Rapid Racer

The Duel: Test Drive II, 1989

After I finished the Le Mans 24 Hours in May I considered Gran Turismo 5 done and dusted. When I picked it back up in November last year I started messing around in arcade mode trying out different handicaps. Traction control and anti-lock braking are driving aids and are supposed to be disabled eventually like training wheels, but the majority of players seem to race with them enabled - disabling them, especially online, effectively make them handicaps. This wasn't enough to perpetuate the novelty and once I received the G27 racing wheel I had to learn how to use a clutch and H-pattern gearbox. I mastered that quickly and moved onto heel-toe shifting which, again in time, I mastered. I ditched racing tyres for slippery sports tyres when driving street cars and adjusted to that. Everything can be adapted to. You could argue the Ferrari F40 in all its jolting twitchy instability is a car that could be tamed in a way. While you can certainly learn the F40's behaviour and catch the back drifting out before spinning, it can never become a boring car. It can be frustrating. I quit the Nürburgring 4 Hours last year because it was just too demanding to constantly reign it in on the Nordschleife while trying to create a lead over the second place runner. You have to be hyper-vigilant on a roller-coaster track that sends it in any combination of directions and that's why making it through a lap is rewarding. It's a shame the F40's rival, the Porsche 959, is contractually absent along with the rest of the Porsche stable. It's also a shame the 911 GT1 isn't able to go up against the CLK-GTR, but then they never made a classic game about those two. The Nordschleife, too, is just another sequence of turns you can memorise given enough practice. Hence I've been delving into the Course Maker again to produce another four circuits. I still vacillate between desiring high-speed straight and narrow tracks and twisty rural roads of the variety that might have been seen in Test Drive II. I realise describing corners can be repetitive given the limited vocabulary which is why I've been thinking about buying a video capture device so I can upload the best lap replays to YouTube. It certainly would help interested downloaders to see them in action, or rather to see them as the scene of the action.

Here's the new four:

Mäanderung Nierenbohnering (Eifel Circuit)
4.52 miles, created 05/02/13, Fastest Lap: 1:39.471 (Mazda 787B)
In the previous post I presented a track called Nierenbohnering (Kidney Bean Circuit) which was as close to an oval as could be achieved, although with major elevation changes. All the corners had a complexity of 0. By raising the complexity the overall shape is maintained but the course meanders along that line - hence the Meandering Kidney Bean Circuit. Speeds are still high, but the challenge is keeping grip whilst snaking right and left along the narrow track.

Neue Zweiburgenring (Eifel Circuit)
5.34 miles, created 09/02/13, Fastest Lap: 2:16.230 (Mazda 787B)
Nierenbohnering evolved from a track called Zweiburgenring which took the name from the two castles visible in the scenery. This track is entirely new and just so happens to feature two castles, though only one is particularly close to the course looming over the final sector. The first minute of a lap is spent in the spoons section negotiating several highly cambered corners. After that it leads into the high speed section broken by a sharply descending chute that ends at a final spoon before the pit straight opens up.

Viavai (Toscana Tarmac)
4.20 miles, created 20/02/13, Fastest Lap: 1:23.657 (Mazda 787B)
Although it's a fairly long track, there are only three points where braking is necessary and the majority of the lap is spent at full throttle in excess of 200mph. In real life that would be a major strain and lend itself to endurance racing, but that raises some problems concerning the AI. Unfortunately the AI regularly drives through the pit lane rather than stop as intended because they enter too fast (which might be related to a glitch with the dividing barrier that when hit sends the car tumbling into the air). Consequently the field becomes littered with slow cars hobbling with damage, bald tyres, empty fuel tanks, or a combination of the three. The pit lane exit is as problematic as the entrance. Speeds over the start/finish line are about 180mph which means pit traffic comes onto the track directly in front of cars doing 200mph. In an hour long endurance race I came down the straight and saw a cloud of smoke at the crest where the pit exits and narrowly missed a three car accident. In reality such a track would never be allowed to host a race without moving the exit all the way down to the next corner like Interlagos or Spa-Francorchamps. These issues could be dealt with if the Course Maker wasn't as obtuse as anyone who has used it knows it to be.
This is a rare anti-clockwise track. The first true corner looks like a pinched section of a large curve. The end of the straight crests onto a falling gentle left-hand turn which winds in before a short straight in which you brake from 220mph down a gear. Done correctly you can get right back on the accelerator and blast though the corner onto the next flat out stretch. At the south of the track is a gentle left into a short straight and then the sharper Curva Sessa which can be taken flat out if the car maximises the width of the road. This opens up onto a wide undulating stretch whose first crest sends some cars airborne. A modern LMP or Group C running high downforce loses a little traction and the wheels can briefly turn freely, but the Ford Mark IV goes nose-up without tapping the brakes beforehand. After another less severe crest the track falls downhill and rapidly narrows. A little kink marks the braking point for the slowest corner going from 220 all the way down to 60mph. A faster cambered right turn begins the final fast section until the final corner which is entered wide and down one gear, unlike the idiot AI who crawl round it and the rest of the circuit.

Strade di Voltigiano (Toscana Tarmac)
5.31 miles, created 20/02/13, Fastest Lap: 2:38.950 (Mazda 787B)
If Viavai is the fast and simple Toscana circuit, then this is the slower and more complex one. I'd designed a highly complex Toscana track back when I first tried the Course Maker. Like the Eifel track that I also made last April (Warrenring) it didn't flow well. Dialling all corners to 10 complexity isn't enough. As the name describes (Italian: The Road of Voltigiano), this is supposed to be a rural road that could be found out in Tuscany. Voltigiano is a place name I found while wandering around Google Maps outside Siena. I had been working on a track with a particularly thrilling final sector with a highly cambered (almost banked, resembling a halfpipe) left-right sweep on the crest that sharply descended down to a heavy braking final corner. Annoyingly there is a bug that I've encountered several times which causes the game to freeze if you cancel out of the test car options menu. Alas, I forgot years of indoctrination and hadn't saved. I remembered the topography map and the the rough inputs and this is the closest I could get to initially recreating it.
Part of the character of this track is corners that feel inside out. Rather than the approach gradually turning into a corner many of these lead away creating hairpins. This rejects the way most courses are designed in favour of something that appears to follow the land as a practicality, such as the sixth sector which hugs the edge of a hill. In slower production cars a lap can take three and a half minutes - like Le Mans except far slower.

My first car in GT5 was the F40 but I had heavily tuned it up to into 600+ performance points. As I couldn't roll back the engine tune or the weight reduction (of an already utilitarian car) I decided to buy a second F40 to keep in stock condition. Since the F40 is available in only one colour I wanted to repaint my original one. Yellow is the second most seen colour on Ferraris, but as I was looking through the selection of paints I noticed I'd received a chrome paint as a bonus. Instead of painting it black like all those photos I later saw, I jumped ahead and doused it in silver chrome. It looked nice at first but then I quickly regretted it after a few replays. I had become one of those rappers that desecrates a high performance vehicle with a garish paint job. I can change the colour again, but I've lost the chrome - though I don't know what I would have dared put it on in the first place.

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