ORCA Silvia Spec Cup - SEASON COMPLETE, CARRACERPTP SUPREME ORCA CHAMP

[Johnnypenso]

Really looking forward to racing with you guys again too. It's been too long and we need some fresh accents on the mic.

Need some variety from that Indiana twang..

 

[Naptown25rs]

Need some variety from that Indiana twang..

Hey, 'Merica's Hat! No one is talking to you...

 

[LancerEvo7]

Can you call him part of our hat when he's south of Detroit?

 

[Naptown25rs]

Can you call him part of our hat when he's south of Detroit?

He's across the line, that's all that matters...

 

[BrandonW77]

Hey, 'Merica's Hat! No one is talking to you...

Better than being in Florida which is 'Merica's wang.

 

[Naptown25rs]

Better than being in Florida which is 'Merica's wang.

That's not ever close to the worst thing about Florida...

 

[acedition333]

What PP are you shooting for Brandon?? Or is it still up in the air? I think it will just make it somewhat
easier for your testing once you have a set PP.

Just seems like alot of testing in a BIG range of cars to choose from.

450pp??
475pp??
500pp??

 

[Johnnypenso]

What PP are you shooting for Brandon?? Or is it still up in the air? I think it will just make it somewhat
easier for your testing once you have a set PP.

Just seems like alot of testing in a BIG range of cars to choose from.

450pp??
475pp??
500pp??

It's not as big as you might think. If you stick to the NCD at first, and limit by drivetrain, the number of cars is actually quite small. How many FR's are there from 400-450PP for example? Not many. A Beemer, Mustang, S2000, couple each for Mazda, Nissan and Toyota, maybe 1 or 2 others and that's it. Most cars under 450 are FF's or 4wd's or fit in a much slower category.

When you throw in the UCD the list expands quite a bit obviously, but many of those are just variations on the same cars from the NCD. A couple dozen RX7's, S2000's, Silvia's etc. and who wants to drive a Standard S2000 that's 3/10ths off the pace of the Premium S2000? And who would want to test the myriad versions of the exact same car over and over when they might was well be near identical in performance?

My thinking is once you've homologated one Standard S2000, all the other Standard versions are in, and in the off chance that competitive racing shows one is significantly better or worse than the others, which is rare, but does happen, we can deal with it then. Once the 10 or so NCD's that fit the category are homologated, and a few from the UCD, you'll actually have maybe 40 cars done when you lump them together. After that, the search is on for all the one-offs or rare cars from the UCD and while the overall number is huge, the number that fit into each slot limited by PP and drivetrain is quite small.

 

[BrandonW77]

What PP are you shooting for Brandon?? Or is it still up in the air? I think it will just make it somewhat
easier for your testing once you have a set PP.

Just seems like alot of testing in a BIG range of cars to choose from.

450pp??
475pp??
500pp??

Like JP said, I've just been selecting a drivetrain (FR so far) and then looking in my garage to find a PP that has a cluster of cars within +20pp. Example, 6 cars from 420pp to 440pp and set the restriction for the bottom end of 420pp and use the engine limiter to dial the other 5 back to 420pp. So far this has resulted in some fairly evenly matched cars.

So far I've found 360pp is good for some vintage FR cars, 420pp is good for mid powered street cars like RX-7 and s2000. Only problem so far is that a lot of my cars aren't broken in but since a lot of them are being tuned back a little bit it's not going to effect the data too much.

 

[Johnnypenso]

Only problem so far is that a lot of my cars aren't broken in but since a lot of them are being tuned back a little bit it's not going to effect the data too much.

Since you're dialing them back, break in is a non-issue, unless of course you need break in to meet the PP minimum.

 

[BrandonW77]

Since you're dialing them back, break in is a non-issue, unless of course you need break in to meet the PP minimum.

If the base line car (example: 420pp) isn't broken in during testing then the baseline might need adjusted. But since the other cars are already dialed back they'd simply need dialed back less so it likely wouldn't be an issue. That does bring up a positive of this format, people won't have to worry about having a car that's broken in because they would likely be turning down the power limiter anyway. 👍

 

[Johnnypenso]

If the base line car (example: 420pp) isn't broken in during testing then the baseline might need adjusted. But since the other cars are already dialed back they'd simply need dialed back less so it likely wouldn't be an issue. That does bring up a positive of this format, people won't have to worry about having a car that's broken in because they would likely be turning down the power limiter anyway. 👍

. The baseline car will be detuned to 420 PP (eg.). If it starts at 427 PP without break in, or 435 with break in and either way is detuned to 420 PP, it'll make zero difference on the track. If anyone here can consistently gain 0.03 seconds per lap from that 1 HP (maybe, and a rounded off one at that), then you can thank Vettel for keeping your seat warm. As long as it is spec and engine limited to the target PP, break in won't matter.

