Today I sat down and thought about the most ridiculous fun car I could use to win my staple grind event, the Le Mans 30 minutes. Browsed my garage and found my Pontiac Firebird. Then I remembered there is an engine swap for it....
So I built a 699PP Pontiac 1978 Trans-Am for this race.
This is the setting I came up with.
Interestingly the car handles much MUCH better than you'd expect, it can keep up with the AI Group-4 cars even in the corners, despite it having no front downforce. It has lots of mechanical grip with this setup, raising the rear helps a lot with the cornering, I just gave it enough rear downforce to keep the rear end from getting light in corners and crests, but not so much it would take away front grip.
Also, the car behaves really well, it will drift and power drift but it is very controllable and easy to recover, there is no ''snap'' to its oversteer, even in the wet.
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The race went really well, for a while, the car does 310 km/h on the straights and even though it has terrible fuel consumption and I had to coast a lot I did a 4:10 (racing hards) and subsequent laps were not much slower. That's enough to build a comfortable lead even if you have to pit thrice.
Unfortunately the race turned EXTREMELY wet and it was a spin-fest, I turned into a carousel twice and lost a lot of time because the wet-o-meter turned deep blue and it was like ice and I could not get the car out of the grass without spinning a couple times more.
But I still won by a couple seconds, using racing only racing hards and wets with h-pattern shifting, wheel, clutch and no aids.
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So there you have it, my most ridiculous car to win the 30 minutes of Le Mans with! I can wholeheartedly recommend the engine-swapped Firebird for fun races, the car is actually really capable, well mannered and has good cornering!