Coulthard Beats GT Gamers!

  • Thread starter mavryk_gt
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mavryk1982
David Coulthard: 1:16.32

Jason Birt: 1:16.86 (+0.548)
Rob Woodhouse: 1:17.53 (+1.214)
Andy Sawley 1:17.88 (+1.564)
Jamie Lunn 1:18.73 (+2.411)
John Morshead 1:19.27 (+2.955)
Keith Brown 1:19.90 (+3.587)

Already a 1:15.4XX on the online leader-boards ... They picked the wrong gamers lol

__________________________

Seasonal Event Info:

GOLD: 1:18.00
SILVER: 1:20.00
BRONZE: 1:26.00


Prize: 1,000,000cr
 
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Bit disappointed in the prize, was hardly worth the effort but did it all the same, got a 1:17.6 but am really not that good with comfort tyres.
 
They picked the wrong gamers lol

The fastest time worldwide set during the race was slower than DC - though the times started to tumble after that.
 
David Coulthard: 1:16.32

Jason Birt: 1:16.86 (+0.548)
Rob Woodhouse: 1:17.53 (+1.214)
Andy Sawley 1:17.88 (+1.564)
Jamie Lunn 1:18.73 (+2.411)
John Morshead 1:19.27 (+2.955)
Keith Brown 1:19.90 (+3.587)

Already a 1:15.4XX on the online leader-boards ... They picked the wrong gamers lol

__________________________

Seasonal Event Info:

GOLD: 1:18.00
SILVER: 1:20.00
BRONZE: 1:26.00


Prize: 1,000,000cr

No stig suit for setting a great time at the Top Gear Test Track?! :-(
 
I believe there were 24 people picked at random from competition entries, whittled down to the six finalists through on-the-day GT5 things.
 
At one point me and my DS3 were 4th best in the world (I think I was 4th person to do a clean lap) since then I fell back with my 1:17.6
 
I got a 1:17.854 in the 15min 'window' and now back on GT5 to see what I can get down to. My target is to beat DC's time, the 1:15 leader board is beyond me!
 
Is there somewhere the fastest DC lap can be viewed?

From what I saw of the coverage DC did cross a white line and also ran on a painted surface and thus slightly cutting a corner. Most likely it's nothing the game will not allow but I'd still like to compare.

Any thoughts?
 
I'm still chuckling a little at the fact that the three last finishers in the event wouldn't have even got a gold in the seasonal!
 
I'm still chuckling a little at the fact that the three last finishers in the event wouldn't have even got a gold in the seasonal!

... in the fifteen minutes they had in a room full of people, TV cameras and Jonathan Legard babbling in their ears.
 
Famine - I wasn't bad mouthing their abilities, trying to downplay the pressure they were under or anything like that. I just find it funny.
I'm just wondering what I said, or did, that has you in an uproar about everything I ever post? Exactly what was it that instantly made you dislike me in such an obvious way?
 
I'm still chuckling a little at the fact that the three last finishers in the event wouldn't have even got a gold in the seasonal!

Pressure plays a big role, it's not the same to play GT5 from the comforts of your home and sofa and PD's rig while competing versus real people and David Coulthard.
Also, not everyone is used to playing on a wheel.

As far as the seasonal goes - abused it for a few hours today, 1:17.177 is my best so far.
My goal is 1:16.xxx, I guess I'll get there soon.
 
I downloaded the 1:15:xxx ghost data after not being able to get sub 1:20:xxx with DS3, tried to keep up with him in 1 lap, got 1:18:xxx. Going to keep trying, so close to that gold. I'm really happy with this event.
 
Famine - I wasn't bad mouthing their abilities, trying to downplay the pressure they were under or anything like that. I just find it funny.
I'm just wondering what I said, or did, that has you in an uproar about everything I ever post? Exactly what was it that instantly made you dislike me in such an obvious way?

I don't want to disappoint you, but I have absolutely no idea who you are.