It is definitely a positive. Show up in one of these cars...room is limited to XXXPP on XX tires...if you can get onto the track, you're good to go. 👍 If you can't...

 

[BrandonW77]

. The baseline car will be detuned to 420 PP (eg.). If it starts at 427 PP without break in, or 435 with break in and either way is detuned to 420 PP, it'll make zero difference on the track.

As I said, ultimately it's not going to be a big difference, but I need to address the Canuck/'Merican language barrier just to make sure you're seeing things the way I am. The goal is to find a PP mark that several cars can fall into, the "baseline" car would be the lesser of the group and all other cars would be detuned to match it. What the actually PP would be is irrelevant, the desire is to find one with a cluster of cars in a +20pp range of that number.

Example, during testing I find the following results:
Car A: 420pp (baseline, not detuned)
Car B: 425pp
Car C: 429pp
Car D: 434pp
Car E: 437pp

I find that when I detune cars B-E down to 420pp all 5 cars turn lap times around GVE within .2-.3 of each other (within my personal margin of error). 👍 Upon further driving I find that Car A was not broken in, after some mileage and an oil change it turns out Car A is actually 425pp in it's stock form. The result is that 420pp is no longer the baseline, 425pp would be the new baseline. Since all the other cars are already at or above 425pp it won't cause an issue other than having to change the baseline number from 420pp to 425pp in a spreadsheet somewhere. It could mean cars that were ~417pp will no longer be in the mix but I doubt they would have been anyway.


Ideally, here's what I would hope to happen (even though it may not pan out this way). Rather than having a giant database of cars organized into PP's that people use to choose their cars from I would prefer to simply find PP levels that have clusters of competitive cars (using the same drivetrain is key). Say there are ten cars that "qualify" for a PP level of 425pp (with some minor detuning to the power limiter), of those ten cars it turns out that 5 or 6 of them run within a couple tenths of each other while the remaining 4 or 5 are several tenths slower. The slower cars would naturally be eliminated once people find out they don't stack up so they would gravitate towards the 5 or 6 cars at faster end of the spectrum. In the Industry we call this a "self-correcting problem".

But, but, but Brandon! I have raced in PP rooms with unlimited tuning and unlimited drivetrain and there's always ONE car that rises to the top and EVERYONE will choose that car so this plan will not work!!

No doubt! But those rooms had unlimited tuning and unlimited drivetrain which will (in theory) widen the performance gap between any given cars. I think the real key to this concept is limiting the drivetrain to just one flavor. With no drivetrain limit everyone will end up driving a mid-engine NSX and the plan will not work. I think limiting the tuning will help too, probably not as significantly but anything that helps balance the cars is a positive.

You crazy Yankee, if cars are .2 seconds different from each other then over 10 laps they will be several seconds apart and this plan just will not work.

If we were just doing hot laps by ourselves then yeah, they would be different. But we drive on a track with other cars which creates a draft, aka slipstream. .2 seconds is easily close enough to stay within the slipstream of another car which will keep you right on their bumper and even allow you to overtake them on occasion. I remember a Silvia race at GVE where I qualified about 1.5 seconds slower than Carracerptp but I was able to stay in his draft as he broke away from the pack and was right on his tail every lap, even passing him a couple times. Had I not lost 2 seconds in the pits I would have been with him the whole race and possible even won the race. That's with a 1.5 second difference in raw lap time, so a difference of only a couple tenths shouldn't be a big issue.

I'm not saying this is absolutely how it will pan out, but this is the concept I'm trying to achieve and with the little bit of testing I've done so far the results seem to suggest it's quite possible. I've driven 6-8 cars at the 420pp level, several of them were at a similar lap time and the others were slower, there was not one car that blew them all away. I'm not trying to achieve an absolutely perfectly balanced group of cars, I'm simply trying to find groups that are close enough to allow us to race a multitude of cars and simply have fun racing. I'm not envisioning a points earning championship, I'm envisioning us meeting up on Tuesday nights and Saturday afternoons and selecting 420pp/FR/SH and doing a 5 lapper followed by a 10 lapper reverse grid, or 360pp/FR/CS 5 lapper followed by a 10 lapper reverse grid, or a 500pp/MR/SS 5 lapper followed by a 10 lapper reverse grid, rinse and repeat as necessary.

You're drunk.

For sure!

