Automobilista 2 V1.5.5.0, Le Mans & Endurance Pack Pt1 RELEASED - Now Updated to V1.5.5.6

I can only report that I have done 180's in multiple different race cars and they were totally inadvertent and I was shocked at the result when it happened, despite all the real-world feedback I was getting. One example:

Radical SR3 on a FIA Grade 2 track. Pushing each lap doing competitive laps (within 1 - 2 seconds per lap of the car's capability in a true pro's hands) and feeling like the car is immensely capable and so fun to drive hard. I pushed what I thought was about 5% harder through a small switch-back chicane that you could take fairly straight if you got the entry right. Suddenly, I am pointing the wrong way after getting no discernible feedback that I had gone over the edge. Was so surprised I forgot to clutch-in and managed to stall the car, just to add to the humiliation.

The slick tires just kept gripping even when you thought you would throw the car off the edge of the track...within reason of course. But the drop-off in grip at the limit was severe and nothing like any road car's progressive loss of grip.

There is a reason that professional drivers can manage pirouettes or to spin such capable cars when the slightest manoeuvre goes wrong (usually assisted by others on the track racing hard)...the edge is real. As mentioned above, the edge of grip typically becomes sharper when you have set-up the car to maximize grip. Like all sports, it's a trade-off between maximum performance and the risks taken to get it.

 

Brando is dead - sorry.
But maybe there will be a 2nd comming for the marvelous Delta - ehh "thing".
Try to really look at its smoooth curves. Relaaax and let yourself feeel how peace does fill your body. Peace - man. Peaaace.
Repeeeat softly the mantra: I love the cute Delta thing - I love the cute Delta thing - I love the cute Delta thing ...... 10 more time

 

I’d agree that personally I have found the loss of grip on slicks at the limit to be very quick and threw me around far too quick for me to catch. Old hairpin at Donington around 85mph when they let go , I ended up in the infield and the same as above forgot to dip my clutch. Luckily I stopped short of the barriers.
I did manage to blow my head gasket though later under the old Dunlop bridge.
Good old K Series engines.

 

The reason why professionals spin is because they have to operate at the edge all the time, and sometimes, either because in this time they failed to antecipate it, or because something threw them off this time, they lose it.

What you are describing is basically the dreaded instaspin, that is so prevalent in iracing for example. And we all know what even professionals think of that. As for your real life experience, a myriad of things can explain that, but since i dont know the facts, i wont conjecture, but just say that this "edge" gets very blurred once you are really at the limit all the time. What separates the good of the really good is that they are "on top" of the car all the time, and virtually antecipating what it will do, based on their inputs.

 

I think there's a fallacy about road tyres, slick tyres, grip on the limit, whatever...
Even on road cars/tyres (much more tolerant), pushed to the limit, the moment we loose grip and the car starts to rotate, it's unstoppable (90% of the cases). And I mean a car without ESP or ABS - they do wonders to catch the car for us! (and make them dull to drive... ).
I'm from a time when those system were non existing or, latter, only for the rich people.
Now we can't turn them off!

We don't even need to bring slicks to discussion .
I've driven slicks on very controlled situations and they track like a train (I was not allowed to push the car). I believe when other say they are more edgy.
But when on the limit (like we should race the cars) every little bump from another car, loss of grip on the grass, etc., makes the car go wild - that's the definition of "on the limit" - no tolerance .

AMS2 has a tendency to stop car rotation faster than expected (other sims do this better), like there's a mechanism like a weak/tolerant ESP going on.
But I believe Reiza will cook something for us .

 

I agree with Richard here, there could be many reasons why you 'suddenly' spun. I'd also say that the Radical SR3 is a very special and different animal than the race cars most here have in mind, but I have to admit I'm a bit jealous of Marc as it must be so much fun pushing that little 600 kg track toy lap after lap.

The notion that there's just a very narrow line of grip, like a walk on a tightrope, is not true. At least that's how tennebaum's text comes across. That's what happened in different games, you have to nurse race cars around the track, grip is like a very rare element in space. Cold tyres are like that, yes, but once you got some temps in your rubber it grips, especially in high performance race cars. This is Timo Bernhard in the 919. You could almost say it is on rails ^^

 

You can if you pull the right fuses.

