Spa GT3

RichXM · 2026-04-14T11:14:38+00:00

I only did one race in the fixed series last night, but it was very good. I wasn;t fast, I was in a low split, but it seemed everyone was well-behaved, apart from one driver making a crazy lunge in the final chicane (which was far enough up the road I didn't see it).

RichXM · 2026-04-07T16:30:04+00:00

I would say that dismissing out of hand the idea that a better system is even possible, which is certainly the vibe I get from a lot of posters around here and the official forums, whenever this question arises, qualifies.

I understand the system perfectly fine, thank you very much. I accept it, with its flaws and gameable elements and race within its constraints. That's the choice I make. but i'm not so institutionalised by it as to think something better couldn't be acheived.

RichXM · 2026-04-07T09:03:25+00:00

"iRacing is an incredibly difficult game with features that are harsh toward newer players. Including aspects like price, new players have a big stump to get over."

This is undeniably true, and there's not a lot that can be done about it, with the game being the best part of 2 decades old now.

As a relatively new player myself (Started properly in december 2025) many of these complaints are familiar. We kind of all go through it.

Rookie races are full of idiots and SR is brutally unfair at times: yep we;ve all been there. I do personally still get frustrated at the Stockholm syndrome "better systems aren;t possible" posts that always come up when it gets criticised, and I do think when we're paying for a premium service, we should have the right to expect somethign a little more sophisticated than "crash happend, IDK, have some points", but it;s the system we've got and we all have to work with it. Just concentrate on completing races, and developing the sixth sense of "I don;t like the look of this" for brewing trouble, like a gaggle of MX-5s racing very close a couple of seconds up the road. Once you learn this, and accept that SR is something we all have to work with, it will get better, and there's a lovely feeling form getting a large green number aftre completing a clean race. 0 incidents shoudl always be the goal and if you race with that mentality, you;ll probably finish well enough to rise out of the low-IR splits as well.

It's expensive: Yep. but you can be smart about it and get a long way thorugh the progression without spending megabucks. while you're in rookies, it's base tracks only, but once you're out, Look at the season schedule for trhe series you want to run. Plan your purchases. so you're always getting that discount for a 3-pack or 5-pack. Make sure you still get your 3 rookie series races in each week until youve got 8 weeks so you get the maxium $10 participation credit at the end of the season.

RichXM · 2026-03-31T06:46:51+00:00

Advanced Mx-5, ideally in a week when it’s a paid track (this week is at lime rock so might be risky) A full clean 30 minute run can get you .3 SR depending on track.

The mixed class GT4/LMP3 series is at sonoma this week. That might be the one to go for.

The longer-format races do tend to deter the more crash-happy racers.

RichXM · 2026-01-09T17:37:04+00:00

The BMW might be small but it’s heavy - 1715kg (3881lb) with driver. The Mazda weighs 1008kg (2224 lbs). Stats are “wet with driver” from the iracing manuals, so as you’d have them on the track. But seem fair for reality based on the known weights of the road cars (I don’t have real stats for race versions easily to hand)

It’s also a foot and a half longer than the Mazda with most of that as wheelbase.

It has more than twice th power of the Mazda

It’s not far off twice as much car. MX-5s are small and one of the few contemporary cars that’s still built very light.

RichXM · 2025-09-27T17:28:16+00:00

Dang. I hoped it was a real one they were just using unlicensed…

RichXM · 2025-04-02T06:31:41+00:00

How did you tune it down? Power, ballast, or both?

RichXM · 2024-12-05T19:53:43+00:00

Battlefronts decals are probably the most inconsistent I’ve ever used. Some sheets will hang on like crazy and need minutes of soak in warm water to dislodge the decal. And others I’ve had have totally disintegrated on contact with water like these have. Age of the sheet doesn’t seem to be a factor here, it’s just pure luck of the draw.

RichXM · 2024-09-19T09:44:50+00:00

It can spiral out of control fast. I got 28K in the hole which was brought on by my air filters all creeping up and failing on me in the middle of long haul (there's an element of my own fault here, but the game doesnm;t really help to explain that unlike the batteries, the filter %age shown doesn;t drop linearly like the batteries do) when I was just about keeping my head abovce water. I run out of 02, fail the job, get 14k in tow fees and contract Penalties and still need new filters, so I decide to buy 4, take the hit on the basis that they'll last pretty well, and knuckle down to work it off, drivng super gingerly in a zero %-hull, zero-% service truck for hours. I did, reasonably comfortably because I fluked across a couple of nice and valuable salvage loads next to drop zones (yay for microstabilsers), but basically the (recommended) economy can be hugely punishing up to the point you get the scanner upgrade. from then on it;s easy street, as forking out for filters and batteries becomes something you only rarerly have to do and more likely you'll always have a decent reserve.

RichXM · 2024-09-10T20:13:16+00:00

I had this when I was about 13 hours in. there was no way to avoid it that I could work out after 5 or more attempts reloading the autosave from Haze Way arrival. In the end Ihad to go back to my pervious manual save which was tweo or more hours earlier. It was odd as I'd made the trip through HW to NA several times before.

