RDRC S8 Round 3 - Rally Greece (6th - 12th March 2017)

[Deleted member 217114]

Let me put it this way, i think i have over 400hours of dirt rally. 400hours of the same 6 country's. They combine into, what, 150kms of road? Every country is just 2 long stages. Reversed, cut in half, in light, in dark. Same road every damn time. So yeah, i know the stages better than i know the roads around my house. So i don't think hotlapping really is the problem. Except maybe at the first stage. It's 2 rally's in a row that i gain 10+ places (overall) in stage 2 and 3.

Hotlapping aside, what about hood cams and hud? They have an advantage over me. I am on a single monitor, no hud, cockpit cam and 720steering degrees. Triple setup can see apex better, hoodcam can see apex and road better, hud gets more info like visual corner indication, 240 to 360 steering gives a lot faster response. So many advantages to be taken, yet i drive like i do. What i mean is that you could go on and on about advantages. Just drive the long stages a bit before the League and have fun. Because i can't unmemorize the stages.

You have valid points. You're right. I agree. That's why I also would love to have options like force people to drive softlock, headcam in leagues, etc. and ofcourse filtered leaderboards. We can only dream of that, cause I would love to race against people who have the same peripherals and settings as me

 

[svt4cam]

Done whew! I think the Weyerbacher Team Fate Rally Kadett is sitting in 9th in 2wd- at the moment. Brought the car home clean with no major mistakes. Regressed back to full manual and clutch and dash view for this rally and Hopefully can grab a few points for all the perspiration. It was a lot of fun Thank you for all the hard work organizers!!!

 

[bogani]

Started of solid the first three stages but then it went downhill. Two resets and a few spins but managed to bring the car home.

My teammate @peg306 told me I could ride the cliffsides like snowbanks. Didn't work out well.

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

Hmm, decided to give the good old-fashioned way of rally-reporting a go again now! Writing a bit after each stage! (live style, editing my post after each stage and service)

Pre-Event testing: Nix, nada, me and @Roy Magnes found some old rFactor mods and tracks and created our own server with max number of AI's and had some fun... Not the most relevant testing!

SS1: All in all a good stage, not quite sure where I stack up in the standings in the 2WD- class, as I don't want to look at it and get stressed, nervous or disappointed. But the feeling was good, and that's good. The most important thing is that I had lots of fun!
SS2: Well, it felt messy, I couldn't find any rythm, most likely due to messing up the first hairpin, just like I warned about in the Magazine. Luckily I was way to early on the brakes and not too late!
SS3: Not a good stage at all. Topped it off with a half spin in a hairpin, had to put it reverse for a while.

Service B: At least I've managed to take care of the car. Everything is fixed back to 100%

SS4: Well, well, well (insert meme). That went better than expected, to say that I felt I have full control might be a stretch, but no real mistakes, and a clean stage. That's always great!
SS5: Way to careful. I know this is a stage that it's easy to mess up, but I do think I lost a bit too much on my extreme carefulness.
SS6: I rather... dislike night-stages to put it mildly. Happy that I got through it without major issues. New day dawning soon!

Service C: Yet again I've managed to take care of my trusty old Escort. 100% fit for Day 2!

SS7: Hmm, started out good, then had a half spin that stopped the car in a hairpin, and lots of weird driving after that. Hrmph! Focus Pinkyboy!
SS8: It's a bit weird, the more I drive, the more out of rythm I get. With that said, I don't think it was a very slow stage for me, just totally out of rythm.
SS9: Yuuup! This felt really good. A couple of small errors here and there, but nothing I lost more than a couple of seconds on at max. Finally a good rythm again. It was great fun!

Service D: It felt like I used the car harder on the last 3 stages than earlier in the rally. But this is the least amount of time I've used in service this rally. Yet again, 100% fixed car!

SS10: Ok stage, started out very good, got totally out of rythm around halfway, and drove rather erratical until the last few corners when I finally got in the groove again!
SS11: I know it's not really a wise thing. Driving nice and safe for 10 og 12 stages, and then try to push a little bit on this stage, but no mistakes and it worked out fairly good. That's always fun!
SS12: Another small spin on this stage, but I didn't lose much time, and by looking at the overall, I didn't lose a spot or anything either. No harm done!

Service E - Finish: All in all a pretty much amazing rally for me. I expected Greece to be a rally where I really struggled due to being very slow on these kind of stages. But in the end it was a great result. Of course, a "great result" doesn't equal a class win, or even a class podium. But I might be the best non-Kadett, and that's amazing for me!

