Not far off. There are 40 drivers listed on the 67 season page in the Wiki, 19 of which got no points (and only 5 of them participated in more than one race), 6 of which managed to finish the race properly (didn't get an NC, Ret., DNS, DSQ or something like that). The ten best drivers had a 45% chance of retiring (admittedly it was mostly for technical faults). On average 16 drivers made it to the starting line, on average 53% made it to the finish line covering the required distance. The second finisher was once a lap behind the winner, and excluding that the runner up was on average ~36 seconds behind the winner, being less than 20 seconds behind only thrice. On average the 3rd or 4th driver was already a lap behind (average hits 3.7, and more often than not the driver finishing third was a lap behind), excluding Nordschleife from the calculations, because it's so darn long. On Nords the 5th F1 driver (actually he finished 6th, 3 minutes behind the best F2 driver who finished 5th) was already 8:42 behind, but still technically on the same lap. So yeah, it was pretty much hell for everyone involved. Looking at everything there were only like 4 driver/car combos that could consistently drive hard and finish the race (e.g. Jim Clark is excluded because while he did drive hard winning 4 times, his car broke 5 times), and something like 7-8 drivers capable of being consistently fast enough to reach top 3 during the season, if the car held up. Though lets remember that more often than not the driver finishing 3rd was already a lap behind. What happened at Monza also suggests that they weren't exactly pushing as hard as they could all the time. Jim Clark lead the pack a bit over the halfway point, at which point he suffered a puncture, limped to the pits and lost an entire lap (at this point there were still 13 out of the 18 drivers that started still out there, so he had a bit of traffic to deal with). He then proceeded to catch up with everyone, took back the lead a few laps before the finish and lead up to the final lap. Then the fuel pump promptly broke and he ended up third, 23 seconds behind the winner. I daresay that before that puncture he might have held back a bit. Again, nothing at all suggests that the 60s F1 cars were easy to drive fast.
Actually I have most of the sims except rf1.....and FYI, I'm not referring to driving at peak speeds with the F1 as I don't understand how to control the throttle, ie, I can't get on the gas without the car sending a torque wave thru the chassis and dragging me off line/track....and if I can't keep it online, I can't go fast. The F2's okay as it doesn't send anywhere near as much torque thru the chassis, but I find it impossible to believe that the F1 is really like that, and I also notice that most people drive the F3's, so there's a clear message to ISI, ie, reduce the hyper realism to just plain old fashioned realism and most people will be happy. I'm not a supporter of icephysics or difficulty for the sake of it, but it sounds like you are, bad news is you represent the tiniest minority of sim players, so I hope ISI doesn't listen to your fantasies. Do you even own a car?
This could be because of how slippery the cars are in the wet, I mean, the 60F1 is already slippery in the dry, imagine adding wet weather to it, heck, you might find 3-4 people thru the whole world who'd enjoy it. Also, there's not much feeling with the F1 at malaysia, so you approach a corner at speed and there's no real feeling of going off, it's just a visual of you doing a huge slide. Anyway, I like Ferrari FVA, Netkar, Game Stock car, GTR evo/RACEON, and I like these cars in rf2... Megane. FISI. F3.5 thx to b85 update F3 at any track, F2 at most tracks.
Definitely with you there. The cars should never be made more difficult just because some people like it that way. Neither should they be made easier for the same reason though. They should be as hard to drive as they were, or at least as close as can be gathered from the available information. Though looking at the results and stats, and also hearing what the drivers have said, they weren't easy to drive by any means. Remember that some of the F1 cars in 1967 were little more than F2 chassis with the bigger F1 engines planted in. There wasn't even a big difference in the tyres. Imagine how the F2 cars would handle if you suddenly doubled their power? (The F1 cars were around 400 bhp whereas the F2 cars were around 200 bhp.)
It's not really the handling so much, as I appreciate what you're saying wrt increasing power on a base chassis spec, however, I just can't find a way to feed the throttle without either going obscenely slow or being swamped by torque.