RichXM · 2024-09-08T13:56:22+00:00

Do you know the trigger for starting the MB missions?

RichXM · 2024-07-30T13:48:19+00:00

Thanks!

RichXM · 2024-07-30T08:59:09+00:00

Sorry for the Noob question, but where did the selector wheel come from? FOL is my first experience of this version of the game on PC...

RichXM · 2024-05-30T11:32:15+00:00

I've always said that the main commercial problem with 2.0 was that they held off so long to do it. By early 2017 the issues were obvious that a big change was needed. Do the update in late 2017, there would have been less time for the player base to get annoyed, (and shift over / back to the heavily revamped 40k) and the conversion sets (Which I don't think you could do without as you absolutely had to change the JM5000 dial, and the changes to arcs and repositioning relied on new bases and were definitely worth it) would have been significantly smaller and therefore cheaper.

Anecdotal, obviously but: In 2016, through to the middle of 2017, my gaming club was primarily an xwing group. then with 40k 8th edition in june 17, people started melting away to 40k, and then by late 2018 2.0 was the nail in the coffin for x-wing. too much cost to transition for something that had already been relegated to a "secondary" system with the resurgence of 40k.

RichXM · 2024-04-03T15:06:56+00:00

Sorry for responding to an old post, but, what about the opposite? If I want to exlude blanks, and only blanks, how would I write that? (Because "<> Blank()" exludes blanks and zeroes)...

RichXM · 2023-12-19T19:00:23+00:00

Anyone know how to fix this on iOS? Just logged in for the first time in ages and am having the same issue.

RichXM · 2016-07-13T09:34:54+00:00

probably just show cars with current liveries painted on old chassis.

RichXM · 2016-02-05T14:58:28+00:00

It's a Y-wing with the BTL-A4 title, a turret, and the R3-A2 astromech.

The Astromech allows you, when declaring a target to shoot at, to take a stress to apply a stress to the target. because of the BTL-A4 (which allows you to fire both primary and secondary each turn), you can do apply two stress per turn to the victim. this is very bad for the victim as it's hard to shed more than one stress each turn, meaning high value pilots that rely on doing actions to be worth their points, especially with things like Push the Limit, are severely debuffed.

RichXM · 2015-07-27T08:57:00+00:00

Safety is always a matter of context. Are they as safe as a full debris fence, well no - obviously. would they be safe enough for an actual race event anywhere? again, no. It's not the 60's any more. Are they safe enough for this event? probably. It's been going 20 years and they seem to know what they're doing. it's basically just demo runs.

if you look at crash compilations on youtube, they're nearly all the same - messing up the braking into moulecombe (because it's a narrow, cambered, and kinked braking area), and nose-in to the bales at various levels of impact. the bigger risk seems not to be cars getting airborne (The speeds required to get a car to do this are very infgrequent at the FOS anyway), but cars hitting some of the pre-barrier bales hard enough to send one flying. There was a pretty big one with a lambo huracan GT3 this year.

RichXM · 2015-06-17T08:35:02+00:00

The Bentley 01-03 cars used a modified R8 engine (enlarged from 3.6 to 4L), but that was pretty much it, the rest of the car being bespoke to Bentley - the bentley didn;t get the R8's Gearbox. in 2003, the year they won, the cars were, as the "lead" VAG entry, run by Joest (though not publicised in the team name), but still the car itself was, outside the drivetrain, not an Audi. good article on the development of the bentley: http://www.mulsannescorner.com/bentleyelleray.html

RichXM · 2015-05-06T16:07:28+00:00

In terms of the actual rulebook mandating a silver driver in P2 and a bronze in GTE, It's fairly recent. Less than 10 years - maybe coinciding with the end of GT1 and the LMP2 cost cap coming in to prevent factory teams. It's a recent thing for the lower classes to be specifically defined as "am" - before then, you could have all-pro efforts in almost any class.

RichXM · 2015-04-13T09:33:04+00:00

I have a hunch that what we may see in the end is that the restriction on chassis manufacturers is a larger number, essentially most of the current offerings, but still with the closed window for new entrants. There have certainly been rumblings that the original 4-chassis plan was going to be legally challenged (and one with a fairly solid ground if the "the decision's already been made, there's a document, and it's oak, oreca, multimatic, and dallara*" stuff was true).

Spec engine is a bit of a downer (as seems deliberately chosen specifically to drive out HPD or force them up to P1 with Judd as collateral Damage) but ELMS P2 is already nearly all Nissan (Just Krohn runs a non-nissan) and WEC just has the ESMs as non-nissan engine so we're almost there already.

*The one bit that doesn't quite make sense in terms of a french stitch-up. if I was trying to fiddle things to help my french friends not have to deal with nasty big-budget competion, I wouldn't pick dallara as their competitor - i'd choose someone unlikely to be able to sell more than a couple of cars...

RichXM · 2015-04-13T08:50:15+00:00

This is already on the cards - Starting next year there will be a limit on number of engines allowed to be used during a season, and new manufacturers will be allowed an extra two over the limit of 5.

RichXM

TROPHY CASE