Risky Ride

Peugeot 908 on Ligne Droite des Hunaudières

Last summer I was busy catching up with Gran Turismo 4 and wrote that the endurance races offered there represented the apex of the racing simulation. Well now I've caught up to Gran Turismo 5 and there's a new apex. I'd actually been waiting for the price to drop but the PS3 was sitting idle for weeks at a time and I had a week off coming up, so I decided £15 wasn't really that much - the original GT cost me (read, parents) £40.

As is traditional, the first few hours are spent passing the licences. This actually proved to be useful for once since the prize money, experience points, and prize cars I won were enough that I could buy a Ferrari F40 as my first car and still have a few hundred thousand left over. That makes me nostalgic for the days when you'd have to buy a used Nissan in a horrible colour. Actually I lied, the first three hours were spent installing the game and then downloading updates both for the system and the game. When I was finally able to play, I noted there's very little deviation. It should be no surprise that five games down the line the racing sim has pretty much been nailed in the same way the latest in the FIFA franchise has firmly grasped the notion of kicking a ball about a field amongst 22 men. GT5 is something of a broad church encompassing karting, rallying, grand tourers, Le Mans prototypes, and NASCAR - for some unfathomable reason. Maybe it's just because the Jeff Gordon special event includes that one test they always put in, where it makes you sit there for thirty seconds doing nothing every time you fail the test and have to restart. No, it may be because forming a slipstream pack and going round in literal (squared-off) circles isn't racing. Four left hand turns? What do I do? What do I do? GT mode follows the series script closely and you progress through the beginner, amateur, professional, expert, and extreme levels culminating in the Endurance series.

Once again the easiest here is the Grand Valley 300km requiring the least experience points to open up. The Indy 500 probably deserves the title of easiest but it requires more XP to unlock, perhaps because boredom is another form of challenge. At this point into the game I already had the car for Le Mans - the four million credit Peugeot 908, aka the Fapmobile - but I didn't have the XP to unlock it. The LMP cars don't need to brake going round Indianapolis which made my thumb sore from having it permanently jammed under the right analogue stick for the first twenty minutes. I resorted to putting an elastic band round the controller for the duration, which actually compounded my boredom. My mind was drifting so far from events on screen that I missed a pit stop on lap 120 and ran out of fuel on the back straight. Learning from that lesson, I started taking on more fuel which came in useful when I missed the next two scheduled stops.

Running out of fuel is the lesson I never seem to learn from. I entered the Nürburgring 4 hours with my trusty steed the F40. I figured a classic grand tourer like that might do well in a short endurance race, but apparently not. I had opted to pit at the end of every lap and use the advantage of medium tyres to build a lead over the rest of the field on a two lap strategy. Unfortunately something I had done to the F40 made it handle like a swan landing on a frozen pond. The rear tyres were going bald from constantly fishtailing around corners which meant taking it slower which meant losing my lead. I fell back through the pack when I tried to change strategy and ease off the accelerator, but 2:20 into the race I ran out of fuel just before kleines Karussel. I quit and looked for something better and found it in the Audi R8 5.2 road car. I had a fifteen second lead by the first lap and comfortably operated a two lap pit strategy, finishing in the lead by 2 minutes 40 seconds after 423.8 miles.

After this I had enough XP to skip the Suzuka 1000km and the Tsukuba 9 hours and promptly did so - I wasn't about to waste fourteen gaming hours that could be better spent getting fourteen hours into Le Mans. For me this is where the most notable changes to GT5 shine. In GT4 there was no mid-race saving. The only option was to leave the PS2 on the entire time and the quickest way to avoid a power cut was to put yourself into the lead before handing over to the AI (B-spec mode) and engaging time acceleration. As GT5 separates A and B spec and didn't have mid-race saving until the major update, the player was forced to do these extremely extreme events in as close to one sitting as possible. Mid-race saving alleviates this, yet forcing the player to participate in the entirety in fact brings a welcomed sense of physical endurance to what was previously a test of hardware endurance. GT4's renditions of the two prestigious 24 hour races were paradoxically the least memorable or demanding by allowing the player to hand over control to the computer. The other significant change also happens to be what convinced me to buy yet another Gran Turismo instalment - dynamic weather and the day/night cycle. Along with forcing the player to complete the duration, the transition from day to night and back again is what really transforms the simulated Le Mans into an experience. There's nothing like blasting toward Mulsanne nervously trying to spot the braking point dimly lit by headlights from behind the wheel in the interior view. It actually reminds me of when I had a Scalextric touring car set that had working head and tail lights and I used to turn off the lights in the room and imagine myself in the driving seat.