I agree with you, but to be honest, if we had the most realistic physics/tyremodel/vehicle dynamics engine ever created then we should have an actually tougher time to drive these cars. We would be (just as we are now) more often than real life drivers (wether they be amateur, pro or just plain crappy drivers) going over the limit, complaining about massive oversteer or understeer, cars too difficult in relation to realife etc. because IN REAL LIFE YOU FEEL THE CAR UNDERNEATH YOU BEFORE YOU GET ANY FEEL THROUGH THE STEERING AND ALSO BEFORE ANY VISUAL CUES ASWELL. You feel the car getting closer to the edge of grip without having to correct cause you can feel it so much earlier, you feel it much earlier. You almost "sub-conciously" lift the throttle once comming close to understeer, you almost sub-consiously do all these things where as in the sims we just barrel roll through the corners (relatively speaking) much harder, then we get all this understeer, or weird behaviour in the backend or whatever, and then we blame the physics model. Also, in reality you also feel the car doing tiny tiny little hip hops, skips and slides, you feel them so much earlier that you can feel them even before the point that you have to make any correction because the slide is so small. Also, in sims, you feel you start understeering, well, once you start understeering (or just a tiny bit before if your really good), but in real life you can feel that you will start understeering soon before you are barley understeering and then you start realising your comming closer to understeer and so your prepared to start lifting or trail braking more or doing whatever to help with the understeer. These are just examples, not exact cases, but you get my drift. The only way we can ever have all this as simmers is if we create some magical motion cockpit without lag, that can simulate up to 6ish g's, can simulate inertia, etc etc etc which is many many many many years away. (Time it takes computer to simulate the physics, time it takes to send it to motion cockpit, cockpit has to read the info, send that to the actuators they have to start moving etc etc etc so much lag (relatively speaking). So really the perfect physics engine ever created should be harder for us gamers to drive than in real life. People just dont seem to understand this, even when comming from people that have raced in real life. understeer x 4 on top of eachother wtf what a headache lol
They are kinda all over the place when accelerating, aren't they? They don't have much directional stability to begin with, and heavy acceleration makes the fronts even lighter making the car more prone to veer to the side. A fair bit of it can be curbed with some setup changes (lowering camber to -1 degree or even lower depending on the track (increases grip in straight line situations), increasing toe in on both ends (will naturally try to keep the car on a line better) and increasing diff preload/power setting are my favorites), but mostly you'll just have to be really really careful when accelerating. I usually can't press the gas pedal fully until right before I change to third, and even then I need to be on a straight. What are you comparing them with when you say "obscenely slow"? They will most definitely accelerate faster than the other Formula cars, at least when I'm driving. The key is pretty much to just be light on your feet until you're absolutely sure you can floor it, and being quick with your hands when the car starts to veer. =) Haven't driven the F1 cars for a while (been focusing on testing the updates to the other cars) but gave them a shot on Mid Ohio and Spa. After adjusting the setup a bit they were even more fun than I remembered. =) Eagerly waiting for the update.