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

nice one Ole, did those reports back in the RBR days where we had to do the rallies in three or four hours in one go. It's a good way to let off steam between stages. With Dirt Rally, I spread my rallies over four or five days, wouldn't actually trust my eyes and the rest of the body to do it all in one go anymore

 

[Roy Magnes]

So I finally got time to do the rally today, and this is my report:

SS01 - A bit cautious, I don't want to wreck any results on the first stage...
SS02 - 4 seconds closer to the rally leader on this stage, that is a good sign. A little erratic, but you will always find small mistakes when you look for them...
SS03 - Rolled the car in the second corner and had to get help. The rest of the stage went well, though...

SS04 - A big knock to the radiator when I forgot about a rock on the side of the road and scrubbed it, but the overall time was very pleasing
SS05 - Felt like I was way down on power from the start, might be because of the radiator-damage. Thankfully it's just another short stage before I can fix it.
SS06 - That stage was as messy as anything, I almost rolled it early on. Brought the car home to the overnight service in one piece, though.

Leg 1 done, and I am sitting a bit further down the ranking that I would have wanted. The price for mistakes is high on a hort rally, so I will have to push hard on Leg 2 to redeem myself. I want points!
Oh, and at this point there is 0,1 seconds between Björn Borgqvist and sa8or, and I am separating them

SS07 - It felt like this one was better, now that I have plugged the leak and regained some power to the engine. Powerrrrr!
SS08 - Slow thorugh the hairpins, but still an okay time
SS09 - I am very pleased with this stage, I was on full attack all the way, and it felt like it was fast

SS10 - My hopes of recovering a podium was shot down here, when I hit a rock and spun 180 on a narrow part... Bummer
SS11 - Flat out, from the times it looks okay. I just want to finish now, hopefully with a few points.
SS12 - Game crashed a couple hundred meters into the stage...

Right... back to stage 7 again then, following the game-crash on the final stage... Yay...

SS07 - The stage felt good, no big dramas and a reasonably good pace.
SS08 - Did not slide enough in a hairpin, and drove onto a rock on the inside. Had to reverse to get off, that is costly here...
SS09 - Not as fast as last time through, and I clipped something invisible that pierced my radiator again. I just want to finish this rally now, I don't even care about the results anymore...

SS10 - No repeat of the rock-episode this time, but instead a very nice time
SS11 - Pushed quite hard on this one, I don't think the time is all that bad.
SS12 - Aaand finish. Hit a rock on this one too, but not hard enough to cause serious damage.

The rally did not go as well as I had hoped, but also not as bad as I feared it would after that flip on SS03. I am pleased that I got the car back in one piece with relatively little damage, I should bag some points both for me and for RMI FWD, so all is not hopeless and lost

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

http://i.giphy.com/xUA7aM1Z9c1r3z0tqM.gif

Scandinavian flick on SS1

 

[Nick Papadopoulos]

I , eventually, managed to finish the rally in a good position for my standards. It was a competitive event . The appearence of our Dirt Rally Hellenic Community was impressive and dominant in our home event and with a few hours left , it is very possible to have 3 Greeks in the top 3 places and another one in 5th. Congratulations to all the competitors that took place in the rally.
I will leave there an important message from the whole group of Greek rally fans.(as seen in the Polo livery). This is our hope and request for the return of the historic and well known RALLY ACROPOLIS back in the top tier , in the World Rally Championship. We are looking forward for this return !!

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

yeah, the guys on the roof seem to share the sentiment

 

[Roland]

Phew! I made it all the way to the end without terminally falling off a cliff which basically is all I hoped for..
I did come pretty close a few times though..

PLEASE ignore the horrible trees.. That's how far I have to dial down my settings to get a consistent acceptable framerate in this game on this relic PC of mine..

Hotlapping? Spreading the rally over 5..6 days? Is that possible? I learn something new everytime..

I usually just do a short practice stage to get the right feeling and then get I get going, doing one rally day at a time..
Personally I get the most fun out of driving my 70's Fiat with 900° rotation, full manual H and helmet view only.
But since I'm slow no matter what and will never compete for a win anyways, using "easier" or "less realistic" settings would
only break part of the immersion for me rather than move me to the top of the rankings.. More practice would help me a lot more with that..

I do fully understand a lot of people feel quite different about that, and they should be able to use their own preferred settings.
Rule changes like enforcing cockpit view for all would make this league a lot more hardcore IMO and scare away a lot of the more casual players.. Then for me it will get very lonely at the bottom of the list... so let's leave things the way they are.

