dukestah’s gtr blog

cold plus wet equals very slippery. i went out for another stint on my 24 hour race. rain has increased and the track was too wet for slicks. so i tried the mentioned combination of soft rain on front and hard rain on the rears but this was my worst decission for this race. tire temps are always below 80 degree, colder on the rears and quite unhandable. i tried to powersteer to get the tires hot enough to be a little bit competitive but no chance. i lost around 30 seconds per lap to position 16 (g2 porsche) and after 5 laps the number 18, 19 and 20 passed me. my lap times went up to 9.20-9.30. finally, i pitted after lap 6 of this stint for soft rain for the rear and fuel. number 21 passed, position 22, what a success 🙁 i decided to continue tomorrow and after pressing cancel race it came to my mind that i have forgot to save the race. what a beautiful evening.
after 4 hours of racing, it is 4 o’clock in the afternoon. even soft rain tires are just between 60-80 degree celsius, i’m really sorrowful about the night session. when temperature of the track keeps decreasing there will be no tire suitable for the night stints. since it is impossible to change the tire pressure during race, which sounds indeed very strange, the race is kinda lost. with slightly underinfladed tires it would be possible to gain a couple of degrees more but thats to late now.

last race for this week. i restarted my race session from yesterday which was ended suddenly with the strange crash. still rain and a semi wet track. my first 6 lap stint was on medium slicks. at lap 5 it became more and more difficult to keep lap times close to 9 min, front tires below 70 degrees and rear tires around 75 degrees. so i went for the box after 6 laps and took the soft slicks for another 6 laps stint. passing some of the g2 and ngt opponents but i good some pressure from the back since the gt cars started to lap me. unfortunatelly, they were still slower in some sections and so i had to keep sure that they do not block me. tire temps keep dropping for each lap and the rain fog increased so i decided to go for soft rain tires on the front and hard rain tires on the back to find back to below 9 minutes laps. but this will be tested next week.

a couple of days without gtr due some other activities like skiing and a birthday party. after my 6 hours car trip on friday (for just 330 km! snow and lag of brain is not really a good compination on roads) i was kind of sick of driving a car ;).
i tried to remove all add-on cars for test purposes, just to check if the stuttering is based on add-on cars. i started a 30 cars race on nordschleife day with the original cars but the stuttering was the same. to be consequent, i finished this 1:30 hour race regardless to stuttering and complete freezes for a couple of seconds. unfortunately, my strategy doesn’t fit to my current lap times so i run out of fuel and had to pit for the last lap again. even with the slow elise, i was the fastest of my class, so with a better strategy and more concentration it should be possible to win the class. my current lap times are about 8:45 min on med slicks (depends on passes) and a fuel consumption of about 12 litres per lap. tire wear is good enough to stay out for about 20 laps but i have to test this, i had a wear of 6-8 after 10 laps. with the current consumption i have to refuel after 8 laps, so one pitstop for fuel, the next one for fuel and tires could work which will lead to 1:10 hour stints and a driver change after two stints. but i will check if the handling will remain similar with a full tank and an empty tank (i did just tests with a maximum of 75 litres yet which is enough for 6 laps) so if i go for 3 stints of 6 laps on the same tires and if this will give me the chance of saving 2-3 seconds per lap due a better balanced and consistent setup this could be an alternative strategy. especially for the night and the dawn/dusk periods the tire temperature will be the major criteria for pitting. stay tuned 😉
about stuttering, with the above-mentioned tests, i had a couple of things running in the background and this was a terrible scenario. gtr is very sensitive to such things. the next thing i have recognized is memory. a field with more than 20 cars eats up one gigabyte easily. with more than 40 cars on the track gtr started to reload sounds like pitradio during the race which produces lags of seconds.

another test evening. formerly, i wanted to check tire wear so i went out to a test session. setup was my race setup for hot tracks with medium slicks front and rear. my plan was to drive 3 laps and then to pit to check tire wear and to get fuel. but my 2nd stop was like some other evenings befor. nothing happens. it is really not understandable because there was no other car on the track, so it was really not yellow, i have anounced my stop, there could not be any stop’n’go penalty. no pitstop, it really goes to annoying me.
to put some more salt into the soup i wanted to test the brake issue again. i calibrated my wheel and checked all settings within gtr. i set the sensitivity to 20% to get some kind of linear response and i set 5% deadzone for brake axis. disabling abs and out on the track, and what a surprise, the elise was acting very similar to the settings with low abs. so it is possible to use this car without abs if the brake pedal is correct calibrated. i often found the brake at 100% when checking the controller settings and at the moment the throttle was ablied just a bit the brake power went back to zero but as soon as the throttle was zero the brake power was back to 100% percent. this happens sometimes between sessions but often only after starting gtr. over the whole evening i had just 2 complete wheel locks at all and this was at night where the brakes were too cold. this is a little bit pity because you can not adjust brake cooling during race and with more than 10 degrees difference between day and night it is quite hard to handle.
so i thought, ok, let’s go for a huge field. i installed the nordschleife pack containing two versions of the nordschleife (zurich and the mother2) plus additional cars. strange thing, it was not possible to put more than 29 cars on the track. after struggeling with this for more than a half hour i get really pissed and deinstalled all mods and addons on gtr and installed my previous version of zurich which is quite newer than this nordschleife pack (helpers on the track and some minor changes), my prefered elise car pack plus brighter headlights, video removal and gtr logo removal and nothing more. surprisly, now it was possible to create a grid of more than 29 cars, 59 to be exact. i decided that a total amount of 50 would be the maximum my system can handle. my next attempt was to modify the gdb files of the zurich track to get longer races on the special stages. i went for 6 hours, edited all the files, gtr was showing a max race length of 6 hours, exactly what i want. so i started another test session but who knows why, the race was done after 40 minutes. so this works neither. back to the original files and another try. i startet the zurich24 track and went for a 2 hour race with all classes and 50 cars. no time for qualifying and after my last attempts to qualify and to race i thought it would be the best to start from the end. everything went fine for 1:30 hours until i was trying to pit my second time and, you surely guess whats coming, no pitstop. damn, this can’t be true, i was leading the gt2 field, and the race had just half an hour left to race and i can not pit. beside this, it was a great experience to have this huge field, the passes of the gt1 in the morning, the life in the pits, the daytime changes and the differences in the behavior of the car due the different temperatures.