Yeah, that is a fair point. End even without a motion rig there will always be some latency to deal with. I've tried to figure out the visual lag of various sims with a high speed camera, and all of them are surprisingly slow. For comparison I really don't want to play FPS shooters or drive racing sims with my HDTV, due to it imposing a 40ms lag (in game mode none the less) compared to my desktop monitors. 40 ms is enough to make rFactor feel very distant when racing normally in a high performance GT1 car, and almost impossible when trying to drift. It's that big of a difference. What I also found was that with my desktop monitor the fastest responding sim I could find was netKar Pro at around 30 ms. Add 40 ms to that and it's 70 ms with the TV. Live For Speed was around 50 ms, and rFactor was between 60 and 70 ms. So rFactor natively has about the same lag as nKP played through a noticeably lagging TV. And I have to admit, played with that much visual lag nKP started to feel much closer to rFactor that I would have expected. But anyway, I think some amount of... let's call it "compensation" from the game engine is allowed to get the car to feel right. If the physics model is as perfect as in your example, it isn't really a simulation of driving the car, it's closer to a simulation of driving the car by remote control with associated lack of feedback and lag between input and output. I really don't mind the game engine being designed to replicate the behavior and feel of the car as it is driven, even if it means some slight compromises with regards to absolutely accurate physics, if the feeling manages to be more in-car than remote control. EDIT: Additionally, I think that crushing all visual lag to it's absolute minimum should be among the most important tasks of any sim dev. Most people seem to comment that the steering in LFS feels more responsive and natural than in rFactor, and also that nKP again feels a bit better than LFS (as a package though rFactor is easily my favorite). Also seeing how pCARS used to have insane visual lag of about 100 ms, and seeing how every single aspect of it felt infinitely better after they brought the visual latency down to around 50-60ms, I really do feel that the reduced lag of LFS and nKP are just about the most important thing why they feel better than rFactor to so many, rather than for example the tyre model (which obviously plays a part, not denying that). Any additional lag is most noticeable when the car is sliding, and how the car handles/feels and how natural it is when sliding are usually the thing most berated by critics of rFactor, and most praised in LFS and nKP.
I just meant unless I really go easy on the throttle at which point I become slow because I'm taking too long to get power down. It's not the end of the world, as I said, I don't mind F2/3, and very few drive the F1's well/at all, so they'll be forgotten about by the majority....and in rf2, all I want to do is MP.
People used to drive the F1 cars a lot sometime ago, but I guess the reason they've migrated towards the F2 and F3 is that few people finished any particular race. Nothing wrong with that, there will be a crowd for them and they'll be enthusiastic about racing them. They're not as bad to drive as GPL was, and there is still a stable player base for that game too. =)
Historic 60's cars are the only thing I drive it's sad there are no servers. Maybe for F3, but never F2 (maybe the most fun to drive, amazing ffb and feeling overall) or F1. I'm lucky to at least have my brother and a couple of stupid AI's for som LAN races I have tested the other mods (megane, GT, new "isi formulas" etc) but I don't find them much fun to drive :/
LOL, yeah crazy....I think that says it all. I'm not asking for anything but realism, I will accept a slightly higher degree of difficultly, but if I can't make sense of what the car's doing, then it becomes a real chore to even bother. The thing that people need to remember is that if a sim player is experienced, then he should at least feel comfortable with a car after he's done some laps/sorted set up, but if a car has either extreme difficulty or something that seems unpredictable, then the effort vs reward ratio tends to go out the window. The argument that only real ife drivers know how to drive isn't so unreasonable, but if you've been sim racing for years and are having trouble, the jigs up, and consider that my complaints against the difficulty of the F3.5 were rectified in b85, but it's not like a GT5 player can now jump in and compete, he must still learn proper racing technique and practice enough so that he feels in control of the car, not the car in control of him. If we were losing 3 or so drivers per year to RL F1 deaths in the 60's, we'd be losing 1000's per day in rf2, and these are often experienced sim racers.
I avoid the F1's because I'm just not good enough with them. In the F2's I'm ok, with the F3's I'm pretty good. That's just my skill level. In the F1's I spin all the time and I ahve a hell of a time controlling them. If I hop on someone's server running F1's, I'm not really being fair to the others on the server because I will wipe someone out!