So... here's how Greece went for me:

First three stages went pretty good without major issues, and my mechanics got my Abarth back as good as new in no-time!
SS4 was quite a disaster though: 3 crashes, 2 calls for help and barely made the end with a car almost in half..
SS5 was fine but slow, anxiously trying to keep the car alive..
SS6 even slower but not so fine.. small crash got me a puncture early on, lost the tire soon after that so I limped through the greek night with survival as my only goal..
Lost a ridiculous amount of time on these three stages..

Even given all night my crew would've been unable to repair everything, but I was able to start day 2 with most parts back to almost 90%

Overall the day went OK-ish..lots of small mistakes with rocks and walls that upset the car or even threw it backwards a number of times..
During the day I felt not only car health, but also the driver and co-pilot dropped way down from that 90%.. must be the heat.. but eventually we made it to the end..

My first goal of scoring at least one point will not be fulfilled here, but my other goal, having fun trying, I definitely made that work!!!
I WILL try again next time, as Finland I don't fear nearly as much as Greece. But that might be because I only ever driven one stage there so far...

Once again, BIG thanks to the guys running this league!
I the extra subconscious thrill of trying to stay out of last place..

 

[Jack Hintz]

Thought I would do something different and challenge myself.
So I've joined the 2WD+ class for something a bit different!

With hardly any testing pre-event and certainly no experience driving the little RWD beast I jumped straight into the action.

Day 1 went fairly smoothly, a spin in SS2 and a half roll in SS4 meant I was down on time. Still learning the car and getting to grips with little RWD experience in hand.

Day 2 I managed to claw back quite a bit of time with an extremely good feeling in the car. Only downside was a huge spin leading up to a hairpin and with little room to turn I had to essentially reverse up to the hairpin to carry on.
10 seconds lost there but still incredibly happy with the result.

I can't get over how quickly I managed to get to grips with the car, and am very much looking forward to Finland!

 

[peg306]

My teammate @peg306 told me I could ride the cliffsides like snowbanks. Didn't work out well.

 

[Thomas Lambaerts]

@Roland you say your ancient pc... But that resolution though. What is that? Triple screen setup?
Hum Finland might appear more easy, it's actually not. To many bloody jumps. Prepare yourself to complete at least one stage with a blown tyre. Or to peel the car from a tree at the outside of a corner while going over a crest/jump. You will love IT

@Jack Hintz That car and Greece or Finland is the best combo in the game. Totally love that you picked it up. It is hard work though, all the opposite lock.

 

[Neilski]

Well, I finished. Miles out of the points already but then that was no surprise.
Mostly uneventful, very much to my surprise after how practice went (!!). Even quite enjoyable in fact!
My main purpose, given that a top-20 finish was out of the question, was to stay in front of the 2WD crew. This quickly became a case of staying in front of the ridiculously quick Tommie Lindberg (or should I say Lindgren? ). He was scarily quick but made mistakes here and there, and at one point dropped back about 20 seconds. Going into the last stage I had something like 15 seconds in hand, so I reckoned I was going to hold onto my dignity and finish ahead of him, but it was a long stage so I was feeling a bit nervous. Maybe that tightened me up a bit, who knows, but I made a few minor-ish mistakes (screenpic is one of 'em, left me pointing the wrong direction) and generally lost the flow, and Tommie did another outrageously quick time to finish about 4 seconds ahead of me. Sigh.
At least I seem to have a good chance of finishing ahead of the Kadetts!

 

[Jack Hintz]

@Jack Hintz That car and Greece or Finland is the best combo in the game. Totally love that you picked it up. It is hard work though, all the opposite lock.

Would you believe I've found it to be the easiest RWD car I've driven in the game aside from the Manta? :O

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

Provisional Results are out! You can find them here
As always, RaceNet-names that are unknown will be listed. Many of the same guys from earlier, it's due to the extremely slow and tiresome way to remove guys from RaceNet, it is faster and simpler to edit the results manually sadly.

Drivers on this list have until March 15th 23:59 GMT to notify us about names to be included in the final results.

