another 8 laps to drive. the track is still quite hot and so the car starts to tend to slip more than expected. unfortunately, cold wheel slip is more predictable than overheated wheel slip. the elise tends to swing the rear under braking so i have to go back to linear braking instead of trail breaking. this costs about 10 seconds per lap. the opponents are as powerfull as they have never been for this race so it is really not funny at the moment. i am more than 30 seconds behind the slowest lap times so i am loosing at least one position per lap. off to the pits after lap 48. a complete stop will hopefully fix my handling troubles. but then, after saving the race i went for restart and not for continue by selecting the wrong menu item and gtr overwrites the save game! thats indeed a strange behavior. since this race is lost i tried to figure out whats wrong and surprise surprise, gtr creates a save game every time you start a new race out of an existing race. thats quite pity because i often use saved races to get comparable conditions.
based on the devastating experience with the low performance of the elise on the nordschleife under dry conditions i decided to change the car. i did some tests with other original cars the last days but none of them are what i am looking for. the gulf team exige tuned elise is too powerfull, lap times are way below the ngt cars so this car is for this class too fast. but this car is not crypted so i am able to edit the performance files. after a short research on the web i found a couple of powercurves of similar machines and with the new exige gt3 in mind, i started to create a new 24h elise. i have used the exige powercurve and adapted this to the curve of the honda type-r machine. after a few test laps, i found that the car is still to powerfull due the light weight and i smoothed out the curve to 220 hp at 6200 rpm and a curve which started to produce 200 nm at 2250 rpm, rising to 340 nm at 6200. this provides a maximum of 250 hp at 7500 rpm. this is far away from the 300 ps of the new exige gt3 and my first lap times are above 8:05 with some space left for improvements. so in combination of an adjustable 6-gear gearbox this is a great car for the nordschleife. the fuel consumption is about 10-11 litres for one lap and with the extented tank of 100 ltr (the add-on car comes with just 60 ltr) the fuel should last for 9 laps. maybe i adapt the fuel consumption or the tank so that i can stay out for 10 laps. most of the ngt/g2/g3 cars are able to stay out for 10 laps due the lower fuel consumption than the original gtr elise (12 ltr per lap, the porsches 9-10 ltr).
a quick test with a 50 cars field showed that the modified elise is competitive. still slower on the straights than the fastest ngt cars but a little bit faster in the bends due less body mass. unfortunately, i wasnt able to complete a stint since it was late in the evening but i am really looking forward to next week for more race action.