dukestah’s gtr blog

belongs to racers 😉
long time no drive due eastern and some other activities like real trips with my roadster. i continued my 24 h race, i’m already in dusk now, heading the night. the track temperature is still ok, tire temps between 50-70 degree celcius. this is not perfect but the best i can get on this tires. even if this is my 2nd stint on these tires the car starts to be a little bit too pushy and tends to understeer a lot in medium speed corners. especially if i want to pass someone i have to leave the best line and so it is very hard to stay on the track. in lap 43 the night darkened the track once again. unfortunately, this is not very fluid in gtr so it is like driving on a new track. i have set the night light level to 10% which is not really dark but dark enough so that it is a little bit harder to find the correct break distance. in this stint i passed just 2 porsches and the elise, so it is quite boring at the moment. still on position 2, i went for the pit after lap 45. my front tires were at 21 and the rears at 17. i decided to go for new tires all around to get best conditions for the night. after 54 seconds i left the box with number 3 just 10 seconds behind me. the next stint will be not as easy as i would prefer for the night.

long time no comments. i was very busy the last weeks so i got to stint 11, finished 99 laps, around 13 hours. some worst case stints, especially the last one, half lap after leaving the pit, a porsche spun in front of me and i was unable to avoid the crash, front right tire blown. half lap on low speed back to the pit for a new set of front tires and 10 litre of fuel. so this stint was effective 10 laps long. so i went to the box on lap 99 on position 6.
why position 6? some history of the last stints.
i found that the tire temps are so low because i wasn’t very fast. my lap times are about 8.05-8.10 which is indeed about 10 seconds slower than at the beginning of the race. so i started to increase the speed a little bit and was able to get the tire temps around 80 degree, which provides a good handling. but unfortunatelly, this is increasing the tire wear a lot. i have to swap the front tires at least every second pitstop and the rear tires last for 3 stints. on stint 10 i had to go for the box after 8 laps because my spotter told me that the tires are worn. (32 front) so i am losing more time due the tire changes and because of the worn tires the last laps of a stint are not really fast. after analyzing some replays and motec data i learned that my line is not really good at night due the limited visibility. so i started to work on the line to get back a smoother way of driving. since it is quite hard to continue a night race after 2 weeks of no driving i did a short test session at day and surprisly i was able to drive a 7-53.2 which is one second faster than my best lap ever. the replay and motec shows that there is still potential of improvement and i think with a more consequent line, less variations and at good weather conditions it should be possible to catch that 7-50. i really have to focus myself on this because i think this can lead to a more consistent race lap time of about 7-55 to below 8, depending on weather and wear. with this i should be able to get in touch with the top 3 again, maybe with some luck one or two of the leading cars will dnf within the next 10 hours.

i gave up the wheel tweaking crap, maybe i will invest some more time someday. to continue my former 24 h race i started the next stint. but surprisly, the car handling was strange. it felt like a rear tire is loosing air pressure. i had smoking tires in nearly every corner and my lap time was more than a half minute slower than the previous laps. i figured out that the car slows down drastically in fast bends when i turn the wheel more than 45 degree. so i thought it is maybe a damage on the suspension, maybe due a contact while passing. but the car was really undrivable and my front tires were heating up more and more due the heavy understeering. since i was so confused by this, i cancelled the stint. i went for a test session, with a brand new car ;), and, the very same behavior. my only idea was to check the controller and game settings and what a surprise, the brake assistant was activated. i am not sure if this happens by an accidental key press or by my manipulations of the player.plr. a short 3 lap test session was showing that this was the reason for the strange behavior of the car. but this was enough for the evening.

long time no driving. i did just some tests because the swaying and rattling of the new wheel is kind of disappointing and especially on the end of long straights the car is very unstable. tweaking the force feedback settings of the controller were without any result (enable center spring with a strength of 0, spring and damper effects set to 0). so i went for the player.plr to tweak certain force feedback settings. i set the motor vibration effect to the steering axle to zero. this gave me a sligthly calmer steering wheel but the spring effect keeps swaying the wheel on straights. disabling the spring effect will give a kind of death wheel so this isn’t a solution. i am really wondering why this spring effect is so strange in gtr. i tried viper racing and richard burns racing and there is not such an effect. you can check this simply by placing the car on a flat area (pit …) and if you take your hands of the wheel, the wheel will turn to one side after a couple of left-right movements. this is really not real, i never had such an effect in a real world car (except the suspension/steering was damaged) nor in any other simulation.

due my experience with the gt-tires i thought it could be usefull to test intermedians and rain tires befor i need to use them in a race. so i went on intermedians on a 20 degree track. the feeling was quite weird, no grip, some kind of snap under/oversteer and a very soft feeling. the temperature raised to just 40-50 degree which is really not driveable. on the same track and under very same conditions, the soft slicks will heat up to 60-70 degree and they provide much better handling. result: intermedians are really more than useless. what about rain? i started a test session on a wet track and on a track under rain conditions. if there is no line visible, the best thing is to go for soft or hard rain tires, depeding if it is still raining and there is a lot of water on the track. if the rain stops and the track starts to dry it could be usefull to go for hard rain tires but often it is better to stay out one lap longer (nordschleife) on soft rain tires and then to switch to soft slicks. if the track is very cold and still kind of slippy but the rain tires start to overheat (especially on long straights) it is usefull to go on the wet part of the track to cool down the tires. this can work for 2 or 3 laps but if the track keeps drying it is not possible to stay out any longer and the lap time will be much better on slicks.