Cars from Gran Turismo at Tatton Hall Classic Show

Went to Tatton Hall Classic Car show on Monday and saw a few cars from the game. Was funny to see cars like the Honda Beat and Toyota SERA in the flesh for the first time and the the matt-black GTR looked the nuts. For the full story on Tatton Hall Classic Car show 2012 and over 120 pics go here: Tatton Hall Park Classic Car Show 2012 [on my other blog: http://retrorunabouts.blogspot.co.uk/]



Nissan GTR 'Stealth Edition' haha.

Honda Beat.

GT5: Cars Thread

Cars from old GTs they should port forward:

Gran Turismo:

Nissan R33 Skyline LM

Mitsubishi GTO LM

Gran Turismo 2:

Suzuki Cultus Pikes Peak

Nissan TOMICA Skyline R30 Silhouette Foumula

SALEEN Mustang Wide Body

Audi A4 BTCC Touring Car

Nissan HKS 180SX Drager

Nissan HKS R33 Drager

GT5: Tyres Thread

This thread is just a bunch of musings and observations about tyres, mainly in endurance races.

What do rain tyres actually do??

I went out first with R : Hard tyres for the 1000km of Sukuba, which poured down for the whole 6 hours, so I quickly came back to the pits and threw on Racing : Rain. Handling wasn't much improved, the car still broke away easily on corners front and back, I was using the 4WD Skyline R33 Touring Car, and I couldn't catch the front runners. I quickly came in and pitted again, this time trying out the Racing : Intermediate tyres I've not used for a long time, or at all in GT5. These totally transformed the car. It wasn't slightly wet, it was really wet, but still the Intermediates lasted longer and handled ten times better than Rains. So what are rain tyres actually for?

I'll be trying out Rain and Inters during my 24 Hrs. Le Mans, also raining cats and dogs.

Do all Racing tyres have same wear rate??

Do hard / med / soft Racing tyres have the same wear rate?? They never used to. In GT3/4 - "SuperSoft" or Racing : Soft we're clearly grippier than Racing : Hard tyres, but lasted nowhere near as long and Medium was a noticeable compromise between them. Choose between faster lap times or less pit stops. In GT5 it doesn't seem so clear cut, as R : Soft tyres don't seem to hold the road that much better than Hards, but do increase lap times a bit, whereas the difference in wear-rate between them is barely noticeable at all. This kind of negates the point of R : Hard tyres. R : Soft do still make lap times a few seconds quicker, so why even use the less grippy Hard if they have no wear advantage?!

In the case of my 9 Hrs. of Tsukuba endurance race, running a 4WD Amuse Carbon R '04, I have even found that R : Soft tyres were outlasting R : Hard! I first ran R:Hard and found they wouldn't even last 10 laps. After my third pit I ran fast to make up time and managed to destroy the R:Hard tyres in 5 laps! Assuming that all Racing tyres had been nerfed for this race [although I don't see why as the opponent cars are all running R:hard go figure], I switched over to Sports : Soft to see if they lasted longer, which would make sense if PD were to force a handicap on Racing tyres in the advanced races and encourage the use of realistic tyres [I still don't agree that R:Hard aren't like realistic slick tyres]. Sports Soft lasted nearly 20 laps though, but I lost pace so after a couple more stops I threw on a set of Racing Soft to catch up and was flabbergasted when they lasted about 20 laps too. Back to R:Hard and they were burned in 10 laps. How can this be? I assumed it to be all in my mind, went back and checked again with the same result. Maybe because of the heat of the track, or because the surface is greasy the harder compound tyres lose grip more and spin their tread away in corners, but I don't really see the real world physics of this. Seems to me that they're confused with the tyre setups in GT5. Has their quest for realism in the updates introduced more continuity errors or is it simply a glitch on this Tsukuba? I'd love to know if this has always been the case before the updates. It's certainly never happened in previous GTs.

Do Sports tyres last longer than racing ones during endurance races? It would certainly seem the case in some. Are Racing tyres, which most people describe as having an unrealistically high rate of wear in GT5, designed like this to give a handicap against the less grippy tyres? I suppose this would be the case in real life where slicker and softer tyres are designed to sacrifice their rubber to the road to aid grip, but the expensive compounds used and higher op-temperatures might still allow them to last longer being thrashed round a track as they are than semi-racing "sports" road tyres, which might start to fail much quicker from this sort of treatment.

