re: 2024 Formula 1 season Thread

I play F123 and enjoy it. The career mode is pretty fun. My setup is a PS4 controller lol. I've thought about getting a steering wheel/pedals but I don't really have the right setup in the room for that and I don't think I have the time to justify putting money into that.

I was heavily into race sims and online racing for a few years, but I haven't done it in several years, so my knowledge of the sims themselves is very dated.

Back in the day, I favored a sim called GSCE, Game Stock Car Extreme, where stock car refers to Brazilian stock cars, which were road racing cars. It was an rF1 based sim made by a small Brazilian studio called Reiza. The name was eventually changed to Automobilista. There was a huge mod community for rF1 based games, so there were a ton of tracks and cars and skins available. Because of the mod community, every F1 track was available, never any licensing issues. Reiza basically took rFactor 1 as far is it could go. For single-player racing, they had very good AI cars. (They eventually went to a more advanced engine and called it Automobilista 2, but I stopped playing around that time.)

For quite a while rFactor 2 was the favored sim among the serious online racers. I loved the tire model, much better than the rF1 based sims, but overall I liked the simplicity of Automobilista. So I did most of my online racing with GSCE/Automobilista and had a blast. I was part of a small club that raced every weekend and we would have our own championships, and others were welcome to join any race as well.

My main point is that I learned so much about racing by playing sims and doing both single-player and online races. For F1 races, instead of doing full length races, we typically did one-hour races, which was close enough to understand the experience of multi-stint racing. We typically raced cars from eras that had refueling because that was more fun and there was more strategy involved. In the days before a race, we would practice on the track to understand tire wear and laptimes of the different compounds and fuel economy, then formulate our strategies based on that.

I used a cheesy setup with no force-feedback, and it hurt my competitiveness. There was a another guy who I matched up very well with in qualifying, we were always near each other on the grid. But I noticed that towards the end of stints, the last few laps before a pit stop, that my lap times fell off much more than his did. I eventually figured that with the lack of force feedback, I was overdriving the tires so I was suffering more tire wear than him on every stint. You learn so much from online racing, and the emotions are surprisingly strong when you have a good race, and when you're in a club that has a few "aliens" (the fast guys), it's hard to win a race, and when you do, you are surprisingly emotional. I feel like I have a small sense of the emotion that Lando experienced when he finally won a race.

I remember the funnest race I ever had. We raced a 1970s era Porsche 911 at Laguna Seca. It was a one-hour race. From practice, we all realized that tire wear was enough to need a pit stop, but also that the total pit lane time at Laguna Seca was huge (for some series, the pit lane goes through the Turn 2 hairpin and exits at the exit of Turn 2). So some people opted to not pit, and some people pitted. I pitted because I hated driving on worn out tires. I can't remember the gap to the guys who didn't pit, maybe 35 seconds, but I spent the last half of the race catching up to struggling cars and in the end I improved my position from before I pitted, and it was very satisfying. Man those were good times.