Unrecognized RaceNet: ?
Unrecognized RaceNet: bertalev83
Unrecognized RaceNet: George Nempis
Unrecognized RaceNet: jon_i634
Unrecognized RaceNet: karpfingertomas
Unrecognized RaceNet: Maverick
Unrecognized RaceNet: mc342ui
Unrecognized RaceNet: mh753
Unrecognized RaceNet: mohp
Unrecognized RaceNet: NoSouleR
Unrecognized RaceNet: othonas
Unrecognized RaceNet: PUPONE777
Unrecognized RaceNet: Realista74
Unrecognized RaceNet: Rejdim46
Unrecognized RaceNet: Ruddy91 [CZ]
Unrecognized RaceNet: RZr2jz
Unrecognized RaceNet: sbeslidis
Unrecognized RaceNet: Scheisenberg
Unrecognized RaceNet: SEB01
Unrecognized RaceNet: SlitheringOne
Unrecognized RaceNet: SNipeR
Unrecognized RaceNet: Toikkari_37
Unrecognized RaceNet: vivalabam922
Unrecognized RaceNet: waltcynt
Unrecognized RaceNet: Wut?
Unrecognized RaceNet: ZÉ DA BURRA
Unrecognized RaceNet: zefe

Additional Notes:

• Kiierk (Joakim Stenström)
• fedorico (Fedorico Harvenberg)

We know who you are, and it will be fixed for the final results!

 

[pigloaf]

As always, RaceNet-names that are unknown will be listed.

Surprised there's still quite a lot of names changing

 

[Roland]

@Roland you say your ancient pc... But that resolution though. What is that? Triple screen setup?
Hum Finland might appear more easy, it's actually not......

Hi Thomas! True, the old PC is only part of the story. Built it in 2009 when W7 came out.. Upgraded to SSD and double VGA in 2013 and that's it.
At that same time I upgraded my monitors to 5x 24"s in upright/portrait mode as you might be able to distinguish in my profile pic. That's 6000x1920 resolution indeed.. so I don't really need AA
I placed the monitors straight behind my wheel base, as close as possible to my eyes, so I can have life-size cockpits in any car game..
My brain doesn't register the vertical bars at all when racing, and the screen image fills up my entire peripheral vision.
So when racing in a darkened room, the immersion is as close to VR as I can afford. So much in fact, that I sometimes catch myself reaching for the seat belt or bracing myself for impact..

Unfortunately they don't make 5 or 6-screen VGA cards anymore so I'm stuck with these aging ones..

Sorry for slightly going OT here..

Regarding the Finland Rally: Thanks for the heads-up. Ignorance is bliss I guess, until I find some time for recon in the upcoming weeks..

 

[Michael Nelson]

Surprised there's still quite a lot of names changing

Yeah, we expect they'll keep happening too. Unfortunately the way Codies have implemented it with regards to changing with Steam names, means that they frequently change. We wanted to switch to RaceNet IDs (these are unique number identifiers that don't change), but going through every person and finding their ID is something we just don't have time for. At least we know for next season

 

[SEB01]

Provisional Results are out! You can find them here
As always, RaceNet-names that are unknown will be listed. Many of the same guys from earlier, it's due to the extremely slow and tiresome way to remove guys from RaceNet, it is faster and simpler to edit the results manually sadly.

Drivers on this list have until March 15th 23:59 GMT to notify us about names to be included in the final results.

Unrecognized RaceNet: ?
Unrecognized RaceNet: bertalev83
Unrecognized RaceNet: George Nempis
Unrecognized RaceNet: jon_i634
Unrecognized RaceNet: karpfingertomas
Unrecognized RaceNet: Maverick
Unrecognized RaceNet: mc342ui
Unrecognized RaceNet: mh753
Unrecognized RaceNet: mohp
Unrecognized RaceNet: NoSouleR
Unrecognized RaceNet: othonas
Unrecognized RaceNet: PUPONE777
Unrecognized RaceNet: Realista74
Unrecognized RaceNet: Rejdim46
Unrecognized RaceNet: Ruddy91 [CZ]
Unrecognized RaceNet: RZr2jz
Unrecognized RaceNet: sbeslidis
Unrecognized RaceNet: Scheisenberg
Unrecognized RaceNet: SEB01
Unrecognized RaceNet: SlitheringOne
Unrecognized RaceNet: SNipeR
Unrecognized RaceNet: Toikkari_37
Unrecognized RaceNet: vivalabam922
Unrecognized RaceNet: waltcynt
Unrecognized RaceNet: Wut?
Unrecognized RaceNet: ZÉ DA BURRA
Unrecognized RaceNet: zefe

Additional Notes:

• Kiierk (Joakim Stenström)
• fedorico (Fedorico Harvenberg)

We know who you are, and it will be fixed for the final results!

SEB01 ( Sebastian Stanciu)