Sad to hear Steam/Racenet wasn’t cooperating with you. Definitely glad to have you back!
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Agree with what Roo said, good to have you back Camenbert. You are in good company. In the great tradition of taking a ■■■■ at your opponent’s bad luck, should we call you Alonzo or Barrichello from this point forward? 
< referencing their running out of fuel in Le Mans Virtual on Saturday. Was priceless.
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Was just about to check in to make sure everything was going ok. Good to see you back. Not sure if you’ve tried going back in again, usually it just gives you a “time out” time at least, might get lucky, worth a try if you haven’t.
and here we had made it quite a few races in a row without an issue 
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Finally did setup my wheel again, after several weeks of racing interruption. I played some AMS2 and then decided to give Baumholder a try. Yikes, in the Audi! Of course I jumped in right away and paid for it. Last place on the first stage, but getting more consistency in subsequent stages. But still light years off the top pace. Not sure I have time today to do all the stages, but it’s nice to be back on track 
err path.
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Glad to have you back as well!
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The first stage is over! I really need to come up with some better terminology because it’s all overlapping, but I think everyone knows what I mean.
Germany was an incredibly tight rally with close battles all up and down the leaderboard. With @Roo winning @keets in 2nd and @chipwich in 3rd. We had just 17 seconds separation between 4th and 5th; 6th and 7th by under 1 minute. And one unfortunate technical issue.
Roo also won the bonus point, sweeping that category in stage 1.
Also, great competition as we had 4 drivers less than .7 of a second apart on SS6.
Final Stage 1 Standings:
Roo - 97
Keets - 73
Chipwhich - 63
Aginor - 49
Mag Ovr - 42
Mudcat - 30
521 - 22
TeTeTe - 16
Camebert - 2
Poland which started yesterday is the first rally of Stage 2, I will add in the next rally before Poland is over, then add in a mid season rest week from July 1-8 and get every other rally scheduled. It may have been a rough start for some of us, but I think it’s coming together pretty well. Also anyone is invited to jump in at any time and please if you know someone who may want to give it a go, here or elsewhere feel free to invite away.
Just one last word, if you do encounter a technical issue, Steam/Racenet/internet and it doesn’t record your time, take a Screenshot of the “current standings” after your stage or maybe get in the habit of doing so just in case anyway. I don’t want that stuff to take away from what someone did. I can get things corrected in just about any scenario except the game crashing on you mid stage.
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Seconded!
How about this heirarchy?
- STAGE: The individual ~4-8 mile stretch of road.
- EVENT: The weekly competition, consisting of 12 stages in the same country.
- LEG: A group of 4 events, the first of which just concluded.
- CHAMPIONSHIP: The overarching contest, consisting of 4 legs plus a final shootout. Whoever wins this gets bragging rights for all eternity (or until the next championship, whichever comes first
).
How’s that?
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Oh dear. I thought we only had to drive four rallies in that class but now I realized that it is going to be twelve?
sigh
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Hopefully you don’t mind driving the Group Bs too much, Aginor. If you learn to tame these cars, going back to any other AWD car feels like easy mode. I ran one of the weekly rallies in the 2000cc class and it just felt so relaxed after the rabid Group Bs.
In the meantime, I’ve really fallen for the Pug. Before I ran the first half of the Polish rally (more on that below), I saw that the monthly AI challenge was for the Group Bs in New Zealand, Poland, and one other location (Spain maybe?). For New Zealand, I remember when we ran the R5s there it felt a bit narrow and could be quite awkward in places. I figured the Group B Pug would be even worse, but amazingly it suited the stages perfectly. The track felt much wider, and the corners were linked in such a way that they had a beautiful flow to them. Really looking forward to running that event in our rally.
As for Poland, it looks like it’s going to be a very close contest between Keets and I. First split on Stage 1 I was already 3+ seconds down, but managed to claw some time back. After Stage 3, Keets was leading by 0.363 seconds overall. Extremely close. Stage 4 and I got almost 30 seconds up, but I then made some mistakes on Stages 5 and 6 which Keets hasn’t run yet. I kept nudging berms in Stage 5 but got through relatively unscathed. Stage 6 I tapped a berm about half a split from the end, which pitched me into a double roll plus a puncture to boot. So my best educated guess is that when Keets runs Stages 5 and 6 we’ll be back to almost even again.
Will be a real nail biter finish I think. It’s great that we’re so close and can push each other so hard, right to the end. 
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If any of you are BlueSnowWRC, you’re in.
Just a heads up, next rally will be New Zealand. While the plan was and still is, to take an off week July 1-8, I’m probably just going to put up a Weekend rally Fri-Mon in a car class I have yet to decide, if anyone wants, non-points race just because. Since New England will be the final championship race, so we won’t see it again for a little while and it’s 4th of July weekend, it’ll be there.
