Pre-season: Monza

so that was MEGA frustrating. it was a drive Gilles Villeneuve would have been proud of, though. I got a good start, got 1st, started gapping the field, then Oli started gaining on me. he passed me, and then I spun into the wall for the first time, suspension damage. then I spun into the wall again, more suspension damage and a bit of aero. my wheel was cocked to the right by about 20 degrees or so, and it wouldn't put power down anywhere. it was loose everywhere, and slow on the straights. I thought about pitting, but that would just end my shot at getting at least a podium finish. so, I just pushed on. Peter caught up to me, and we battled for a couple laps, and eventually I got in front, or he backed off...one of the two. I started to catch up to Oli, and right when I was really getting on his gearbox, my car acted up going into Parabolica, and I spun almost to the wall. 1st and 2nd place gone. I was cursing up a storm. to say I was angry is like saying the T3 has a little bit of a handling problem. so, I just tried to stay on for 3rd at least, and my car was worse as each lap went by, and then it just locked the rear tires up and I spun right at the 8th turn all the way into the field, the one after the 2nd Lesmos. right when I thought the race couldn't get any worse, on the last lap in the turn before the parabolica, the car decided not to put the power down like it was supposed to, and I spun into the inside wall taking my front left wheel and front wing with it. barely managed to hold onto 3rd. I am still fucking pissed about it, though. I almost won it.

Joseph.

We set two new records for the chapter tonight.

1: Highest percentage of finishers :-)

2: Lowest attendance :-(

Anyway,it was good fun. I qualified behind the 3 alien guys with a new PB. It was still way to slow to be even close to 3rd position.

Not much going on in the race. Except I lost it in T1 on lap 2 and Ross got by. I managed to get my position back the lap after that. Then it was a quite lonely race with the 3 fast guys up front going away and Ross not being able to keep up with me.

It was a bit close at the end though. I was 2s from 3rd. But that was only because Joseph lost his front wheel :-) Almost made it ..

It was nice racing with you guys.Grats to everyone.

I must admit I'm very excited to see how it goes next year. If the attendance is this low there's no use for this series :-(

My first event in the GP '79 Mod, and well of the pace of the lead guys. However, I haven't really had much practice at this mod yet, so despite being well in the distance from the lead drivers, I was pleased to get to the flag without being lapped, and seeing a gradual reduction in lap times throughout the race.

It's a pity that there weren't more racers on the grid. Despite that, I really enjoyed it. Thanks for setting this series up.

This series is in a tough time slot. I'm not sure how it'll fare when it has to compete against the F1 series.

I struggled with lower grip as soon as I joined the server, but at least it was only a smallish amount and still passable. Just not good for best lap times.
I could jump straight in the car any other practice times and do a near best lap time right away all but guaranteed on that very first outing, but not on the server. I could not even get under 1:40 for ages. The car would not stop anywhere near as well, so it was enough to cause overhooting on corner entries, plus it would also have had less lateral grip and exit grip for power but you don't feel those as much.

Qual went ok, considering I fluked one decent lap but struggled with the other 6 tries.

I took the race car out for about 5 laps in Warmup and it ran quite fine. But only a few others went out, plus I was half a lap away from anyone most of the time. So it probably hid the problem that was going to come for the race!

The race was interesting because being amongst all the cars from the start it was very slippery. It takes two laps to get the tires up to temp to do best lap times, but I know what it drives like right from the pits on cold tires and it was far worse than that. So I skated off the first chicane and that let Oliver and Joseph run about 4 secs ahead.
I didn't really care as I knew I could reel them in later, once I worked out what the car was like. Except that as the laps went by I worked out that the closer I was to them the worse it got!

It started to show that the Bandwidth Throttling was helping me get better grip as long as it dropped the data flow down by being further away from others, but the closer you are to other cars the higher the data flow gets. So after skating off somewhere again and dropping back to 10sec or so the car ran quite nicely again, and I would edge back and about 9secs was the borderline of where it prevented me maintaining the expected pace.
So I was pretty much stuck back there, seeing I need to run my best times to match or beat Olivers.

