Minimal GT4 progress last night. I started out by finishing the Clubman Cup, and winning a Mazdaspeed 6. Meh. Alright, so on to the GT World Championship, and....what? I figure my CLK GTR should be a good matchup here, but either I'm a lousy driver, or...well, maybe it's the driver. After about 5 laps at Toyko R246, I'm 50 seconds off the lead. Even if the other cars are using stickier tires and will need to pit once, I still can't make up that time. Bah.
Time to try some B-spec mode then. I ran the Grand Valley 300km enduro to win a 1937 Auto Union V16 Type C Streamline. Really cool-looking car, I'll have to get some pics of it.
Next I tried some of the driving missions again, and I'm amazed at the increase in difficulty from the first 10 missions to the second 10. The second 10 are all 3-lap races where you start out in last by a fair margin, and have to come back to win. Number 11 put me in an old Toyota 2000GT or something, and wow is it slow. Probably took me about 10 tries to get all of my lines down to where I could overtake the 1st-place car on the last straight. Number 12 was more fun, driving a Ford GT LM at Laguna Seca. This took me a number of tries as well, including several where I had a good shot at winning but spun on the fast left before going up the hill to the corkscrew. The car would always slide a bit if I hit the rumble strip on the left, sending me off course just enough cause problems. I finally did it though, and it felt great. Number 13 is where I gave up on the 3-lap races. It was a 206 rally car (206 > *) up against other rally cars at the Opera track. My first attempt was pathetic, I think I only passed one car. I gradually got better, to where I would finish just a few seconds behind the lead car and in second place. I don't know where I'm going to pick up those last few seconds, however. Growing tired of my slow progress, I went on to the slipstream battles (21-24 I think). I easily won the Nissan Cube and Honda Odyssey races, but then I got to the Skyline race. So frustrating. I must have done this at least 6 times, at 7 minutes per race. The idea is that you're in a group of 5 Skylines at the test ring, and you have to use drafting to catch the group up to the lead car, which you then pass for the win. Well, it seems that the other 4 cars in the pack are idiots. The lead car actually taps the brakes going into the turns, and I can never get the group to catch up. I've even tried pushing one car in the group around the track, as the two of us would still hit higher speeds on the straight, but that wouldn't catch me up either. To make matter worse, the other pack cars are terrible at drafting. I'll see them come up beside me, but rarely pass me. I really don't know what to do with this one. I tried moving on to the next slipstream race with some S2000 race cars, but didn't win on my first try. I don't think it'll be that much of a problem, but I was tired of doing this now.
Back to endurance races! I thought it was about time I tried the 24hour Nurburgring enduro, as that's the race that gives you the Formula car. The biggest issue for me was that I'd have to repeatedly check on my bspec driver, because after coming out of the pits, it wouldn't go back to the 3x speed, it would just be in the normal view at 1x. I checked on it every 8-10 minutes for a couple hours, then went to bed. At the time I left for work this morning, it was 12h40m into the race, with a 12 lap lead. I figure it'll be about 21.5 hours in by the time I get home, then I can 3x it for about an hour to finish up the race, get my formula car, and collect the 1.2M in prize money.
Posted by Ben at March 16, 2005 07:24 AM