March 9, 2005
The daily GT4 update
So, the 1-Series race two days ago gave me a *green* 2002 Turbo. Cool car, horrible color.
Yesterday I started off with the Easy ice rallies, but they seemed far from easy. I eventually learned that full throttle is pretty much reserved for straights, and that's it. Everything is just painfully slow. It took me so many tries, I stopped after the two events, and I was done with rally for the day.
Other than the rally, yesterday was pretty much an all-BMW day, after I noticed a good progression of events that was possible. I started out building a well-modified 330i, and used it to win the Schwarzwald Liga A races. First, I did way more than necessary to win these races. Probably would have been fine with suspension, a wing, an exhaust, and an ecu. Second, there were only 3 races, and neither of them were that long. Third, the prize car is an M3 GTR race car!
The GTR race car is ridiculously easy to drive. The brakes are fantastic, I found myself braking too early on many corners. The only available modification is the Stage 3 NA upgrade @ $80k, so I passed on that. It allowed me to enter the BMW "M" Club races, however, which were a cakewalk that resulted in winning the M3 GTR street car.
Now, the last race in the M Club series was at Nurburgring, and it just so happened that the first race of the Schwarzwald Liga B series was at the same place. This time, however, I was driving the M3 GTR street car, on sports tires, and the first time I did it, there was no aero! That's right, the car comes with a sizeable wing, but you have to put a big huge one on there to get any downforce. My first attempt was horrible, I was all over the track. Between the lack of aero and the switch from race to sports tires, I couldn't even bring myself to finish the race. I went and bought a wing, then made a conscious effort to slow down more for turns, and things were fine. My GTR street car is making about 50hp more than the race car, and only weighs about 100-150lbs more. I didn't have time to finish the series, but as you can see, I did make it to Circuit City last night to pick up a Sandisk Cruzer Micro 256MB flash drive so I could transfer photos to the computer. Just for the sake of taking photos, here are a couple of the Cien I've enjoyed so much, including the obligatory "down the corkscrew" photo. As with the previous pics, click for the full-size image.
