- 1,231
- VS & 74 (France)
- GT-Alex74
Hey guys ! I'm Alexandre, 25 in less than a month, petrolhead and GT addict 
Let's begin with the presentation sheet provided :
Now, additional things about my automotive background. My father has had his lot of great cars when he was young, including a 240Z and a tuned 260Z, a Toyota 2000GT, a BMW 2002 Ti, an Alpine A110 1600S, a Celica TA22, a 323i, and a few other nice things I don't recall right now but I'm as jealous as for the others
And he recently sold his Grande Punto Abarth (a car I drove for a bit of time, quite nice). He also had the chance to do a bit of rally in a Renault R11 Turbo, and be co-driver in a Lancia Stratos.
Needless to say, my brother and I fell right into a bath full of automotive fluids at a very young age
I had a Honda CRX ED9 with a few mods, and I'm currently driving a Mazda MX-5 1.8 with OEM Bilsteins and Torsen, while my brother, being older and changing cars much more frequently than anyone I know, owned more cars (205 GTI 1.9 Gentry, Civic EP3, Fiesta ST, Golf IV R32, Clio RS Ragnotti, Impreza GT 2000 and one Peter Solberg STI 8, a Lancer Evo IX, and now he just bought an 325i E30).
I like all kind of cars, but I especially enjoy oldtimers and youngtimers more, and I tend to prefer RWDs, as I feel it is the funniest layout (but I can't wait to try seriously a rear engined car).
I also like photography, and ran a D40 for nearly 7 years (but it won't shutter anymore, so I'm going to upgrade as soon as possible). I do a lot of automotive pictures of course ! Before having my driving licence, I was living right at the bottom of a mountain pass, so I told my friends to give me a call one hour before if they planned to have a blast around there : I would then climb by foot with my camera stuff and wait for them to come. (Now, I know every single inch of that road and nobody can challenge me on this one
)
So, to end this message, a few pics of the CRX, the MX-5, the Abarth and a bunch of others.
Let's begin with the presentation sheet provided :- How did you find GTPlanet?
- I just don't remember, I know and watch this site from a long time.
- Where are you from?
- A nice place where there are a lot of mountains, and great twisty roads to go around, in the Alps. I'm in France, just near Switzerland.
- When did you start playing the Gran Turismo games?
- From the very first episode ! I think I was 8 year old at that time. The only ones I didn't bought were GT5 Prologue and GT PSP. I began taking part to time attack events on a french forum back with GT4, and I'm now running GT Fusion (with my own team for a while but most guys were not interested in that competitive kind of stuff, so I'll be running with GTNF, the Lacombe brothers and Gaëtan Paletou's team). But I'm mostly running 350-500 PP stock road cars lobbies as a daily fix, trying to use the worse cars available
- Do you play with a steering wheel?
- Of course ! I originally bought the GT3 bundle with the GT Force wheel, but had hard times getting used to it, so I played GT3 for a while with the pad, before finally moving on the GTF. When GT4 came out, I bought a Driving Force Pro with it, and this was a huge improvement for me. I enjoyed the game much more, and began drifting. I played GT4 a lot, just paused it for several months twice, otherwise I had at least my weekly fix, even just before GT5.
So, here comes the funny stories about this DFP. Of course, I had to live with the famous brake potentiometer issues, opening the pedals block periodically to add duct tape and WD40 to solve this. But I did it too much, and as screwing back that piece of crap together is ridiculously hard, I managed to cut some cables. Which I repaired. So I continued, but then I broke the - on my shifter, so i had to change my configuration in order the shift with the pads, de-activate the - position on the shifter and use the + as the e-brake. Awesome for drifting. But 7 years of time attack and drifting combined were too much to handle for the gears, so the wheel began to decalibrate itself sometimes, generally while i was applying violent countersteering, generating a lot of crashes. I tried however to continue to use it carefully, but one day, this happened :
My brake pedal suddenly broke, and litterally jumped on my face (not kidding !). I considered buying a new wheel at this moment. 2 days later, I duct taped the pedal and continued using this patchwork of a steering wheel. I then thought about making a new support out of steel and screw the pedal on, but I ended up just wraping the duct taped pedal with a single sock which had lost it's partner, because it was able to keep the things together.