Later on Oliver must have had some slip up and came right back to me, and Joseph was already in my area from an ealier slip up. So we were back in a 3second range and it took me back to big struggle with the car, so I lost more and more time thanks to being so close anyway! DOH So I once again dropped right back from them.

It was good when Joseph finally ran well off track and was left over 10 secs behind, because then I could run good lap times again and match Oliver. Just one car around is ok, but probably still was costing me a few 0.1's per lap. So even though I could edge up towards Oliver sometimes, I just did not have the real speed ability to keep closing it down. Thus I remained 'stuck' at about 3secs behind.

If there had been any more cars on the server I expect it would have been a disaster for me! It was bad enough with 6! And I didn't think about it at the time but when one left part way into the race it might have been about the time area I regained a bit of pace too. Every bit less data flow (from each and any car) the better.

Other pre-season races have been quite full, so I would think this race being low attendance would have been more to do with Xmas time getting really close. (?)
Though it also would not hurt if it was a little bit more displaced from any main other race. eg F1 series.

Ross: glad you enjoyed it. Your laptimes are good considering this is your first time with this mod.

I agree that it is a tuff timeslot,but we can't avoid clashing with the F1 series without moving it to another day.
Since Saturday is out of the question for me,it leaves us with Friday. This will probably mean that people from the US won't be able to participate.So this is a no go as well.

It's not possible to move it earlier than the F1 series,because honestly I doubt anyone could participate in 2 events consecutively like that and still perform.Same goes for having it later. Which also would mean it would last until way past midnight for people in Europe.

The current time seems to be the optimum. That's probably why there's so many series competing for this timeslot :-)

I hope we gain some momentum when the season starts. If it turns out that we end up with a small field each time I'll have to re-evaluate the future of the series.

If we can get a small but dedicated field going we might as well go on. Wouldn't be a problem for me,but naturally I'd like to have as many people join as possible.

Let's see how it goes. I'm confident that there's a lot of people out there that want to race these suckers, now it's just a matter of accepting that you can't have it all :-)

I personally gave up my plans of joining the F1 series and decided to race in these old cars instead

I'll choose the official '79 races over F1-2005 any time. But I skipped this one since it's just pre-season.

I signed, but could not have race due to work duty :(, MY MONZAA!! sigh

Well I made a right mess of that.

Practice went well with Joseph giving me so good tips and even though I had a few offs my speed got better, I noticed right at the end though that my setup was one sided as I had not selected the "keep each side the same" (cant rememeber its name now), soon as I changed that I went 1.5 seconds quicker, so was feeling good.

Due to this discovery though at end of practice I never run a qual setup. Qual started and I set my Rad opening to small and the car was smoking about half way around the lap, I stupidly pressed ESC rather than limp to the pits, so that was the end of qual for me, I was expecting back row anyway, but was hoping to pip Ross for 2nd to last spot.

The race was an eye opener, I have not drivin rFactor online for quite some time and could not believe how the car felt in traffic, I just felt like I had no control, I ended up running straight across both of the first few corners, then Ross got a good run at me out of Lesmo Two and was along side me, I then missed my brake point into Ascari and had a half spin, straigtened up and then lost it out of Ascari and hit the wall, I limped the car back to the pits, but driving out the car drove to the left the whole time. I run a few more laps trying to keep out of peoples way (as I didnt want to quit), but I span 2 or 3 times, the final time right into the path of Peter (I think), decided at this point to pit as I didnt want to spoil anybody elses race. Shame though, I think me and Ross where about the same pace, so we might have had a good race at the back.

Maybe next time, I enjoyed the event overall, but was rather disapointed with my performance, will for sure try to run the series though, even though I would like different car if possible :)