GT5 : Endurance Race Thread

This thread contains a load of warble about my Endurance races:

Why do some Endurance Races have pit-crews and some don't? How come suspending the race and coming back in fixes any aerodynamic or mechanical defects with the car? It wouldn't be hard to save the damage status and seems a bit of a needless loss of realism.

Finally finished my cash/cars grinding mission so I'm moving onto finishing the Endurance Race series. Before the save capability I'd only done the first one.

200 Miles of Laguna Seca

Wedsport Lexus IS300 Race Car

Daytona 500

Sauber Mercedes

Suzuka 1000km

Skyline R32 Touring Car

4 Hrs. of Nurburgring

Audi A4 Touring Car

9 Hrs. of Tsukuba

Amuse Carbon R '04

There are a lot of fast cars here and the damage physics is getting higher. My first attempts were with the new RX-7 Touring Car and after an hour I was losing to a tuned Honda S2000 both times, probably the Amuse GT1 Turbo, but it seems even more imbalanced than usual. I took the lead quickly, but after a while the S2000 was forever on my tail. After my first pit-stop, with minimum fuel, it had shot ahead and although my time was gaining slightly, I just couldn't close any gap before my second pit. I soldiered on hoping that the Honda would make a long pit and I could catch up, but he was still a lap ahead as my tyres hit half tread so I threw in the towel.

For my final attempt I've used the Amuse Carbon R Skyline, with the big turbo, and yes it's imbalanced. The Honda is now nowhere to be seen, but I am being given similar grief by the HPA Motorsport R32 Golf, which I know not to be particularly fast but never comes in for tyres. He finally did after 65 laps, as I was already beginning to think about my third stop, but before pulling in I was over a lap ahead, meaning I took only 30 litres of fuel and got back on the track still 27 secs. ahead. A couple of pit-stops further on and I am now permanently a lap ahead, 2 hours in. Ok so it hasn't made for a pretty race, but this is not one I intend to sit through again and I don't want to lose.

GT5: New DLC - A total waste of time??

Got round to buying the new DLC and yes, I am quite a bit disappointed. Firstly Polyphony Digital have reportedly made tens of millions from the DLC release already and as GT is their only investment you would expect that for a quarter of the game price, they could deliver something akin to a quarter of the game. I guess £10 for 14 cars and 2 tracks (forget the gimmicky Paints / Outfits) isn't bad value when compared to something like CM DIRT3's shameless integration of dozens of paid downloads into the story line itself, but for a game as big as GT5, which has a huge design team, hundreds of endorsements and a wealth of old material that can be and is quickly ported forward... well, I just expected more. Some sort of expansion to the game was called for, not just some add ons that can only be used online. I would be much happier to pay £25 for an expansion roughly the size of GT5 Prologue. If we've another year to wait for DLC of a similar nature then I'm not looking forward too much.

I'll start with the 14 new cars. 3 of them are karts. Well OK I guess this fraction of the game does need some variety, but 2 new classes and no new karting events? As for the mostly non-real "Touring Car" collection, jeez, who didn't see those coming. Some die hards are saying the last thing GT5 needs is more new cars, but it needs exactly that; more new cars. Not just these constant rehashes of the same old JDM crew, headed up by no less than four more Skylines! I have been wanting a wide-body R32 for a long time now, but three more with similar specs in a pack this small is desperately close to filler material. Let's not forget this is on top of the new car added to the Dealerships with the 2.0 patch, the Schulze N24 GTR, and the new car awarded with the most recent Time Trial event, another Spec V GTR... OK PD, we get that Nissan let you help design the GT-R and we respect that. Skyline is king of Gran Turismo and we love them, but too much of a good thing, eh, when there are so many other brilliant new cars on the market since GT5's release. As for the Eunos, RX-7, EVO and Impreza TCs, all nice, but again too familiar and they don't perform great either next to existing versions, so lack application [I've only raced the Eunos in the 4-Hr Endurance just to make use of one]. I will give some credit to the Dodge Challenger Touring Car though. It's unlike any tuned American car I've seen on GT before and looks like a good tool for any USA Class racing, but I still haven't tried it. I guess the most original and exciting cars of the DLC pack have to be the two hybrids oddly enough. The Prius and CR-Z TCs are fresh looking and an all-hybrid race series is an interesting prospect, but alas thats all these cars are good for. You would expect them to be secret weapons for Endurance races with performance and crazy fuel economy, but I have found they're just not competitive at all against full blooded cars, even in the same PP band. With the 12+ months of development this DLC has had would it have been too much to ask for a properly special car, like one of the new Ferraris or Lamborghinis, to have made its way in - something that even GT5P got eventually for free. Updated NASCARs for free, but no Ferrari F11 even with DLC?! That might just be a personal thing. All in all, with the continued profits PD will make as players filter back off MW3 and co., a bigger, brighter car list would not have gone amiss.

