Hey there endurance folks. I need your wisdom.
Assuming you're using real time, how long after rain stops do you typically start seeing AI pit for slick tires? I did a 20 minute race at x15 so it would cover 5 hours with four slots set to sync to race. Light Rain - Overcast - Heavy Cloud - Medium Cloud. I also tried it with Light Rain - Clear - Medium Cloud - Heavy Cloud just in case having it be clear skies right after would dry the track quicker.
It didn't make much and after 20 minutes nobody changed tires. There was a clear dry line and the spray coming up off line was very low but not entirely gone. What have you guys seen from your endurance experience?
I've never seen the AI pit for slicks either. They'll go in for wets 1-4 laps after the precipitation starts (unless the first weather slot is inclement, in which case they'll already start with them), but they seem to just keep the wets on for the remainder of the race.
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Uh...okay, so I just had a pretty interesting experience. 28 laps around Monza Classic Combined. Not super long, but no sprint either, so I suppose it fits here. All Group 5s, max grid size (me + 21 AI), with myself using the 935-78.
For the first 5 or so laps, everything is fine. I've got the 935-78/81 on my tail, with another 935/80 behind it. Then I start noticing the number of cars on-track began shrinking rapidly (i,e, at the start, my position would read like "POS 1/22," but then it was "POS 1/18," and then "POS 1/15" a lap or so later.) Also, the two 935's that were chasing me had vanished/retired. Then I saw this (this was taken on lap 9 I believe):
Look at all those retired cars! Obviously a few had to retire due to damage, as I could notice lots of debris shadows on certain parts of the track, plus it's visible on the cars themselves, but, at that point, it was just me and 9 other AI on-track. I had a hard time believing that so many AI were crashing like this, so I started to investigate what was going on.
Back to the start for a sec - the race started at 3:00pm with Clear conditions during the summer, with the weather slots set to "Clear -> Rain -> Thunderstorm -> Light Cloud," syncing to the race. I went in for wets as soon as I saw rain drops, around lap 6, way before any of the AI, so I had dropped quite a few positions, from 1st down to 9th (out of 13). I quickly caught up to the AI, who, even though the track had gotten really wet, had still not went in to pit.
I'm in first place again, and after a while the gap between me and second place is over a minute and fifty seconds. That's unusual, even though the 935/78 is faster on the straights, the Capris and BMWs especially should be faster through the corners. At
least fast enough that such a large gap should not be occurring.
Paying attention to the gaps and number of cars had caused me to run off the road and damage my front end, so I request a pit stop and head in.
Maybe if I had manual pit stops on, this would not have happened, but the AI drove me right by my crew, and I proceeded out the pits, still damaged. This happened to me a few times in both games, so I just request another pit stop and will try again. Keep in mind, at this point, second place was still over a minute and thirty seconds behind.
As I come in to pit for the second time, I notice this:
Two things to notice here: first, there are only 9 cars on track now. 13 had retired at this point. Secondly, you'll notice that I'm now in fourth place. I sat here at the pit entry and waited for them because there are two things I wanted to confirm.
Here's one of them:
One of the cars that retired, another 935, was actually
blocking my slot. I thought that I would just clip through it and the pit stop would proceed as normal, so I drove in slowly, but, sure enough, once the AI took over my car, it drove right by them.
So I figured if it's possible for me to have a blocked slot, the other AIs must be unable to pit for this reason as well. This is the second thing I wanted to confirm:
I waited for the other AIs so that I could drive up behind them, illuminating their tires. The remaining AIs were all on slicks. In all of my past races, AI will pit either as soon as the rain starts falling, or no later than like 2-3 laps after, but this was ~8 laps after the first drops of rain. No wonder they had slicks, they couldn't pit.
This suggests, to me, that the AI were unable to pit due to a bug, and raced until they ran out of fuel. This would explain why the two 935s that were close behind at the beginning of the race just vanished, even though I did not see them wreck. I'm sure that all of the cars that retired early on due to damage and took up most of the pit space didn't help, but I don't know if that's related.
Either way, there was no way I could finish the race, I'd run out of fuel myself eventually, so I retired.
Have you guys encountered anything like this before? The only somewhat similar experience I've had was a 100-lap Group C race at the Daytona oval, where only 11 out of 32 cars finished, but that was obviously due to the hilariously bad pile-ups that can occur there (the AI still went in to pit with no issue in this case).