Renault Megane Trophy - Endurance Race Sign Up Thread

Well that was my first endurance race , great fun while it lasted , but i need to prepare better for the next one , my wrists ached like mad fighting the ff , next time i turn it off or down.
Good racing by all who attended ,big congrats to Kalle and Paul well driven , hard luck Sean and Marcel but good to know you superhumans are as fallible as us mere mortals , Marcel you even beat me on the drivethroughs i only got 1(LOL)
Thanks to the organisers and Paul @ ARI for hosting , nice job guys

 

An hour in I got hit so hard I couldn't make it back to the pit due to damage. That was me done. Congratulations to the finishers.

 

Great race everyone! Big thanks to organizers. Too bad I lost connection after 77 laps for some reason

 

I will get those up now on my website!

 

Official Results: http://theracingconcept.co.uk/rcec/

Williams and Wegers are classed as having done 0 laps due to being disqualified.

This has made me see that I need to re-write my race result storage

 

Thanks Matt & Dani, the commentary was great! Never realized before how much fun there can be by just watching the simrace. I really appreciate what you've done. Nicely organized event and very enjoyable video so BIG thanks to you guys and also ARI for hosting! Hopefully I have time to participate if you're planning more endurance races in the future.

I'll sum my race with few words in case someone is interested to hear. In case you want to watch the video first then now would be good time to stop reading.

Well, I had weak preparation for the race. Didn't have time to practice so just searched up old setup from some old rF2 build archive. I think I was 4th in qualify with time that was nearly second slower than my personal best. Setup was very tricky to drive (as it was in the past too) so decided to change few things to reduce oversteering for the extremely long race. We had short warm-up so was able to quickly test it before the race. Maybe it improved the car a little but still very difficult and sensitive to drive and also had terrible snap oversteerings on few places of the track. However race was going to be long so I thought maybe I'll get hang of it eventually.

Turn one went clean thanks to rolling start. I was trying to keep up with top three but couldn't quite manage. The car was still hard to drive and I lost it once or twice at brakings. So I moved brake bias slightly towards front and got it settled on that part. Still had those nasty snap oversteerings and all I could do was to learn avoid them; slightly different line or approach to corner, maybe briefly off the throttle, little countersteering before places where it used to snap, etc. Eventually it took over two hours to find the "flow" and I was still doing little mistakes every now and then. But the pace was starting to look good at that point.

Before the 2 hour mark I've had one drive-through penalty for speeding in the pits (hassled with the limiter button - damn those tiny red wheelbuttons of G27 ...and my big thumbs!). I also lost correct steering ratio from the Logitech G27 wheel at pitting. Steering got horribly slow and center point had moved maybe 10 degrees off the middle. I suspected there were some bug that resetted the factory steering ratio for the car setup. Tried learn to drive with the slower steering for 6 laps but it was impossible and spinned at least once. Then I started to think maybe it's the wheel because center point was off. So I stopped the car in a reasonable safe place and reconnected the USB-cord. Of course it lost calibration so tried to press all pedals and turn wheel from lock-to-lock. Miraculously it started to work properly so I was back in action!

In that point lots of drivers had retired for various reasons and found myself second maybe 40 or 50 seconds behind the leader Sean Williams. Well, I could have finished second fairly safely OR try to put some pressure to Sean and see what would happen. There was one hour left so everything was still possible. So obviously didn't want to get bored and started to drive faster. At first the gap was closing down slowly but then I made few mistakes and lost the gained time. Time was basically running out so I was hoping that by continuing to push hard would cause Sean to make some mistakes... and eventually he made few of them.

There was something like 10 or 15 minutes left of the race and gap to Sean had diminished to 4 or 5 seconds. I was running out of fuel and knew Sean had to refuel too but not until there's only few laps remaining. So the only option was to pit in and keep pushing as hard as I could. But then I made a really bad mistake and forgot to change the amount of fuel to be added. And they filled'er up alright! So I lost maybe 10 seconds in the pits compared to Sean's forthcoming pitstop. It looked like the game was all over but then Sean made a mistake too! He had hassled with the pit limiter button and got penalty for speeding in the pitlane. So when there was just over 1 minute remaining of the 3 hour race Sean was serving the penalty on the pits and I was flying past him on the main straight! And the rest is history...

Of course I felt sorry for him but on the other hand just couldn't wipe that wide grin out of my face!

BTW special thanks for setting start-time and timescale so that at the end of the race there were dark - it was really nice. Next time maybe random weather too?

 

No problem, it was a pleasure to commentate on and thanks for being part of it! Myself and Dani weren't expecting the turn out that we got so was a pleasent surprise to see such a healthy grid.

As for more endurance races in the future, most certainly! We should get a regular schedule going for these like one every other month or something!

 

Fun event thanks for hosting. Yep that damn little red limiter button got me too... I then didn't realize it was a drive-thru penalty and tried to server a stop and go, LOL!

Anyway was fun. Not sure I would want to do another 3 hour race though... ;-)

 

It'd be fine. I hope to be able to take part in the next one.

 

Any news regarding the next endurance event? Not being impatient just curious, i really wanted to participate in the last one but i got a cold and could not race

 

I think we're going to plan one for some time in January, try and do one every other month or some jazz.

 

nice! will you most likely stick to the megane or consider to use another car as well?