Well, I got a short opportunity to play last night, so I tried a couple of cars from my list.
First up was the Great Pumpkin Audi TT. I added NA1 tuning, the FC trans (widened to 8 autoset), triple plate clutch, and race FW. This sped up the shifting substantially. I had forgotten my notes from Digital Nitrate's field compilation, so I went with the first field without the MS Elise or the Zonda. Unfortunately this had the Proto Spirra in it. 200 points on the block.
The little TT is still a hoot to drive, but the Spirra took off from the outset. My TT was quite good through the back side of the course but I gave up most of that gain on the front straight. I was falling steadily behind the Spirra but running second when I got nudged at the kink in the front straight, and spun in the sand. This was a killer, BUT the situation was hopeless anyway. On S2 tires I barely made 10 laps on the fronts, and really only 9 decent laps. The other cars are making 11-12 laps at least. So time to try something else, or go to a fuller build on the TT. But I hate cars that eat front tires, so I'll probably skip it, even though I love the way you can throttle-steer it.
I reset the console and got into my relatively-built Top Banana M Coupe, with full race suspension and about 390 hp. This car seemed a shoe-in during its Track Meet audition at El Capitan but last night I realized that was on R-compound tires.
So I switched to S2s and found a field that didn't have the MS Elise, the Zonda, or the Spirra. Hot shoe was the Shelby S1 followed by the TVR 350C. This actually looks like a relatively tight field, though the first two were clearly a bit quicker (why the AI loafs around in the Viper is beyond me).
I started the race and got left at the line, but was picking off the back markers by the Hoopdie. The M Coupe is a bit down on top speed, but the braking is stupendous. By lap 7 or 8 I was about 8 seconds up on the Shelby. But then, it all started to go wrong. Not quite as quickly as the TT, but the front tires went away again, and I started losing ground. I held on through lap 11, falling back to third. If the Shelby and the TVR had pitted on 11, it would have been a workable position. But they stayed out, and I had no choice but to go in, meaning the race would have been unwinnable. So I retired again.
What tires are you folks using? I need to make at least 11 good laps out of a set to make a 5-stop strategy, and I'm using S2s up in 10 or less. I don't know how I'd even get down to a 4-stop, 13-lap interval. Fun as El Capitan is, all of the long, fast sweepers are lefts, meaning the right front goes away sooner than anything else.