What is the latest take on Evo? Pros, cons. What tracks and cars are being worked on? Will there be races on R2P soon?
Thanks
Doug
That nefarious trouble maker DOUG SNYDER was caught red handed Thursday night Aug. 21, flagrantly disturbing the peace and causing mayhem. It took 4 Santa Clara sheriff's officers, a Highway Patrolmen, and the San Jose Police Helicopter to subdue Snyder at about 10 PM on the night in question. Snyder had allegedly arranged for a JET POWERED VW BEETLE to terrorize his neighbors. People all over San Martin apparently called 911 when the alleged vehicle was started (with after burner of course); thinking it was a plane crash or a gas explosion. Details on the machine are as follows.
http://www.ronpatrickstuff.com/
The public is hereby warned to be on the lookout for Snyder and his accomplice Patrick. These individuals are considered a danger to public safety and tranquility.
I tried to buy a G25 on line last night, and everyone is "out of stock", none availible at any price. Does anyone know why?
Doug
After whining about how bad things have gone I thought I should tell when they go right! On Wed. the 6th we were testing the FE (Formula E, SCCA spec formula car) at Sears Point (Infineon), it was the best test day we have ever had. Nothing broke and we systematically made changes that improved the car. Lap times came down but not as much as expected as the track got slower during the day , they don't reflect the progress we made. Our best time was 1:38.48 but we did a 1:38.88 very late in the day which I think would have been in the 36's on a fast track. You can get an idea by timing other cars you know and seeing how they change during the day.
***I WOULD LIKE TO INVITE ANY OF YOU TO COME TO OUR RACE AUG.30-SEPT.1 AT SEARS. Our car is an open wheeled formula car in the FE class #75, Dark Blue. Email me and I will give you all the details.
The electric sprint car wen [... more]
I have been working madly to get the electric conversion done on tne micro sprint car. In addition, I have built a short track in the field in front of my house, a 430 ft dirt oval. The good news is that the performance is as expected, lots of torque and a real kick to drive. If I had known how much fun driving sideways in the dirt was I might have been a dirt guy instead of a road race guy! So why bother you are asking? Well a couple of serious reasons. First and foremost there is no way in hell I could run a gas car here in a resedential area. I do most of my driving around 7 AM! No problem nobody even notices. The reason for doing a car to drive right here at my shop is to augment the sim. As we all know the sim gives you a lot of the experience of real driving but it still can't give you the sensory stimulation. Now I have that part covered as well. Drive the sim th [... more]
After last weekend maybe I will just stick to sim racing it has some real advantages. To give you a flavor of our real race weekend I will describe the Saturday race. The whole weekend, Thursday through Sunday went about the same way. We run a Formula E in SCCA national races. Formula E is very similar to Formula BMW in Race 07.
So to the race at Thunderhill, 2 cars collide in turn one on the start and go up the hill. Several laps of caution follow. On the restart the leading 2 Formula Atlantics collide in turn 2 is a spactacular accident, much wreckage. Several more laps of yellow. The next restart a Formula B comes out of turn 14 way to aggressively, looses control and hits the pit wall at the pit entrance thus never even making the starting line! More yellow until finally the checkered. Total racing 1/4 lap.
Doug
Obviously I come from the world of track driving and have only reciently discovered sims. In fact, to come completely clean, I’m going to quote what I thought about sims when I wrote the book in 2001. From Ch. 5
“Unfortunately I don't see games being very useful in the foreseeable future. The big problem is they cannot simulate the kinematic and proprioceptive aspects which are so key. Although the graphics of some games are dazzling this may actually be counterproductive as it might create greater visual dominance. Also the games are two-dimensional, focal vision is probably more dominant which of course is the wrong direction. The idea that games develop hand eye coordination is also not really relevant as motor learning theory has found that there is little transference from one skill to another unless the skills are virtually identical. So I expect little is [... more]