However, the real disappointment to me was the two new tracks. Don't get me wrong they're both great circuits, but it struck me that they can only be used in Arcade, Practice and Online PvP. The latter is useful, but outside the Lounge they haven't been integrated into the game whatsoever and this, for me, is the biggest let down of all. No new events, no new specials, no DLC-only Online Seasonal events, no level-cap or completion percentage increase, no extra special licence, no new trophies?? No integration into the game at all - this is more like 1.2 than 2.0. They aren't even grindable, which for me is where I take time to learn a track. Given the several year lifespan of the game, I feel a proper overhaul could have been achieved by now, even if it cost us more than £10. I know Japan has had more to contend with lately than making video games, but less focus on the Academy and stuff and more on the actual GT please.

Oh, and I forget to mention the Red Bull X2011.

GT5: Elusive Cars Update

Thanks to the new B-Spec online event I've quickly generated enough money to get the Miura, Ford Mk.IV and F2007 to complete my big money collection, but there's still a few cars I just can;t seem to get on the UCD:

Audi R8 Race Car '01

BMW V12 LMR Race Car '99

Honda LOCTITE MUGEN NSX '01

Mitsubishi CZ-3 Tarmac '01

Nissan R89C Race Car '89

Pescarolo-Courage - Judd GV5 Race Car '04

Spoon S2000 Race Car '00

Message me if you have any of these to trade!

[all links to mygranturismo.net car pages]

GT5 Update : B-Spec Money Grinding in 2.0

As you probably know, the prize money system for GT5 Seasonal Online Events has been reset in the run up to 2.0 and all the ridiculously high rewards for short single-player events are a thing of the past, having been replaced by a consecutive daily login bonus. At the full 200% bonus, some prize amounts are back in the region they were before and some aren't [Tokyo Bay Kart - Compact Car Cup down from cr. 389,000 to **], so I'm still figuring out which A-Spec race is the best credits per minute.

B-SPEC PRIZES AT LAST!

B-Spec is better for grinding obviously because you don't have to do anything, even issue instruction commands with the right car and driver, but with double the number of laps and low rewards its not a very efficient process. It's high time PD brought some proper B-Spec into the big money Seasonal Events and the one that's come with 2.0 is no disappointment. They've included a mere 5 lap race of the short Rome track, ideal for grinding, and it's possible to imbalance your car more than in the other two races.

It's not a great imbalance though and the AI in these Online races is pretty tough and even right on the 500PP limit there will still be one or two cars in the pack that will give your driver a run for their money. Using a detuned racing car will give an advantage, but I've found that drivers still place 2nd and 3rd and it's more about finding the right race car thats close enough to the PP limit so it only needs a little power drop and won't lose its drivability. I'm compiling an ongoing list at the bottom of cars I've found that just seem to be faster here.

My level 35 driver completes the race in about 7 mins. 20 and will have passed pretty much any rival car by the last lap, but with an easy grid, basically one without a really high-power car like the Esprit V8 / Nür Spec Skyline / NSX Type R, and I have had repeat wins with my drivers down to level 28, still with no instructions given.

340,000cr. / 7 mins. 20 = ~50,000 cr. per minute!

cr. 340,000 @ 200%
cr. 255,000 @ 150%
cr. 170,000 @ 100%

At 50k per minute it would take about 6 and a half hours to make the full 20 million cr. needed for the classic Le Mans cars... not hard to rack up while sitting off doing other things. By far the easiest money grind solution yet!

Car List:

Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione - Only needs detuning slightly to make the 500PP @4 bhp. Lev. 30+ drivers will win without trying.