more testing this evening. due my experience in rain and on a much hotter track than usual (if you start zurich day dry it will have just 20 degree track temperatur but if you start zurich day or dawn with changing weather it has more than 30 degrees on the track ?!?) i did a 10 lap race with adapted setup. medium slicks front and rear, less spoiler on the rear and 10 nm less on the front sway bar. the opponents were set to 115% strength and i started from 1st position. after aremberg, there was no more opponent visible in rear view mirrors and i finished my 1st lap with a 20 secounds gap to the second. after lap 6 i went for the pits with 3 minutes ahead and a best lap of 8:40.980. due my pace i drove step by step into troubles because my rear wheels were almost above 100 degree. nethertheless, i finished the race with 2:54 to the second and my best lap was 20 secounds faster than the best opponent. i had to slow down for the last 2 laps because i had fuel for just a total of 10 laps on board and to pit just for one lap again wasn’t really my idea. so on a wormer track with a balanced setup it is possible to drive 11 laps in a 1:30 hour race with the elise. with less stress for the car and the tires, a longer stop after 10 laps, this will give an estimate of 160 laps for a 24 hour race. with a full tank it should be possible to stay out for at least 8 laps and with a moderate driving the tires should last for 16 laps. this will lead to a 1:20/2:40 strategy but i am not sure if it is possible to stay out for 16 laps on the very same tires while keeping the lap times equal. i will do more test races just for checking the tire wear and temperature. maybe hard tires rear and one step more rear wing will give better and constant results. less sway bar on the front is not recommended, the car renders more and more less responding.

another messy evening. first i started a qualifying session to get a real starting position. surprisly, i got the first place although the opponents are quite strong on single laps. i start the race session but gtr keeps starting the session over and over again. ok, i restart gtr and jumped direct into the start grid. it was wet with low rain and the forecast was dry. to have more fun, i started from the end of the field. it was really cool to see those 24 cars ahead on this wet track. i passed 5 or 6 cars within one lap and then the track started to dry. what an experience! i really love this changing conditions in gtr. after lap 4 i was on first place with a couple of secounds ahead. in lap 5, the line was quite dry, my car became more and more unstable, my rear tires were above 100 degree and driving on the wet part of the track did not help very much. so i decided to pit after lap 6. but a few meters after hocheichen my right rear tire was gone. with more than 15 km to go i was not really sure if it is a good idea to try to reach the box but just a couple of meters later the left rear tire was in the very same condition. race over, what a pity. but it was a great experience and with a 9:01 on this semi wet track i was not really angry.

just another race this evening, started at the end of the grid. i did some slightly modifications on the setup but during the race i wasn’t really happy with it. due some touches in the first laps my nose wasn’t really like it should be so i lost a lot of top speed. the ai was often not really sure how to drive and so i was very aggressive. after a spin due the kick of an opponent i was really like a volcano. in only one lap i passed 15 opponents and after my stop i finished the race in lap 10 with more than one minute ahead. my best lap was not below 9 minutes so i was quite surprised about the low performance of the opponents. i did some more testing with the brake settings because i always face the problem that the wheels of the elise are blocking without getting back to rotating. so the car is sliding more than 50 meters with blocked wheels even if the brake is fully released. ok, it will take a short moment until the wheel is fully accelerated due the inertia but not 50 meters. i never experienced this problem with other cars and after some reading in forums i found that this is some kind of bug, based on the compination of self decalibrating pedals (logitech) and the low weight of the elise. this is really unpleasand because i really want to drive without low abs but it seems impossible for the elise. ok, it is still possible to lock the wheels with low abs and the brake distance is still longer than without abs (rotating wheels) so it is not as easy as it sounds. but real gt cars do not have abs.

oops, this wasn’t my evening. i was struggeling a little with the 24 h nordschleife car pack because i wanted to drive a full field race with mixed classes. but gtr was starting the race over and over again. so i went back to gtr manager to uninstall the car pack. my next attempt was my well known 25 elise field. due the anoying stuttering i had tested if a different vbstrategy setting will help but i had to cancel the race after 2 laps because it was not playable. so one hour later i started another race with 100 percent opponent strength and aggresion level real. surprisely, i was still faster than the pack and i led the race after 6 laps. with 25 seconds ahead, i went for the pits after lap 7 with just 7 litres of fuel left. i came in, stopped and my crewmen disappeared. nothing happen. no comment, no fuel, nothing. so i guess that i got a stop-and-go penalty, maybe for passing under yellow because i never got any comments from the box during this race so i wasn’t aware that there is any yellow flag.