It was an incredibly fatuous comment to pass. The gold, silver and bronze times are arbitrary markers set by Polyphony and half of the finalists - none of whom claimed to be high standard GT drivers - didn't beat the top arbitrary marker in a high-pressure situation filled with distractions. Oh, ha ha ha.
 
We had a great time though! The qualifying rounds were on sport hard tyres then ten mins before the final we were told we would be using comforts so didn't get much time to practise. Glad to get picked, thanks Mercedes
 
To be fair, in the warm ups they were ahead of Coulthard running 1:14's and were switched on to Comfort Softs for the Live Race in order to even the times up. Jason is a great racer (and friend) and I dare say after few more laps and without Legard shouting in his ear he might have taken DC's time :) DC was applying quite a bit of artistic license to some corners!

Either way, he's dead chuffed about the Trip!
 
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Plus none of us ever saw Coulthards quickest lap (they cut back to mercedes world) but on every lap we do see he cuts several corners, he is generally legal at the hammerhead and bacharac and gambon corners but would say that everywhere else his line would be a fail in game!
 
Just wondering about a few things:

1. What tyres did DC use and how do they compare to Comfort Soft in the game?

2. Just how realistic is the grip on the SLS AMG in GT5 with comfort softs? Without aids you really have to be careful on the throttle or it just spins out. Would a real AMG behave like this with those tyres as well? I don't have an opinion either way, because I have never raced in a real car. I'm just curious.
 
Firstly, probably the standard tyres for that car. Secondly, Coulthard, a former formula one driver, span the car leaving Gambon.


Now, it's worth a few extra notes at this point. In, GT5 the standard tyres are Sports Hard grade. In reality, the car is a fairly hefty grand tourer and will need low wear rate tyres or it'll chew right through them a few hundred miles (or a couple of laps of a race track), but it's also a sports car so it will need grippy tyres to extract the maximum performance - so in the real world you'd probably describe those as "Sports Hard" (it actually wears Continental ContiSportContact 5P from the factory).

When it comes to gaming vs. reality, you'd expect the same person to be a couple of percent faster in the game than they are in reality, assuming a perfect simulation of reality and a similar level of familiarity. Why? In reality you have fear, you have limits, you have risk. There is no pause and restart in reality when you stack it and you can simply go much faster in the game because you will not die if you overstep the bounds. Gaming makes it easier to explore the limits. Added to that, go hustle a 2 tonne car around a track for 15 minutes - it's damned tiring. I did the same 15 minutes at the same time on my PS3 and I was fine - I imagine the guys at MBW had a bit of an elevated heart rate though!

Now I'm told that in practice, some of the gamers were hitting 1'12 - the gamers practised with Sports Hard tyres, but for the final event the tyres were switched to Comfort Soft. Even assuming Coulthard to be a bit over the hill (he's a retired F1 driver, not a current one), he's still someone who has been at the top of his game relatively recently and it'd be foolish to think you could drive a real car faster than him. That puts the gamers 6% faster on equivalent tyres - or it puts them in Pole Position while Coulthard is fighting the Hispanias... Dropping the tyres to Comfort Soft puts them 0.6% slower, or someone at the top of his game - Mr. Holland - 1.6% faster (with more than 15 minutes to do it!). This suggests that Sports Hards, though nominally the right tyre, have too much grip while Comfort Softs have a bit too little.


I think the problem is with GT5's tyre grading. It's done simplistically and for clarity - Comfort tyres are for commuter cars, Sports are for sports cars, Racing are for race cars, Hard gives little grip, Medium gives more, Soft gives most. A Punnett square of grip. Reality isn't like that. Reality has myriad different tyre materials (or compounds) which grip and wear at different rates - GT5 cannot give you high grip and low wear, but reality can. Reality has tyres engineered so that the transition from grip to slip is gradual or it could be a flat wall where grip vanishes. GT5 doesn't offer this. My hatchback-derived, wrong-wheel-drive coupe-style Japanese thing wears a set of sports tyres with a comparatively soft compound that wears well and a gradual grip-slip transition (I've put them on an MX-5 before too). You could call them "Sports Medium", but they absolutely would not offer as much grip as the SLS's stock tyres that we earlier described as "Sports Hard"!