 

When does endurance pt2 come?
I hope that there will be even more Porsche <3

 

You will have to wait on hopefully the next dev update

 

Not "instaspin" a la iRacing (I know what you are referring to), but rather a much peakier tire than is my muscle memory, which is from road cars. I wasn't in a professional race--just hot lapping in a pay-per-play scenario. Despite the car being very easy to handle (besides the launch), inspiring confidence with incredible cornering grip and braking prowess, it was still able to catch me out through a corner that I perceived I had more grip available, but as it turns out did not.

You all know I have posted a zillion times about race cars not being harder than road cars to drive around a track--just the opposite. But as @Joaquim Pereira says above, when you are actually near the limit, it takes very little to go over the edge. That could be only a few km/h too fast in a corner, accelerating a second or so too early through a chicane (which is what I did), missing a braking point by just a few metres, etc....in each case you suddenly lose your small safety margin and if there happens to be a bump or an opponent to avoid, or an inconvenient curb, etc., you can be done.

I would not have been able to purposely drift the SR3, though that in part is due to its low torque combined with very sticky tires on a lightweight rear-engined chassis. But, I was able to do competitive laps at a track I had never been to (or seen or played in a sim) within two laps. My spin happened when I was shocked how easy it was to get a great lap time and thought I close down that last 5%, which turns out to be where all the real skill and difficulty comes in to play

 

You do mean CHEESEburgers, right?!

 

Yeah, I think nobody disputes that. The tyres grip until they don't anymore. If I'm at the edge of a cliff it just takes a little push and I fall off that cliff, that's totally clear, but sometimes it seems to me that there's that notion (not from you) that race cars are super difficult to drive, you have to be careful with everything you do because otherwise it'll kill you in the next corner, you have to be a trained astronaut to handle the raw power and wildness (ok a bit hyperbole ^^). That was maybe the case if you drove a Porsche 935 in the 70's, but not a Porsche GT3 R Type 992 e.g. Those cars are built for customer teams, gentleman drivers etc. They have to be stable and fairly 'easy' to drive.

 

Yep--the fun is all in the slicing and dicing with competitors, not some stress-fest just trying to keep the car on the track. You can't slice and dice unless you have some safety margin...or even do Q laps. At 95%, a well set-up race car is easy to drive. At 98% (a Q lap) it takes great skill. At 100%, you either have to be a top-level driver, or more likely, restrict yourself to a very short duration because you cannot sustain that knife-edge level for very long. When you race, it is very rare to go above that 95% controlled level and the goal, as Mario Andretti clarified, is to go as slowly as possible, but still finish ahead of everyone else. It's about minimizing risk, not being a hooligan taking wild risks.

I have zero interest in time trial, but I think part of the fun of it is to be able to do that rare 100% lap and have it recorded for posterity. We get as many tries as we want and have no physical danger.

Now imagine the skill of those F1 guys who can sit in the garage, possibly due to some mechanical issues, until the very last moment and then go out and do a single "winning" Q lap. It boggles my mind how anyone could perform so well under that much pressure. I sure can't--even if I was only doing it in the sim!!!

 

See that is the problem I am having. We have people here that have driven fast cars on the track and they give their experience. Then someone comes along and says that grip doesn't work like those people say and we go round and round.
That is something I hate.
I see some things in AMS2 that look weird to me. Like sometimes the oversteer are in weird places also we sometimes have these long understeer moments that I have never seen in real life where it seems the car is just sliding understeering for a long time. Also the sliding still seems excessive at moments. But that is just my interpretation. It feels like something is still wrong with the grip or something either laterally or in some other place.
But that is just the problem. There seems to be no consensus. The people who have driving in reallife in fast cars on slicks on the track say such a thing and somebody calls it a myth when they describe something and it was something else that threw them off.
That is something I want to avoid. We need parameters that we can all agree with how to judge the realism of a sim. That is why I always come to onboard footage.
See I am an aircraft man and I have been going to airshows my whole life and I hate most hollywood movies because due to the movement of the planes it is easy to see which is real and which is not to my eyes. That is why I was gobsmacked when I saw the planes in DCS. They for the most part look very real when you look at a replay track and they move just like real aircraft.
That is also why I think it is important when the behavior from the onboard from AMS2 matches with real life onboards and I am talking about the physics here.
Especially (just like I read here) you can certainly drive these cars to a decent level and it is just those maybe last 20% from the top that we miss. I think everyone here could put a real life lap in almost any car just not as fast as the pro's.
But I want to somehow get to the point where we can all agree on that something is realistic or not and not this opposing things all the time. Therefore I don't see any shortcomings by evaluating a sim physics by looking at races and real life onboards and comparing them to the sim.

