Why are there so few road car races online?

[Mogget]

I will get straight to the point.....

Why are there so few road car races online? There are so many great road cars to drive/race in AC, and the vast majority of them are far more enjoyable to drive than the modern race cars that I see scattered across the lobby. When these options do appear, why is it almost always the Toyota GT86 or BMW M3 E30? Where are the BMW 1M races? Ferrari 458 Italia? Lamborghini Countach? Porsche 718 Boxster S? Nissan 370Z Nismo? Lotus Elise? The latter is probably the most surprising omission of all of them, as the standard Lotus Elise is not exactly a difficult car to drive. There are so many road cars available that are more exciting to race than the Toyota GT86! Why do we have to stick with the safe option all the time?

There are times when I wonder if the vast majority of AC users simply do not know how enjoyable the road cars are to race, or that they assume that road cars can only be driven at Nordschleife track days, or taken for a Sunday drive through LA Canyons.

So I ask again......why are there so few road car races online?

 

[Mr Chip]

Can suggest a look at www.cosyracingcommunity.com

Primarily race road cars on a Sunday evening with the odd race car now and then.

 

[Michael Krone]

The best I can suggest is search "rubberduck" in assetto. He hosts road races occasionally.

 

[Hoksu]

Still the question remains why there are so few of them. Why for example Racedepartment races almost completely neglect road cars? Yes I get that many players prefer racing with race cars, I race racecars a lot more than I race road cars. But there is one enormous argument why there should be at least some racing with road cars: because there are so many of great quality road cars for AC. About half of Kunos cars are road-going cars, and there are lots of fine mods, so it's a huge waste not to put them to good use.

Yes yes real life this and real life that, but no reason you can't race road-legal cars in AC. Or if there is, I would like to know what it is.

 

[RasmusP]

I can only speak for myself but personally sitting in front of a single monitor and with a G27, anything softer (and slower) than a gt4 car feels like a crawling sponge and simply isn't fun.
Some few cars are great for learning the basics of racing because they do forgive almost anything while still teaching the basics.

But to get an immersion that's somewhat close to driving my 90 hp standard Skoda Fabia within the speed limits, it needs a gt4/gt3/formula 4+ car.
The faster Lotus feel like a rocket sponge...

I have to say that things changed when I got my fanatec csw 2.5. So I could feel something with the road cars too. But most people have weaker wheels than that...

Also testing the oculus rift for 2 months gave a far more enjoyable immersion with slower cars, since I could actually see the speed.

On a single monitor, 200 kph feel like 50 kph do in real life...

 

[Mogget]

Lightning fast speed is not what makes a car fun to drive. It's the handling that matters, and frankly the GT cars are extremely poor in that department, even when compared to the Toyota GT86! There are also plenty of road cars available in AC that are every bit as fast (or even faster) than a GT4 car in a straight line.

 

[RasmusP]

Lightning fast speed is not what makes a car fun to drive. It's the handling that matters, and frankly the GT cars are extremely poor in that department, even when compared to the Toyota GT86! There are also plenty of road cars available in AC that are every bit as fast (or even faster) than a GT4 car in a straight line.

That's true, although I'd say it's different if you want a nice race or "having fun with the car itself".
The old Lotus 25 and 49 are great fun when being alone on track but I raced them about 5x at it wasn't fun at all.

The Audi TT Cup is a lot of fun to race! You can rub the cars through corners without a risk of spinning, they feel stiff and agile and aren't too slow.

So I agree that I don't need straight line speed (although 200 km/h at Monza GP are the minimum that I'd like to reach)

 

[Lizard Of Bodom]

...

So I ask again......why are there so few road car races online?

Maybe you are looking on wrong servers or something but literally EVERY car you mentioned is available on most of servers I play on (LAC/Nordshleife and even Highlands or HighForce). Yes, sometimes you get less people on server with "normal" cars but I prefer that to 24/24 grid of GT4 cars any given time. In general i would always choose road car over its sport counterpart as it just gives me more fun to drive, dont really care if I am slower or less grippy. I suggest just putting "nord" or "canyons" on CM search box and run trouigh list of available servers, you will see the cars you are referring to available for choose and cruise...
(unless you are looking for actual proper "race" server then you are probably out of luck :>)

 

[RasmusP]

(unless you are looking for actual proper "race" server then you are probably out of luck :>)

There are times when I wonder if the vast majority of AC users simply do not know how enjoyable the road cars are to race, or that they assume that road cars can only be driven at Nordschleife track days, or taken for a Sunday drive through LA Canyons.

 

[Lizard Of Bodom]

hehe presenting it in that way indeed deserves LOL but not totally accurate as I dont see much difference between blasting Countach trough Nordshleife or CTR trough LAC loop versus "having a proper race on LAguna seca". I dont think OP was referring to way those are driven but the availability of such cars online, unless I totally misunderstood him. Yea, if expecting a "50 lap race on SPA using Countach/GTO/Elise etc etc" with practice/warmup/race and podiums blah blah then as I said - out of luck most likely, but if one just want to "race road car against other road cars online" then I think this part is nicely covered by available servers, only problem can be people using them and their abilities/willingness to behave as real users.

