My Diaries

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

Saturday, September 29, 2001

I Fairly Quickly Get Another A License Gold on A-3 in Gran Turismo 1

Continuing my quest to get all my A License Gold Medals, I continued with A-3 (RX-7 doing main straight and first hairpin at Grand Valley) actually getting gold after much persistence yesterday.

Starting from a personal best silver time of 43.177 seconds, I had to get down to 42.800 to get gold.

Here are my final standings for my A-3 license test.

Note that, to keep a fairly wide variety of results, and avoid using up too many game days, I reload my game when I have done too many tries which get "on the board" without setting a new personal record (silver) time.

This time, however, I didn't manage to save any time from previous days.

When I started this one, I thought it would take a long time to whittle away all the time I needed.

In fact, it happened reasonably quickly mostly through sub-consciously learning how to drive the course.

You need to warmup, of course, but it's important to minimize wheel-spin when starting, too, so let off a little just before the start.

You can keep the throttle pinned through the first set of esses leading on to the main straight but you must concentrate on keeping all the lines smooth, and avoiding tire squeal.

The final corner must be apexed late to allow early acceleration, and on my gold run I just barely clipped the inside rumble strip, exiting well over 100mph with good acceleration.

After exiting I smoothly curved to head towards the right side of the road.

I took a smooth line through the left turn before the hairpin, and then headed into the hairpin before braking and downshifting hard and turning in sharply.

I braked well after the outside rumble strip began; this requires lots of practice to be able to keep control of the car.

On my gold run I did a drift around the hairpin, feathering the throttle to keep control, running very close to the rumble strip and arranging to mash the gas quite early for an exit to maximize speed on the final straight. I technically apexed late, but actually kept quite close to the rumble strip for much of the turn, hitting a minimum speed of 55 mph.

My shifting points (mph) were something like:

Note that 137mph was not my maximum speed; I had already lost some speed due to initiating the corner.

Or maybe I even braked just before down-shifting.