La Sarthe and Spa ,weather report and other " stuff "

  • Thread starter Thread starter smoothbore12
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Have they changed the weather for the 1 hour Spa race?
It used to be that almost every race you had rain starting between lap 5 and 9 that required changing to IM tires. The last 3 times I did the race, there was no or little rain before lap 17, so that the dynamic of the race changed considerably.
Anyone else the same experience?
 
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Boxster
Have they changed the weather for the 1 hour Spa race?
It used to be that almost every race you had rain starting between lap 5 and 9 that required changing to IM tires. The last 3 times I did the race, there was no or little rain before lap 17, so that the dynamic of the race changed considerably.
Anyone else the same experience?
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I didn’t run it today, but I did yesterday morning and for the first time ever I saw no rain at all. 1 hour of clear skies. Totally changed things. I was using the Porsche 919 and could have 1 pitted but decided to two pit so I could stay on fuel mode 1 and try and post some lap times. Without rain and two putting I fully lapped the field once and about half twice.
 
PwnusWagner
I didn’t run it today, but I did yesterday morning and for the first time ever I saw no rain at all. 1 hour of clear skies. Totally changed things. I was using the Porsche 919 and could have 1 pitted but decided to two pit so I could stay on fuel mode 1 and try and post some lap times. Without rain and two putting I fully lapped the field once and about half twice.
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I will have to try this....
...tried the 60 min Spa and rains came as expected on laps 6/7 and persisted til laps 13/14. Nothing different from what I find.
 
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jrbabbitt
I will have to try this....
...tried the 60 min Spa and rains came as expected on laps 6/7 and persisted til laps 13/14. Nothing different from what I find.
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PwnusWagner
Ok so after having a no rain run a few days ago today was the worst rain I’ve ever had. Started on lap 6 and didn’t stop until about 18 minutes left in the race. Was wet enough to overwhelm the inters even. Honestly no fun.
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Well it looks to me that the rains at Spa are random in amount but not in scheduled, just as programmed....
 
PwnusWagner
I don’t know, usually rain for me hits more often around lap 10. Lap 6 seemed early and it was the longest and hardest rain I’ve seen.
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I've always seen the rains come just around the same time it starts getting dark and rains all through the night... my runs are on easy difficulty... it's been like this since the first time I ran this race...

Sometimes I will see showers appear again later after it gets light but it's usually not hard rain...
 
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Did 2 races at Le Mans, one on Easy, one on Hard, with my maxed out (but non-swapped) Avantime equipped with a mid rev turbo.

The car is good to drive (for what it is), surprisingly stable and pretty quick through corners (I passed multiple cars at the Porsche curves on hard mode). Brakes are excellent!
With Inters on the wet it's ok. It's doing well as long as it's not too wet. Then it starts to struggle a bit.
FM6 gave me ~3.5 laps, FM5 pretty much exactly 3 laps.
Tire wear is rather heavy for the front wheels. Even switching brake balance all to the rear doesn't help much.
Power is ok, but not great. I won on hard mode, but that was because of rain. I'm not sure if you could win a dry race on hard. On FM5 I was constantly loosing time to the leader. I don't think a one stop strategy would work since this would require a bit of fuel saving even on FM6. Two stop maybe? I have no idea.

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So I just did a race on Hard with the swapped Avantime and this is just another league. Significantly more power, much better fuel efficiency. I drove like an idiot (I may have been a bit drunk🍻😄) and I'm not happy with my tune yet, and I still won rather easily by 23 seconds. Race was almost completely dry.
Will refine my tune and try again tomorrow. But I can already say that it's not a bad swap. Just the sound could be better.

jrbabbitt
I will try this with both i have, one with swap other without...
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I'm curious to hear what you think!
 
With a swap in this Avantime I had a good time with this. It can do 4 laps easy on FM6, with minor weight ballast can get under 700pp,
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I have a different Avantime (no swap) and will run it again.
I know this is a FF car but strangely the nose lifts up on acceleration like a FR car and overspins the tyres and especially in rainy conditions.
More to come....
 

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