier with 4wd cars; they tend to slip entirely sideways, whereas with an FR you can use its tendency to spin to send you around the corner), and drive off smoothly to the finish line.

An e-mail correspondent wrote to tell me he picked up the green RX-7 A spec yesterday, and got two more golds in his A licence, leaving just test 4 and 8 left for A class gold.

The green RX7 seemed common as nails in my games.

It seems strange to me that he's got so many golds, but has not won the Abnormal Series yet. Especially since the other cars co-operate so much to help you win the series that you can usually win it with 30 points. (They don't co-operate to help you win or do well in individual races, though, except perhaps the High Speed Ring). I won twice with the Cerbera with only two race wins each time.

The only "real" gold I have is B-7. B-1,B-2, and A-7 do not count. I have all my license cups, but the following are still bronze: A-3,A-8,IA-2,IA-4,IA-5,IA-6 and IA-8. The rest are silver, except for the 4 golds.

Another thing I did today was finally publish on the web my HTML forms I print off for recording race results.

http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~arpepper/gt/results_forms