 

[Johnnypenso]

I agree with most of what you say but i think I'm not getting the baseline concept across very well. Let me explain.

The purpose of a baseline car is only to find a car that's easy to drive so that anyone can drive it at the PP it's intended to race it, set a base lap time, and then all cars that person tests, are compared to their lap in that car. That way, all our testing is comparable. If you go on absolute lap times, testing is not comparable unless we all test the same group of cars equally, which is way more work than is necessary. Which car is the baseline and what it's lap time is doesn't matter, only that it's fairly easy to run consistent laps on and close in performance to the cars you want to race. If it's a little faster or slower it doesn't matter.

Let's say you want to do some testing/homologating. Your time in the baseline car is 1:32. You do ten laps in an RX-8 and your best laps hover around 1:31.5.

You would submit the raw data, but the most important part of the data is that you are 0.5 seconds faster than the baseline car.

I decide I want to test and my baseline time is 1:31. I drive a Supra around for a few laps and best laps are 1:31.5.

I submit the raw data but the most important part is, I'm 0.5 seconds slower than the baseline time.

So long as we are both consistent drivers within our own skill level our times are now comparable. Instead of comparing our absolute times which are identical at 1:31.5, we compare the relative times and we know that the RX-8 is -0.5 and the Supra is +0.5.

If our baseline times were 1:33 and 1:32 or 1:31 and 1:30 it wouldn't matter either, the results would turn out exactly the same, the RX would still be 1 second faster than the Supra.

You tested one car, I tested the other, and now we know that one is 1 second faster than the other, without both of us having to drive it. If multiple people drive the same cars the results will be more accurate of course, but so long as you are thorough I don't think it'll matter much.

I know Math is not a strong suit for Americans, what with your $16,000 Billion deficits that doesn't seem to be of much concern...lol...but it's quite simple and elegant when you do it this way. Whatever the baseline level PP is, is up to you but again, it doesn't matter for comparison purposes. So long as we all use the baseline car and compare our testing times to it (done automatically I assume by the spreadsheet) then someone need only drive and submit one number and anyone can test and submit times and cars, or not.

How you balance it all out is up to you. How you set up car selection is up to you. How you determine the laptime spread of homologated cars is up to you. What you do about cars that win regularly is up to you. Remember the Chef's hat...lol. All I'm doing is suggesting the easiest possible way to test and compare cars, with multiple testers/drivers where we all don't have to drive the exact same set of cars to determine an "average" lap time, which is how it would normally be done.

And of course, if you are only homologating a handful of cars and it's never going to change and only one person is doing the testing, then none of this is necessary....lol.

CHUCK NORRIS EDIT: I actually have to earn a living today after a couple of easy days so you get at least a few hours without having to deal with that confounded Canadian addin' and subtractin'..

Just reread your post. GVE is not a good test bed for cars. Lap times are short meaning the spread is smaller and there isn't much pitch and roll on the track so it isn't as good of a handling test. A .5 gap there, might be a .8 gap on DF and a 1.3 gap on TM, the kind and size of tracks you'll do most of your racing on.

One last thing:

Here's how the spreadsheet might spit out the data for display

RX8 0.0
Baseline Car 0.5
Supra 1.0
Camaro 1.5
Etc. 1.8

 

[Naptown25rs]

^^^ @ Brandon

 

[BrandonW77]

Short and sweet. I agree with most of what you say but i think I'm not getting the baseline concept across very well. Let me explain.

The purpose of a baseline car is only to find a car that's easy to drive so that anyone can drive it at the PP it's intended to race it, set a base lap time, and then all cars that person tests, are compared to their lap in that car. That way, all our testing is comparable. If you go on absolute lap times, testing is not comparable unless we all test the same group of cars equally, which is way more work than is necessary. Which car is the baseline and what it's lap time is doesn't matter, only that it's fairly easy to run consistent laps on and close in performance to the cars you want to race. If it's a little faster or slower it doesn't matter.

Let's say you want to do some testing/homologating. Your time in the baseline car is 1:32. You do ten laps in an RX-8 and your best laps hover around 1:31.5.

You would submit the raw data, but the most important part of the data is that you are 0.5 seconds faster than the baseline car.

I decide I want to test and my baseline time is 1:31. I drive a Supra around for a few laps and best laps are 1:31.5.

I submit the raw data but the most important part is, I'm 0.5 seconds slower than the baseline time.

So long as we are both consistent drivers within our own skill level our times are now comparable. Instead of comparing our absolute times which are identical at 1:31.5, we compare the relative times and we know that the RX-8 is -0.5 and the Supra is +0.5.