GT5's tyre grading system isn't going to reflect reality properly. But this isn't a bad thing - it's still a game, any way you cut it. Unless they're willing to get into specific manufacturer tyres, with compounds, footprints, sidewalls and performance temperatures all simulated properly, you're not going to see reality reflected in tyres. And then what happens when Pirelli find out that GT9 simulates Toyo's Proxes T1-R to be overall better performers than their own P6000s? Back to square one...
 
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We were told DC was on standard road tyres whatever that might mean, also earlier in the day we got to have a go on an SLS round the Brooklands track at Mercedes Benz World and even a ham fisted idiot like me could really get on the power early and brake late into corners and the car felt so stable, then I got taken out for some hot laps to show what it could really do! Incidentally the guy who took me out for the hot laps could only manage 1:24.5 round TGTT after the event had finished, he kept pushing too hard and spinning off? I was told that all previous F1 safety cars needed upgrading to be quick enough but the SLS is quick enough as standard so it's a proper fast car!
 
Yeah, I saw that. :) So what are the standard tyres on the real life AMG? The equivalent of Sport Soft?

Edit: Never mind. I posted before reading jamiengem's post.
 
Yeah, I saw that. :) So what are the standard tyres on the real life AMG? The equivalent of Sport Soft?

Edit: Never mind. I posted before reading jamiengem's post.

I've edited more in, to help. Might be a bit tl;dr now though :lol:
 
The instructor, I think his name was Nick, switched some if not all of the cars driving aids off for the hot laps and was able to catch any twitches( I won't call them slides) easily, but he was getting massive oversteer when he played the game and had superquick reactions and did some very impressive slides but a lot of the time span off hence the not very impressive lap time, he thought the car in the game was far too twitchy and not really a very good representation of the real car, I wish I'd made him try sport hards to see what he thought of those.
 
I've not driven an SLS to compare directly to reality, but my general impression of cars in GT5 that I have driven in reality is the same - it seems that Comfort tyres have a sudden grip to slip transition (they grip and grip and then you're dead) resulting in excessively twitchy behaviour. I'd say that'd be accurate on something like the low drag specialist tyres you get on a Toyota Prius, where the tyre has been engineered to provide little resistance both in terms of air resistance and friction to enhance fuel economy and lateral grip sacrificed, or maybe DaiYung Hedgefinders you get from RapidFit for £15 a corner or remoulds, but not on even a moderately priced named brand.

If you have a car with a (set of four) named brand tyre on it, find a piece of private road and just push the car a bit beyond what you think it'll cope with - get to the limit and poke it gently a bit further. You'll find that the grip goes away in a predictable fashion (well... the more you do it the more predictable it'll be) rather than all scurrying off at once - some tyres are better at it than others (I find Toyo Proxes T1-Rs to be very good at this, whereas the slightly grippier Goodyear Eagle GSD3s are a bit more cliffy) but it's a gradual process. Throw it beyond the limit and the grip will suddenly go away.

But GT5 has to keep it simple. While I'd love a tyre tuning menu with a couple of thousand options, it'd drive the gamers nuts. So we get Econobox/Sportscar/Racecar tyres in flavours of death, panic and grip.
 


GT5's tyre grading system isn't going to reflect reality properly. But this isn't a bad thing - it's still a game, any way you cut it. Unless they're willing to get into specific manufacturer tyres, with compounds, footprints, sidewalls and performance temperatures all simulated properly, you're not going to see reality reflected in tyres. And then what happens when Pirelli find out that GT9 simulates Toyo's Proxes T1-R to be overall better performers than their own P6000s? Back to square one...


It doesn't have to be perfect but the current one is just not sufficient for a game trying to be a simulator. It's also puzzling how the selection of stock tyres for each car is being decided not to mention tyre wear which is much worse than it was in GT4. Everything regarding tyres is just a mess.
 

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