Peugeot 908 braking into Indianapolis corner

Ten days into the game (1st of May), I finally embarked on the 24 Heures du Mans. The preview screen showed me it would be a 73% rain-on-track start. I exited and tried again - perfect weather. I limited the Fapmobile down to just slightly above the output rating of the most powerful car on the grid - the blue Pescarolo - but even that proved to be more than necessary. It wasn't a case of blasting off into the distance as I complained last year. I was able to gain around 10-15 seconds per lap on the second place Audi R8. I was on a five lap pit strategy (tyres: soft front, hard rear, 40-45L fuel) while it was on seven or eight. We exchanged places during stops until an hour into the race when I was resolutely ahead and I lapped him at 3:39 and conclusively lapped him around 4:30 on lap 75 just before the headlights came on. Eight hours into the race in the middle of the simulated night my concentration was persistently slipping. I was saving mid-race and by now it was the 3rd of May so don't think that I was suffering real exhaustion. It may have been I was over-concentrating. I missed three stops in a row because I was so focused on trying to nail the entrance to the Ford chicane that I drove past the pit entry. The time lost to limping round the track allowed the R8 to regain ninety seconds on my seven minute lead. It was fortunate damage wasn't enabled as I hit the barrier in the Porsche Curves half a dozen times in the night when catching the grass and I had one major rear impact on the third of those curves. Far more annoying was the AI's driving, which admittedly has improved - they no longer drive straight into you. Rather I drive into them. Every ten minutes I had to lap the two last place Oreca Vipers. They'd move aside as I approached but snap back onto the racing line just as I was about to pass in the braking zone, leading to repeated high-speed rear end collisions.

When the night lifted in the twelfth hour it was a relief as the novelty had long worn off and I just wanted to be able to see where I was going. I was around three laps ahead of the R8 as the sun began to rise, but I was starting to hope for a bit of light rain to shake things up. Setting 3.30 laps over and over again for almost four hundred laps gets a bit tiring eventually, even if you're like me and enjoy adjectives like consistent and accurate. Finally on Sunday 6th, three weeks into GT5, I was in the final few hours. My oil warning lamp lit up at 22:18 but there was nothing I could do about the drop in engine power until the race was over. Interestingly, whereas my car after finishing Le Mans in GT4 was a shambles, in the terminal stages I didn't find the Fapmobile hard to control. The rigidity repair shop insisted the body and the engine needed overhauling, so perhaps it was acclimatisation. I naturally finished first, five laps ahead of the yellow R8. The Pescarolo I was so concerned about was eight laps down in third place. There were only twelve cars on the grid, which was disappointing as arcade mode offers sixteen which fills out the course better. The game bestowed me with 13,781,100 experience points which catapulted me from level 35 to 38 - unfortunately two levels and several million points short of unlocking the 24 Hours of Nürburgring.

To all intents I'm considering GT5 won. I'm not sure I could withstand driving around the green hell for a day, in the night or in the rain or a combination of both; nor do I really want to find the time to unlock that particular challenge and then the time to complete it. I haven't even looked at B-Spec mode, but I have partaken in some online racing.

P.S. It was entirely unintentional that I went with the Matmut Oreca 908 rather than the PlayStation sponsored works 908. I just happened to like the more colourful livery of the former. The fact that I'm boycotting Sony had nothing to do with it.

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