You tested one car, I tested the other, and now we know that one is 1 second faster than the other, without both of us having to drive it. If multiple people drive the same cars the results will be more accurate of course, but so long as you are thorough I don't think it'll matter much.

I know Math is not a strong suit for Americans, what with your $16,000 Billion deficits that doesn't seem to be of much concern...lol...but it's quite simple and elegant when you do it this way. Whatever the baseline level PP is, is up to you but again, it doesn't matter for comparison purposes. So long as we all use the baseline car and compare our testing times to it (done automatically I assume by the spreadsheet) then someone need only drive and submit one number and anyone can test and submit times and cars, or not.

I was trying to present a different method of doing this that doesn't involve entering cars into a spreadsheet or having +.5 seconds here or -1 second there. I'm not looking to do a comprehensive lap time comparison of all cars in the game. Your method involves arbitrarily picking a car and then comparing lap times of various cars to that car, entering it into a spreadsheet that someone else would have to create, recruiting members to test (I can't even get people to show up for a test session anymore, they aren't going to do it on their own time), analyzing data, yadda yadda.

My method involves looking at the list of cars in my garage and seeing that with the FR drivetrain there are 8-10 cars between 420pp-440pp. "Hmmmm, I wonder if I set them all to 420pp if they would be relatively competitive?" [loads up track and does 5-10 laps in each car] "Well I'll be! It seems that 5 of those cars run within a couple tenths of each other around Nurb GP/D and the other 5 are all slower. So if I were to simply set the room restrictions to 420pp/FR/SH and let people choose what they want it's likely they will end up in one of those five cars and we'll have some decent racing!" [scurries off and makes a note that 420pp/FR/SH is a good room setting]

I'm not saying this is comprehensive, I'm not saying we will find groups of cars that can work together at any combination of PP levels. I'm saying that we can probably find 3-5 PP levels/drivetrains that have a nice cluster of competitive cars that are fun to race. On Tuesday night I'll make a post saying the lounge is open and we're going to start off with 360pp/FR/CS, people will show up and we'll race. After that we might switch to 500pp/MR/SS and race some more, fun will be had by all. Then on Saturday we'll do it again with our Euro friends and have even more fun. It might turn out that one guy in a certain car is slightly faster then the rest of the group and we try to chase him down all night.......OH NO's!!!! Big deal, we'll still likely have a lot of fun trying to hunt him down, possibly even have some laughs while doing it. Over time we could end up with several PP levels for each drivetrain and have a multitude of cars that are fun to race together.


Just remember JP, you have often told me I'm crazy and that my plans are too simple to work, yet at the end of every season you compliment me on running one of the finest groups on this site. Have faith. I may likely be off my rocker on this one but I'm sure we'll have fun no matter what. I would just rather race than play with spreadsheets. 👍


And I do apologize about the trillions in deficit, I'll try to do better from now on.

 

[Johnnypenso]

You think I didn't know you were going to end up there?...lol.

Why do you think I included this about 5000 words ago?:

Alternately you could just have everyone show up and run any car that fits the regs and see what happens..lol

 

[BrandonW77]

You think I didn't know you were going to end up there?...lol.

Why do you think I included this about 5000 words ago?:

Alternately you could just have everyone show up and run any car that fits the regs and see what happens..lol

That's pretty much the plan. Your face made me feel like I need to explain further, as did the comments about the arbitrary baseline car. I know it sounds like there's no way this plan could work, but early test results show it might work better than one would think.

My goal isn't to create the most evenly based racing on GTP, it's simply to come up with a reason for us to continue getting together twice a week and give us some guidelines we can use to create some races. With declining attendance across the board I don't feel that a regularly scheduled points series is feasible. But I think some of us still want to get together and race/drive/chat/goof off on a weekly basis, I'd like to create a simple structure that will facilitate that. If setup properly it could end up growing into something rather neat and in depth, if not we still have our own little corner we can continue to race in. 👍


BTW, your new avatar kinda creeps me out. Yeah baby.

 

[Marcus Garvey]

I am sure that I am rather alone in this opinion, but I actually prefer racing outside of an organized points series. It would be unusual for me to attend a full season, so any races I attend I typically feel a bit out of place affecting the points outcomes. In past seasons I would simply pull off line and out of the pack with a few laps to go. In this most recent season I failed to do so during a race and negatively affected the outcome for others. I continue to apologise for that. I also don't really care how I finish.

 

[BrandonW77]

In other news, I plan on attending my first RallyCross this weekend. I'm at least going to go scope it out, if the course looks like it won't cause any damage to the suspension then I'll give it a go and sling some dirt. I may have some very dirty (car) pics to share soon!

