My Diaries

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

Tuesady March 07, 2000

I took an old two-forty, and I played a little dirty,
And I beat the bloody Vector at the Tri-al Mountain Thirty!

Thanks for all and any websites of Game Shark help!

I managed to hybrid a Diahatsu Midget weight and (more importantly) a Cerbera LM motor onto a race-mod 1971 Datsun 240Z, already fitted with NA3, displacement increase, balance and polishing (I think it was NA3; just squeaks in under 295bhp). I discovered that if you do the engine patch, and then enter the Trial Mountain 30, the "race stewards" don't notice that you are over-power. This is in version 1.0, but then that's the only one where the Vector shows up, I think...

While you can certainly feel the power, it goes away if you do settings (but strangely comes back if you exit and re-enter another event or machine test). Initially I thought maybe I could put a small motor on a Cerbera LM, and patch it back to normal once entered, but that does not seem to work. Even though the garage says 22bhp, and the Cerbera has trouble going 60mph, it still is not allowed to enter the Trial Mountain 30. That gave me the hint that doing the opposite sort of mod should work.

The garage claimed 1119lb and 1119bhp for the hybrid 240Z. It felt plausible. I made reasonably heavy use of the LSD settings, but patched in no extra aero, and, all-in-all, this must be one very well-balanced car. Initially I tried weight-reduction only, but got inconclusive results. (Perhaps partly because of going to the settings menu...)

My time was not great, I was learning the car as I drove, and didn't tune it optimally--just verified it was going fast enough. I did 41:39.957, and the Vector did 42:37.782

Strange thing is that previous Vector times I observed were 44:07.381 and 44:09.006--it *does* go faster if you do. (Not totally unrealistic, really, but different, I'm fairly sure, from GT1; it would be annoying if it turned out I could beat it with, say, a 43:00 minute time, though, and various things suggest to me that would be the case).

I don't suppose I'll do a lot of hybridding, but I probably will try and create a 142bhp Impreza Wagon. ('cos that's what I drive in real life And in the back of my mind I'll be trying to find if there's another hp evaluation in the garage which could be patched on, say, the Cerbera LM to make the race stewards think it was below 295bhp, while still feeling like 624 to me.