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Well, your Stage 5 mistakes I must have matched as I lost 2 seconds… all was going well before that until stage 4 when I got sideways on a fast section and got wedged side on in the trees.
Stage 6, I was making decent time, some green sectors after your mistakes, then you dropped the hyperdrive and I lost time. Through the chicane I picked it back up, before the long fast section where you again came back at me. I’ve run this stage a few times In different cars and knew where you clipped the banking, even so, I did exactly the same, barrel rolled burst a tyre but limped through the gate 2 seconds up.
Looking forward to see what you do through the next few. I still have 4 stages to go, so may do a couple to see if we can keep it close.
@chipwich, @aginor and @Camembert are all capable of quick times, so it’s wide open with 2 days to go. 
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Ahahahahaha.
I had two good stages and then the usual started. Ended up having seven or so tyre repairs and a 54seconds penalty for driving into a field, drove two stages without Turbo and one on three tyres.
I finished. And that’s probably the only good thing I can say.
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I gave you the heads up on that spot and you still rolled it? For shame! 
I think the Lancia has the edge in the slow speed twisty sections, while the Pug is better in the high speed sections. The Pug is ever so slightly heavier, but it has a more significant advantage in power, although that’s at the cost of turbo lag. If it’s a single low speed corner, either a 1 or 2, I think the Pug can keep up, but if it goes down to a hairpin or sequence of tight corners (like the section around the bales), the Lancia will take the win every time. Once your up to the 3 or higher corners, the Pug comes in to it’s own.
Will finish up the last 6 stages shortly. Hopefully we can get a close finish.
Oof. Poland is a tricky rally, especially for these cars. Much like Finland, it’s relatively open and encourages you to go fast, but the margins for error are razor thin, and the slightest mistake is met with a nasty berm or tree just waiting to ruin your day. I hope you’re still having at least a little bit of fun along the way.
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Just got back from a short vacation and will take a crack at Poland tonight. Thinking of making that one allowed car change to keep things interesting
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In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have written that…
Stage 7 went well, added a couple of seconds to my lead. Stage 8, and about the third turn I hit a berm at the exit, single barrel roll and punctured tire. Fixed it up (no way I’m driving a full stage on 3 wheels if I can help it), and managed to claw back some time with relatively clean driving. Overall I was 23s down on Keets.
Stages 9 through 11 I really pushed hard, but kept tapping things and had quite a few spins, so not sure how much time, if any, I gained back. Probably 10s at the most.
Stage 12 went really well for a long time, very clean and felt fast. Or it did, at least, right until the middle of the last split, where I took at 6 right over crest a little too enthusiastically and speared off into the field. I was curving back around to rejoin the track, but got hit with a 1 minute penalty. Gah!
So the door is wide open for Keets to sweep the victory. As long as you keep your nose clean, you’ve got 1 minute plus to play with. Look forward to seeing where everything lands when the dust settles. And of course Chipwich is always in the mix too. (If you happen to see me under your cars with a pair of bolt cutters, don’t worry, I’m just, er, “inspecting” your brake lines… Yeah, that’s it! 
)
I was really surprised that this rally was so difficult, because in my practice runs I felt really confident and everything flowed very nicely. When I ran the real stages, though, it all felt a bit awkward and the car felt like it was fighting me. I think it must have been the stage degradation. I noticed that some of our stages look really rutted, and it just made the stages that much more frustrating, especially since we’re going at such high speed with very little runoff. All part of the game I guess, but still a bit of a shock.
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Yes, I left that stuff in. I do kind of wish that degradation would be dependent on what order you run in. Would give plenty of incentive to go first where now there isn’t a whole lot of upside to doing so.
Kind of felt like removing rain/snow and always having perfect surface conditions was taking out a bit too much.
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From what I can gather in this developer update (scroll down about halfway), surface deg should get worse as you go along. I guess I hadn’t really been paying attention, but come to think of it the last couple of stages did seem smoother, when there were fewer runners. Now I’m aware of it I’ll probably be able to adjust for it, just hadn’t thought about it before.
Personally I wouldn’t mind running perfect conditions, both weather and surface, since we don’t really know the tracks well enough to be able to compensate fully for changeable situations yet. At the moment, the track layout is more of an enemy than the conditions. That said, perfect everything would just turn it into a hot lap (hot stage?) competition, so having that extra variation is probably a good thing.
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As you’ve got it set to full, this should be happening, according to Roo’s link:
Provides the full range of track degradation regardless of how many entrants there are. It allocates the full range of effects, proportionally, to the number of entrants in the running order.
This means that in a Custom Event of 20 entrants, the entrant running first experiences the untouched track, and the entrant running last experiences the most complete track degradation. For the latter, it’s as if 150 entrants had raced the Stage ahead of them instead of 19.
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