So my first race was rather exciting. I qualified 17th in a field of 17 gt class cars, in a thunderstorm on a flooded track, about 6 seconds a lap slower than 1st. By the end of the 2nd lap in the first stint of the race, I was in p6 running 1.46's and just keeping pace with Lechner, in p1 who was followed by Alzen and Calderari. About 1/2 way through the first stint, we caught the backmarkers and I went up to p4 about 15 seconds behind the lead pack. Because of the traffic I managed to take first with 2 laps to go in my first stint .
I came into the pits hot and got a stop and go penalty, so after the pitstop I came out in p7, but with the stop and go I suddenly found myself almost 30 seconds behind the leaders
. So I pushed hard and again about 1/2 way through that stint I was only 6 or 7 seconds back from the leaders when my tires went away and I went off track a couple of times. So I had to slow down a bit and wait for my tires to cool down, I had also used a lot of fuel. I had come out of lesmo 2 headed towards variante ascari when I saw smoke up ahead. I got there to see Alzen on the side of the track and a few seconds later passed Calderari who was limping into the pits, later when I checked the replay Alzen had tried to pass Lechner on the exit of variante ascari and they collided and collected Calderari. After that Lechner was running 1.50s and Alzen was stuck on the side of the track which created a situation that I decided to treat as a local yellow until I realized that Lechner was the only car not dropping down to 60 kph in that zone, weird. Anyway it was an even match because of my worn tires. But I was doing slightly better than him and finished the stint in first only to realize that lechner was getting 2 more laps to a tank of fuel than me, and I stood to loose the race on pitstops unless I started doing fuel conservation.
The third stint was rather uneventful and after 10 laps I was well ahead of Lechner. We were way head of everyone else and I had passed Calderari on the front straightaway only to have him pummel me at T1, trashing my suspension and aero, and blowing a tire. By the time I got to the pits and got my car fixed, I was was a lap and a half down from p1. OK this just got interesting more again. I was pushing harder than before fighting traffic and passing cars and it took me a while to catch p1 and as I passed him coming out of the pits, we were the only ones on the lead lap. At lap 92 I needed to pit in 2 laps and decided to check the time left because there had been enough happen that I didn't see us doing all 101 laps. Imagine my reaction upon seeing there was only enough time for 4 more laps and I had to pit in two laps. I lost the race on a pitstop and finished in second 12 seconds behind the Lechner.
So now my concern is this. At the end of the race the ai had lost 9 seconds a lap after a three hour race. WTF is going to happen in a 24 hour race? I was only doing 1.50's at the end, but Lechner was doing 1.55's and all but 5 cars were at least 2 laps down. I'm running the ai at my usual 96% and can't change the level in the GDB file. I've tried several times in the past. I know about the settings in the AIW file, best and worst and all that but have never changed that so I'm not sure whether to raise or lower the numbers. I'm kind of thinking to also fiddle with the AI caution settings to see if they will pass the slower cars a little quicker, but I am concerned that it will only cause more accidents. That was one of the areas where I knew I could get ahead, but,,,
So if anyone has any suggestions I'm open to them. Maybe I can try them in single race on a track by track basis and see what happens.
I rather enjoyed the first race. In all honesty I rarely ever run an error free race which helps with the short comings of the ai. Maybe this can help others to tune the game better for longer races. I never really like short races ie less than 30 minutes. like I said I'm doing this pitstop to pitstop so there is time to experiment with things.