I just probably misunderstood the OP's definition of "race" but ah well, i keep on having blast with full opposite lock in CTR in "sunday drive" on nords tourist whether its a "race" or not

 

[Mogget]

I was referring to short 5 lap races at real world tracks. I am not interested in Nordschleife trackday servers, and neither am I interested in fantasy tracks like Black Cat County or Highlands. In fact, I was surprised that Kunos went down that route. They seemed to have decided that the non laser scanned Zandvoort was not warmly welcomed by the AC community (probably because of the whinging from a vocal minority), and yet fantasy tracks from the twilight zone were somehow acceptable?? I never understood the logic in that one.

As for "racing road cars against other road cars online", the options are nowhere near as plentiful as you suggest. In fact, they are virtually non existent.

 

[RasmusP]

They seemed to have decided that the non laser scanned Zandvoort was not warmly welcomed by the AC community (probably because of the whinging from a vocal minority), and yet fantasy tracks from the twilight zone were somehow acceptable?? I never understood the logic in that one.

For me personally it makes sense because Zandvoort is a real track and if you wanna drive a REAL track, laserscan is very welcome to improve immersion.
If I know that it's a fantasy track anyway, I just enjoy the creative work of the people who built it.

It might also be that since the tracks where free, the track building artists simply wanted to do this, pitched the idea and got the okay to work on them.

It was probably done to "Have some road-like-tracks for people who want this apart from race tracks". Just to be able to tick off that kind of content.

 

[Ghoults]

I think the most fun car class is the supercars. The ferrari 458 and 488s, mclarens, nissan gtrs and the like are pretty close to each other. You have wide variety of drivetrains and engines and the cars are imho super fun to drive. But at the same time they need finesse on throttle and steering. The hypercars are too fast for their own good and the toyota gt86 and miatas are too slow to have fun on your own. The supercars have ample amounts of power, enough downforce to not have lift and right amount of tire to take advantage of all kinds of tracks too. It feels a bit sad they are basically never raced but it is easy to see why.

People want more on-rails kind of experience. They want to go fast, brake late and rarely worry about wheelspin. Road cars are all about fast on straights, slower in corners, more rotation and yaw, more forgiving but need that forgiveness more often. But the big difference is that there is constant management of wheelspin and the car is more lively at the limit.

Take something like the tatuus in ac which is basically wheelspin incompetent 99% of the lap and just understeers when you reach the limit. Easy to see why people like it. A road car can understeer or oversteer in a corner if you turn in and lift off brakes in different way than the lap before. A road car also doesn't have the fame and prestige of "racing". Some people think only race cars should be raced in sims. Which is a shame. But also their loss.

 

[Mr Deap]

Some speculation for the reason there's few roadcar race online. Those are strongly plausible cause using common sense.
-Peeps can't drift. They auto lose when the car goes sideway. Console arcade gamer can win race effortless.
-Road cars have a straight forward setup. They can't use auto-win setup on those cars. One simracing content creator almost cried because Project Cars 3 had no setup.
-They're too difficult to drive for them or don't have the hardware. They can't use H shifter. Clutch require more foot work. Don't like exercise.
-They have to drive more by feel. They have to turn on FFB. They have no arm strength.

 

[Lizard Of Bodom]

As for "racing road cars against other road cars online", the options are nowhere near as plentiful as you suggest. In fact, they are virtually non existent.

Allright, I understand your point. But going by the logic "whatever is available I am not interested in but I am desperately missing exactly what I want" the only answer to your needs would be setting your own server perhaps? Lots of people I drive with are doing it on their home PC that other of us just connecting to, with their own choice of tracks and cars so you can set up exactly what you are looking for. I think you only need full CM for that to have server management and moderately-powerful PC.

 

[RasmusP]

Maybe you could search or create road car events on this new simracing.gp?
Just hosting one random server between the thousands of servers would probably never get enough drivers to have fun. 24h, too many timezones etc.

With sgp, even if you'd only get 4-8 participants, doing 5 lap races wouldn't cause too many people to drive alone on their own.
The event could be 45 minutes of 5 lap events with simracing.gp automatically doing everything you'd need, afaik.

Or maybe there's a Discord community with road car races?

 

[386]

Yeah that's one thing I really do not like about AC, people either want to race GT3 cars, drift, or do a cruise on the nordschleife, and nothing else

 

[onearmedbandit46]

Yeah that's one thing I really do not like about AC, people either want to race GT3 cars drift, or do a cruise on the nordschleife, and nothing else

You just need to find the right leagues, there's quite a few floating around in discord and faebook groups that cater to different tastes. I know that doesn't help directly, but they are out there. I've found some just by joining facebook recommended groups for AC.

 

[Bryce Waard]

I currently run an iRacing league and we are looking at expanding into AC. Not sure if it will be a single car (non GT) rotating track or just a complete different car and track each week like we do for our open wheel series. We are currently testing our hosted server on AWS and things are looking good for a roll out in a couple weeks. If you're interested, send me a msg and I'll link you to our discord and race server.

 

[386]

You just need to find the right leagues, there's quite a few floating around in discord and faebook groups that cater to different tastes. I know that doesn't help directly, but they are out there. I've found some just by joining facebook recommended groups for AC.

That is very helpful but here is the thing. The fact that I have to find a league just to drive cars that are in the game is pretty annoying. Right now I could go on Forza Motorsport 7 and find lobbies for almost every car category without doing anything. And there are other games and simulators like that as well, AC just particularly lacks in multiplayer.