Shortly after, a random fellow read this story, and tells me he bought a nearly new Drving Force GT, but as the pedal set did not worked at all, he bought a new G27 and didn't have enough space to store the DFGT, so he decided to send it to me for the price of shipping. I managed to determine that there was just a bad contact in the usb cable. But as I'm a lazy ass, I've just kept using my old duct-taped-socked pedal set with the new wheel
Now, a friend of mine just gave me a T500RS, which has a broken connector on the pedal set cable (he threw the wheel out of anger without unplugging it, and decided not to bother repairing it, he just bought another one). So I just have to find the right connector to repair it, or hack a RJ12 into fitting the port (I thought that was it but it's not the case).
- What other games do you enjoy?
I think 80% have always been racing games. But I also like a lot of other things from various genres, such as The Elder Scrolls series (as well as other RPGs), Streets of Rage (the remake V5 done by Bombergames is pure awesomeness), some FPS (though I didn't touch that kind of games in years), and 2D fighting games (even if I'm definitely not good at this). I also played a lot of Tony Hawk's games as a teenager.
Currently, I don't play that much video games, at least compared to how much I used to before, and that's ignoring my daily fix of GT. I don't have a good PC right now, and I just bought GT5 and 6 and Skyrim on the PS3. So when I want to do something else, I just play old games on my PC (I'm doing Daggerfall now) or older consoles (or emulators).
Aside video games, I also do paper RPGs, and had the opportunity to try airsoft a few times (I'd like to get into it with my own equipment when I can afford it).
- What are you most looking forward to doing in the community, now that you're a part of this site?
I registered here mainly to share some experiments and trials. I want to do a lap time on Trial Mountain with every single road car from the game, a task I nearly completed back in GT4 already, and I thought it would be more fun to share and get the community's opinion.
Now, additional things about my automotive background. My father has had his lot of great cars when he was young, including a 240Z and a tuned 260Z, a Toyota 2000GT, a BMW 2002 Ti, an Alpine A110 1600S, a Celica TA22, a 323i, and a few other nice things I don't recall right now but I'm as jealous as for the others
And he recently sold his Grande Punto Abarth (a car I drove for a bit of time, quite nice). He also had the chance to do a bit of rally in a Renault R11 Turbo, and be co-driver in a Lancia Stratos.Needless to say, my brother and I fell right into a bath full of automotive fluids at a very young age
I had a Honda CRX ED9 with a few mods, and I'm currently driving a Mazda MX-5 1.8 with OEM Bilsteins and Torsen, while my brother, being older and changing cars much more frequently than anyone I know, owned more cars (205 GTI 1.9 Gentry, Civic EP3, Fiesta ST, Golf IV R32, Clio RS Ragnotti, Impreza GT 2000 and one Peter Solberg STI 8, a Lancer Evo IX, and now he just bought an 325i E30).
I like all kind of cars, but I especially enjoy oldtimers and youngtimers more, and I tend to prefer RWDs, as I feel it is the funniest layout (but I can't wait to try seriously a rear engined car).
I also like photography, and ran a D40 for nearly 7 years (but it won't shutter anymore, so I'm going to upgrade as soon as possible). I do a lot of automotive pictures of course ! Before having my driving licence, I was living right at the bottom of a mountain pass, so I told my friends to give me a call one hour before if they planned to have a blast around there : I would then climb by foot with my camera stuff and wait for them to come. (Now, I know every single inch of that road and nobody can challenge me on this one
)So, to end this message, a few pics of the CRX, the MX-5, the Abarth and a bunch of others.
