YT review: "For the very first time in any GT, this is one of those "quircky" additions to the series. I mean yeah, this car DOES have cultural significance. How does it drive? Like a 33HP car on CH tyres from 1985 lol. The cornering speeds are shockingly bad and yeah, it's slow."
This might be the first time in a long time that I'm refusing to drive a car in VR. This car does not have a tachometer in it, meaning that I have to shift by ear.
And I don't think I need to remind anyone on why that doesn't work for me. IMO the custom gauges from GT6 need to come back ASAP.
It's more 2CV and less Mini. Cooler than Yugo, but not as cool as Beetle. More character than a Pao and on par with a Trabant and Niva. If GT7 had Autumn Ring it would be this car’s Nurburgring.
I've shared this video in our PS chat group before, but I feel is worth sharing again here now that the R4 is the Car of the Week...
Most of us here already have a good idea of what a regular Renault 4 drives like thanks to Gran Turismo, but did you know that there's a small company in France that does electric conversions for classic Renaults, officially endorsed by Renault?
Because French laws for conversions are reportedly very strict, the car can't stress out its original components, so it doesn't have super overkill power like modern EVs, and to help the small motor out, the car even retains its manual gearbox!
I don't know why, but the electric R4 and R5 has such a personality and charm that I just don't feel in modern cars. I love the small size. I love the simplicity. Maybe modern cars all feel too pretentious and gimmicky, but I really want to experience these EV classic converts!
I play almost exclusively on GT7VR when I do play GT, so I am very used to relying on the information provided by the car instead of info provided by the game.
So imagine my frustration when I found out that the Renault 4 doesn't have a tachometer. I, a deaf driver, cannot drive without a tachometer or some other visual indicator because my ears lack the working parts needed in order to shift by hearing. Even with my hearing aids in and my speakers cranked (and engine at max gain), I can't hear the redline about 70% of the time.
It's a decent car in flatscreen mode, but my race just grinds to a halt when I go into VR. I'm not the only one with the issue, as our long term member McD apparently can't shift by ear very well either. Instrumentation is important, and I wish PD retained the custom gauges from GT6 as a feature.
The Renault 4 is slow—but only in a straight line.
In the corners, this thing has cornering speeds that are closely comparable to a modern day hatchback, like the Honda Fit, and that's all down to the R4's lightness instead of anything fancy or sophisticated. But, because it's such a barebones simple car, the cornering experience with it is so raw and engaging, demanding proper car control and cornering technique to get the most of its good cornering speeds, inadvertently becoming sporty because of that.
I've had a lot of fun—and even unexpected laughs!—with this 33HP classic FF hatch. About the only complaint I can levy against it is that it doesn't have a tachometer. It's a sleeper in my book
And here's a hint as to what next week's car is: it has a tachometer
So @XSquareStickIt and I got into a fairly heated debate about VR vs flat screen racing in GT (particularly with regards to race craft) and decided to settle it with a couple of short races. I decided to do a quick write up on the problems you run into with VR.
So first off, the races! Square and I agreed to three races - one on Streets of Willow, two on Tsukuba - in the Fiat 500 Lounge. They were all very closely contested races with some ridiculous moments.
The transition to VR from flatscreen can be pretty rough, mostly because you lose a lot of vital information in the switch. The things you end up losing in VR are:
The timing board (delta to leader, current race positions, deltas to cars ahead and behind, pit stop status)
The track map and wind direction
Proximity sensors / blind spot warnings
The shift bar at the bottom of the HUD.
The track map essentially doesn't matter in a race, so you can ignore that - the pertinent track information is available in the MFD.
For the timing board, it doesn't really matter as much as you'd think. In VR, you only need to worry about the cars you can see around you - run your race, and the results will generally be fine.
The shift bar is the rough one since you have to rely on the car to give you that information, and a good portion of the cars in the game don't have tachometers (i.E. the R4 GTL in this past week's COTW). The other subset of problem cars are the ones that receive engine swaps (I.E. 2+4 Swap in Honda S660) or don't have a high enough tachometer to accommodate their engine mods (I.E. the Ferrari 500 Mondial), and the solution to those is to shift by ear. What I would strongly recommend for people learning or already versed in VR that struggle with this is to drive the car around in time trial to get acclimated to the sound of the engine at various speeds - that way you learn how it sounds at the shifting point and can at least semi-reliably get within 1-2,000 rpm of it when racing seriously in the car.
As for proximity sensors/blind spots... turn your head. The car will have at least one mirror you can use to check behind you. You have a Radar in the MFD (I personally always leave it set to the Radar unless otherwise necessary), and you can look out the windows quickly to see if a car is next to you. In the event that you crash or spin and need to rejoin the track, what I always do is toggle over to the track map to judge where the next car is and how long it'll take to get to where I am. It can save your race and a lot of frustration if you end up off track near a hairpin or blind corner.
And of course - practice, practice, practice. Run as much as you can offline against the AI and even Sophy. They're incredibly frustrating to deal with in Hard races when you're in an equal car, which forces you to develop good awareness habits.
I did this with my leagues over in SRC, and that had the same effect.
TL;DR: Racing in VR requires a really good game sense and getting there requires sucking at VR for a bit. Once you get to that point though, it is an absolutely transformative experience.
Square also pointed out some issues he had racing against me, namely that he couldn't see the apexes of certain corners on flatscreen mode (which is obvious in a few places - I gain a huge amount of time on the final corner of Tsukuba for example).
The upshot of VR is the immersion and the ability to look through the corners, both of which can dramatically improve your performance if you really lean into it.
I hope that the races last night prove that VR is not as much of an objective disadvantage like you seemed to think it was. Sure, it has a lot of major downsides, but those downsides are also learning tools.
I've heard that this week's car has a tach, so I'm already more interested in driving it than I was with the R4.
