Keep the name and the colours.

Dzul · Feb 24, 2023

Race Department is one of the last forum-based simracing communities still in existence. Surviving the fate that wiped out places like NoGrip Racing, SimRacing Central, Blackhole Motorsports and other similar forums. It has grown strong and provided a home base for simracers across the internet for decades. It is a place with history and emotional value to many, myself included.

Therefore I believe it would be only proper to show respect to this community by keeping it under the same name and colours. I hope Overtake can see the importance of this and lean towards stewardship rather than assimilation regarding this point.

What's in a name? In this case, a piece of internet history that deserves to be kept.

Cheers.

jgf · Feb 24, 2023

I believe you meant Race Sim Central (RSC); they still exist, after a long absence, but ti's not the same (https://racesimcentral.net/).

And an even older one, TheUSPits, which spawned TheNorwayPits. The latter is long gone, and only fragments of the original remain, the forums having apparently disappeared. (http://theuspits.com/)

And sadly it appears SRMZ may have joined the ranks of dearly departed.

Dzul · Feb 25, 2023

jgf said:
I believe you meant Race Sim Central (RSC); they still exist, after a long absence, but ti's not the same (https://racesimcentral.net/).

Yes! Thank you for the correction. I'll leave my post like it is to keep the context of your reply. Good to see the RSC logo again, the site went down a while ago and I never looked it up again so I had it on my MIA list.

Ole Marius Myrvold · Feb 25, 2023

jgf said:
which spawned TheNorwayPits.

Huh?

jgf · Feb 25, 2023

Ole Marius Myrvold said:
Huh?

TheNorwayPits was a sister site to TheUSPits. Both dealt primarily with Sierra sims, from ICR2 to N2k3; mainly quite detailed technical data on track and mod creation, and with downloads of many tracks, tools, and mods not available elsewhere. Eventually they branched into early rfactor modding. Never as large as other well known sites they slowly faded; the Norway site disappeared some years ago, the US site soldiered on til recently when most of the site vanished, a single page of downloads and some history of their online leagues remain.

Jan Kohl, wherever you are, thanks for the ride.

jgf · Feb 25, 2023

Dzul said:
Yes! Thank you for the correction. I'll leave my post like it is to keep the context of your reply. Good to see the RSC logo again, the site went down a while ago and I never looked it up again so I had it on my MIA list.

RSC was, like RD now and NoGrip for years, a near daily stop for me. In early spring 2010 they suddenly disappeared, a few days later they were back but with some forum sections not working and some downloads missing; no idea what happened but heard rumors of server issues from massive hardware failure or malware attack, and no complete backup available. Another couple of weeks and they disappeared again.

A few months later there was a new "Race Sim Central", with forums and downloads, but apparently no relation to the old site other than name. It was gone shortly. Another few months and there was another "Race Sim Central" page - merely a splash screen with the logo and a notice it was returning soon. This was up for years.

Next was a "Race Sim Central", with original logo, but no forums or downloads, looked to be a marketing site for a wide variety of sim hardware.

Now there's another.

Ole Marius Myrvold · Feb 25, 2023

jgf said:
TheNorwayPits was a sister site to TheUSPits. Both dealt primarily with Sierra sims, from ICR2 to N2k3; mainly quite detailed technical data on track and mod creation, and with downloads of many tracks, tools, and mods not available elsewhere. Eventually they branched into early rfactor modding. Never as large as other well known sites they slowly faded; the Norway site disappeared some years ago, the US site soldiered on til recently when most of the site vanished, a single page of downloads and some history of their online leagues remain.

Jan Kohl, wherever you are, thanks for the ride.

Heh. I wonder where the Norway-name came from. I ventured in to RSC and the simracing world with the Norwegian Grand Prix Legends Series back in 2003/2004, quite a few of those drivers also did NASCAR Racing 2003 and other Papyrus/Sierra stuff. Somehow I had never heard of TheNorwayPits before.

Timothy Wheatley · Mar 7, 2023

Ole Marius Myrvold said:
Heh. I wonder where the Norway-name came from. I ventured in to RSC and the simracing world with the Norwegian Grand Prix Legends Series back in 2003/2004, quite a few of those drivers also did NASCAR Racing 2003 and other Papyrus/Sierra stuff. Somehow I had never heard of TheNorwayPits before.

It's where one of their staff was from. US Pits went through some server issues (as we all did back then) and hopped around a lot based on hosting costs. There was a period where US Pits was down completely but the Norway mirror stayed up.

Jan does tell me he's going to get a working version online so the old stuff can be downloaded, etc. The archivist in me is looking forward to that.

jgf said:
RSC was, like RD now and NoGrip for years, a near daily stop for me. In early spring 2010 they suddenly disappeared, a few days later they were back but with some forum sections not working and some downloads missing; no idea what happened but heard rumors of server issues from massive hardware failure or malware attack, and no complete backup available. Another couple of weeks and they disappeared again.

A few months later there was a new "Race Sim Central", with forums and downloads, but apparently no relation to the old site other than name. It was gone shortly. Another few months and there was another "Race Sim Central" page - merely a splash screen with the logo and a notice it was returning soon. This was up for years.

Next was a "Race Sim Central", with original logo, but no forums or downloads, looked to be a marketing site for a wide variety of sim hardware.

Now there's another.

RSC came from Legends Central, which was my second site. Before that was the 'Honda Homepage'. Both were centered around GPL. LC merged with Mikkel's simracing.dk site and that became RSC in 2001.

I left RSC in 2005 when I started working for iRacing because I didn't want a perceived conflict of interest. In hindsight I shouldn't have done that because when I left I stopped making local backups, which meant the guys I left it with were relying on the backups the host was supposed to be doing. Eventually in 2009 (I think) the site went down and the backup had failed. The guys there decided to sell it to Ignite GT (SimRaceWay) and they used it very much like Motorsport Games uses Traxion today. They covered other news but promoted their own software and steering wheel too, assuming (probably correctly) that if you saw a sim mentioned alongside all the others, you might try it. In (around?) 2015 Ignite GT went away when their money ran out.

I got the domain back and brought the site back online in 2019 alone. And I do backups.

jgf · Mar 7, 2023

FWIW, I remember it as April 2010 that RSC disappeared. Sticks in my mind because I lost my job in March (old guy that owned the company retired, his son took over and immediately fired half the people there).

Timothy Wheatley · Mar 7, 2023

jgf said:
FWIW, I remember it as April 2010 that RSC disappeared. Sticks in my mind because I lost my job in March (old guy that owned the company retired, his son took over and immediately fired half the people there).

You're probably right. And that sucks!