Acura NSX RM - Add a chip and racing exhaust, then detune it slightly to make the 500PP @ ~305bhp - very fast car. [Best time: 7 : 11 : 588]

Nissan GT-R SpecV (GT Acadamy SPECIAL)

Subaru Impreza Rally Car '03 - Power limited to 307bhp [324 standard] and the downforce turned down considerably front and back to get down to the 500PP limit. The weight stays low so the lack of downforce in corners shouldn't matter and top speed is increased for the Rome straight.

Ford Escort Rally Car - Reduce downforce to 6F/8R, lower it 40mm, add a Stage 1 Turbo and detune it the 2 PPs to make the 500PP limit @ ~340bhp. [Best Time: 7 : 15 : 165]

** Tokyo Bay Kart Track for Compact Car Cup

This was the best cash grind by miles before the update. With a car at the 450PP limit the race is over in 3 and a half minutes and the reward was 389k, so about 110,000 cr. per minute! It's no longer the best cr. p/m, but it is still the shortest A-Spec race at present and still worthwhile.

Yeah yeah, game-guides suggest well matched cars to make the competition amusing and where's the fun in winning by imbalance, but the whole point of grinding is to get it done quickly and I've been constantly trying to better my time and get on to the next race. I've raced it so much now that I reckon I've got some decent times, so I'll be posting a shortlist of cars / setups soon.

Homemade PS3 Racing Cockpit so far!

Using a Thrustmaster Ferrari GT wheel for now.

ScoobyLab for iPad + Gran Turismo 5!

A member of my family recieved an iPad for Christmas so, naturally, I hit up ScoobyLab to see how it looked on the thing and noticed quite a few errors occurring. Its the same story when I've checked on my friend's iPhones [as mine is water-damage dead :(], with Flash not working at all and any fixed-size object jumping into a weird position, so I've spent some time making the layout compatible while I still have the iPad around to check it on.

I'm pleased to say that the blog is now almost completely working on iPad and comes up more or less correctly on most mobile/smart-phone browsers, but I'm still having trouble with the iPhone display. It's a tricky fix, but I've found some great code for accessing the iPhone menu-functions themselves to make clicking the drop-downs easier, so that'll be exciting anyway.

** The other great news is that Gran Turismo 5 has finally landed on my doorstep! When I bought my PS3 [over 2 years ago!] we we're promised GT5 by the following January and boy, it just went on and on didn't it?! My sister has made up for the wait though [bless her] by getting hold of a Collectors Edition box-set for me crizzy prezzy, which comes with 5 unique 'ChromeLine' cars [in the pic] and the 1/2-thick 'Apex' book full of driving techniques and glossy stuff, which is very nice. Its basically an updated version of everything you got in the manual with the original GT games, but I guess in these gloomy economic times they have to sell it as an add-on. Either way its a nice bit of coffee-table literature for gamers and car chums alike as we while away the frugal months ahead with the best racer ever!

As for the game, well it speaks for itself! After all the hype it couldn't possibly turn out a disappointment and I'm happy to say the graphics and gameplay really rocks. When the game eventually installed I was a little cold at first because the intro-movie and menu screens just looked the same as before. They look old, in fact, for the PS3, but once I got maybe two races in I'm already starting to think this could be the best GT yet. I didn't expect them to change the driving-engine from GT5 Prologue, but it feels much, much better to me - smoother and a little easier too. The choice of extra-modes is also staggering, stuff like go-karting and NASCAR is utter sickness and have the potential to be just magnificent online. If you haven't already bought the game and don't take my word for it, then check the GT website - http://eu.gran-turismo.com/gb/.

While we're on the subject of GT5 I thought I'd use this thread to list any cool cars and achievements I stumble upon that are worth noting:

Cars:

These are all tuned up and can be used from the outset in all modes [except Sunday Cup races], but don't count as purchased cars.

ChromeLine BMW M3

ChromeLine Lamborghini Murcialago

ChromeLine Gullwing Merc. 300SL

ChromeLine Shelby Cobra

ChromeLine Audi R8 V10

Silvia S15 Q's Aero Well its between this or the Mitsi 3000 for the sub 20k first car, so a no brainer really.

'89 MOTUL Civic Race Car OK so you win it right away, but its a beast of an FF car!

Nissan SilEighty Another early win - the front of a Silvia / back of a 200SX [180SX in Japan], I love these things.

Impreza STi Type R '99 Wahey my first Scooby, I've always wanted a coupe.