 

This has been a topic in sim racing as long as sims have been around. These games are a form of art, and just like art it's open to interpretation. To some people something feels great and to others it's terrible. Honestly, I doubt short of us getting into a simulator from an F1 team like Mercedes or RedBull, any of it is really "real".

As for peoples actual real world experiences, no driver has ever driven the same lap twice. With so many variables, of tires, weather, cars, setups, fuel loads, vehicle condition, driver ability etc it's not really possible to get a definitive answer.

Enjoy it for what it is and it it feels and looks right to you, then that's all that matters.

 

It's a sim/racing game, that runs using simulated physics. I believe now AMS2 have a nice driving experience.

Probably time to keep this side quiet, people adapt to drive in AMS2, and go more for damage model, game new features and deep love for MP.

Tried today a race, dry to wet with AI. Great and fun. Got my ass kicked by AI and feels real.

 

So.. The Porsche RSR '74. I would have thought this car would exhibit a bit more instability when braking hard into tighter bends in terms of weight transfer than it currently does. I would have even expected quite a bit more "lift off oversteer" than I currently experience when turning in and coming completely off the throttle from full throttle. It seems very stable in the rear under deceleration (initial lift off or heavy braking) no matter what.

What are other people's thoughts with this car?

 

Ah yes, the "widow maker" or "doctor killer" 911 from the early years...dangerously unstable rear unless you knew how to drive a rear-engined, rear-heavy car properly, which your average doctor did/does not.



Professional (a lot of ex-F1) drivers raced in the RSR series and they were not interested in killing themselves for what were essentially exhibition races. Notice any changes/upgrades to the car to address the unstable rear?


We have the re-engineered car in the game. It is very light and nimble (compared to even a modern 911 Cup), but has older tech tires that are more forgiving (less peaky). The car in the game has a very good base set-up (compared to some other series, including the 911 GT3 Cup class that could use some massaging).

All that said, is it too stable? I don't know. I've only ever driven a real 911 from the 1970's (regular street version) in a parking lot. I know from seeing videos of the real races, they were intended to promote close racing and be easy to drive and it was a spec series. Let's see who of the old drivers is best when put in the same equipment as opposed to an engineering-centred series.

I would test this by picking a tricky track (like maybe Oulton Park) and seeing if I could push the car lap after lap without a problem. I admit I have never raced it in AMS 2...just pushed it around some laps at a few tracks in P sessions to confirm it was "OK." Under pressure to maintain consistent fast lap times is where it may show some weakness, especially if you are using an authentic H-pattern shifter and three pedals.

 

Those wider rear fenders on the RSR mean that there are very wide rear tyres to help with stability. You can also stabilize a car under braking by tweaking diff settings and brake bias. Will give it a go though today as it's been a while since I last drove it.

So my thoughts are, I don't know why I should expect major instability under braking with this car.

 

That's a good reference, at least it matches my impirical perception (after 36 years driving cars of all sorts).

@Split Second Maybe this can be a proof pro drivers also have oppinions that don't necessarily correlate to real life neither, just their own experience of the world (a mistery of our minds). Pro's are not Gods with mighthy powers and know-all knowledge.
This video is not AMS2, but I also find myself doing better lap times (in AMS2) breaking sooner/smoother and adjusting engine breaking not to lock rear wheels (I do downshift way too early... bad habits from times when my car wouldn't break unless I downshift really hard, Renault R12):