Just to note, while keeping the cars under control is a handful, if I do mess up I always know what happened, and I always have a sense of what the car is doing. I feel when the front starts to go light and know what to expect and how to counter it. I know when the rear is getting closer to losing grip. I love drifting them. The cars communicate with me all the time, even when blasting down a straight, where modern cars would just obediently follow the line. Even so it's not easy, they require working all of the controls very smoothly. Even real life racing drivers are often uncomfortable in their racing cars. Senna pretty much hated his FW16 Williams, and it did some very unexpected things he never saw coming occasionally. The effort vs reward ratio is totally subjective anyway, for me the F1 cars aren't nearly bad enough to discourage me (the first time I drove them I actually felt relieved because they were easier than in GPL ), I get a huge satisfaction out of racing them. Not every car is predictable, not every car behaves nicely no matter how much you practice with it. Some cars are just plain hard to drive. One example is the Alfa Romeo 8C. It's an Italian sports car with a beautiful engine, gorgeous looks, and every expectation is that it'll be an awesome drive. And in every rFactor mod it has been exactly that. However real life commentators (Ben Collins being the usual suspect) have said that it is one of the worst handling cars in the world. Collins said (word for word) "handles like a wheelbarrow". But I'm not totally satisfied by them. I do feel that they should most likely be more progressive on the edge. Treaded tyres are not as peaky when going over the limit of grip as slick tyres are, and at the moment they feel more like slicks than treaded tyres when sliding. These cars were doing shallow angle four wheel drifts on every lap of the race in some corners, if the cars were this sensitive on the edge I don't think the drivers would have taken that many risks. Hopefully this issue will be sorted when the tyre model and heating are finished. This would make them much easier to drive overall too.
I have essentially zero interest in the historic F1 cars. At this point, rF2 is just a great Megane sim for me, and I'm perfectly okay with that.
I saw some of these 60s cars in the flesh yesterday at Brands Hatch, including a couple I swear are in RF2 (pics to come). Seeing the real drivers and their wheel work through the corners was incredible, gave me a new love for these cars as I've only driven the f3 until now....can't wait to get home and try the others!
I can't help but find the difficulty to drive argument strange. If they were easy, everyone would of done it? Have you ever seen any classic footage of the drivers constantly making steering adjustments? I don't like how the modern F1 cars in rf2 drive, so I don't drive them. I don't see why some of the hardest cars to drive in real life should be made easy for us. Just be glad there is a variety and if you want to carry on driving the 60's cars just practice...
The F1 60's at Spa is still the best simracing experience for me! It's just awesome, when you do this slides in fast cornets in 4th gear!
I think that everyone who has tried and quit the F1's has simply given up too easily. For all the claimed inaccuracies (again , I don't feel quaified to judge) they are not THAT hard to get a handle on. (I come from GPL!) And they're great fun and very satisfying to drive once you do get a feel for them. I guess some folks gravitate to the challenge others shy away. One thing I strongly advise (nothing new here) is to let the track rubber in. I have zero trouble with unexpected or unnatural lack of grip once there is rubber on the track. It's day and night. @Hater, I don't understand why you can't develop the ability to ease onto the throttle without losing it or going "obscenely slow". I must say that one learning hurdle I have to continuously get over is differentiating between how fast I think I should be (or wish I could be) in any particular corner and how fast I can realistically go. And it usually ends up that even though I think I'm unrealistically slow at that point, it is the same for everybody else and so I am still competitive. Also, I'm the kind of sim racer who always starts learning a track by driving as fast as I think I should go, usually over the edge, crashing at every other turn. Then I start dialing back. Obvioisly the opposite of how any RL driver would do it. Maybe your like that too. But even after dailing it back some corners (or brake zones) will continue to plague me. It takes a conscientious mental effort on my part to say to myself "stop dreaming, you just aren't going to be able to do it that way." At which point I dail it way back and go at from the other direction. Hers's some 2 cent advise... just don't throttle down hard until the car is balanced. I can't claim that's realistic or not but it seems reasonable and is consistant with my GPL experiece. One key I read from very fast GPLer's (which I was not) was being able to recognizing that moment (or getting to that moment) of balance as quickly as possible. Obviously fastest back on the throttle will give the fastest lap time. And as for Spa (and the other old dangerous tracks that may be coming), as has been pointed out, I doubt the RL drivers in the day drove as close to the edge as we sim drivers do. The statistics seem to show they did not. And for good reason, they didn't want to die. And yes, while the participation with the F1s is well behind the other mods (the point of this thread) I'm wondering if a number of other GPLer's will migrate once this thing is finished. But I must say I see resistance to that, in that many of these guys are racing on really old HW and don't wish to, or can't afford to upgrade. To all who read this thread regarding F1... keep trying! Delay mastering Spa! You'll get there!