 

[Marcus Garvey]

Oof. I used to rallycross. It really depends on the site they use as to how rough it is. Midwest I'd expect a harder surface without the ruts and rocks you'll find in the wetter climes. This will be much easier on a car than a soft wetter surface. As a personal rule; I don't rally any car I wouldn't be happy leaving in the woods. Even in Stock class a majority of cars are trailered, and it is not because a stock car is unstreetable. I averaged about $650 in damages per event. The usual suspects are power steering pumps and racks, axles, struts, as well as the occaisional condenser/radiator damage. Perhaps the most common is debeading the tyres. Some of this can be mitigated(i.e. don't put the wood to it while at full lock will save axles/run 40+psi to keep the tyres mounted), but some is just the nature of the sport. Some of it lies in the driving. The fast guys hook the ruts and ride 'em, but this beats on the equipment. That said, you can still putt around safely and have fun, but to run at the pointy end comes with sacrifices. The Superscrews are rather robust, however, so have fun.

 

[Naptown25rs]

Hey B,


I'll sell you the RS if you want a dedicated auto-x/rally-x car! 💡

 

[Marcus Garvey]

Hey B,


I'll sell you the RS if you want a dedicated auto-x/rally-x car! 💡

Excellent choice. The 2.5NA is actually a better limited-prep rally car than the turbos in my opinion.

 

[BrandonW77]

Hey B,


I'll sell you the RS if you want a dedicated auto-x/rally-x car! 💡

MMMMM....I would love that if I could swing it!

@Marcus, I'm being very cautious about it. If it looks like a nice smooth surface I can just have some fun on I'll give it a go. If it looks bumpy or has ruts or anything like that I'll probably just spectate. I'm well aware of the danger that can be hiding out there and seeing as I only have my daily driver I can't afford to risk damaging it. But I do greatly desire to be slideways on some dirt!!!!!!!

 

[Marcus Garvey]

You can always try to grab a codrive if you are uncomfortable hammering on your daily driver. Those are the only days I rally anymore.

Oh yeah, rallyx is cumulative. So if you hit a cone you cannot simply go out next run and clean that up. The cone is with you until the end. As well, make every effort to hit a cone if you are going off course. A cone is a 2 second penalty, like solo, but since times are cumulative they assign typically a 15 second penalty for off-course runs. Also, the course often changes throughout the day. As ruts or holes are uncovered, organizers will typically move the course around these new obstacles, making fair competition tough. It has happened to me many times that the person in front of me in grid ran a completely different course than I did, making it very difficult to compare times.

NCemtB, I'd be almost interested in the wake of Brandons dismissal about the RS, but it is probably less than efficient to transport.

 

[BrandonW77]

I don't go to these things for competition, I just go for the opportunity to actually drive my car the way I want to. It so happens that I've won my class two out of three times but only because its a very small class. But competition really never crosses my mind and that would be even more so for the rally cross, I just want to drive my Subaru in its natural dirty environment.

I've read how they will change the course of ruts/holes start to appear, thus it is a cumulative time instead of a single lap. On Saturday they are doing something called an Aussie Challenge (or something like that) where two driver start on different parts of the course and go head to head. Winner advances, loser goes into the losers bracket. Now that I could see being a bit competitive about, but what interests me most about it is that I think it might end up in more track time. They are having free runs afterwards which makes me think it will be a smaller crowd, so more runs per driver. They aren't doing free runs on Sunday and never do them at the Auto X.

Edit: I sure would love to have Circuit of the Americas in GT5! Want an incredible track, certainly Tilke's best.

 

[Naptown25rs]

Edit: I sure would love to have Circuit of the Americas in GT5! Want an incredible track, certainly Tilke's best.

I really hope they get some rubber down and find some grip before Sunday, I watched both practices today and it was kind of a snoozer for both sessions... I do love some aspects of the track though, and it should definitely make for one of the better races this season.

 

[BrandonW77]

They said Kimi refused to do any time in the simulator or even look at a track map to learn the circuit. Doesn't seem to have hurt him too much though.

 

[Naptown25rs]

Yeah, I heard them mention that. I can see the positives and negatives of both sides, but it doesn't surprise me... Typical Kimi style!

 

[dsgerbc]

Excellent choice. The 2.5NA is actually a better limited-prep rally car than the turbos in my opinion.

Modern turbo - maybe. I had a 94 legacy turbo, that I rallycrossed a few times, and I liked it more than N/A Subies on the dirt. It had a really small turbo, that spooled instantenously. Not sure it's good for going fast, but definitely fun.