Hi girls und guys, last weekend we had a race with our community, GTE at Spa 60 Minutes. 2 Laps to go, i received a drive-through penalty. At that time, i was in second place 5 seconds behind the leader. I decided to finish the race without going through the box. This will give a 25 second penalty. At the race end, the sim gave me a 25 second penalty as expected and also a lap was subtracted, so i finished in 8th place. Wtf. Logfile: xxx finished before serving penalty fore serving penalty, subtracted 1 lap and adjusted totalET because lapped vehicle within 25 seconds was detected As already said i finished right behind the leader in the same lap. The subtraction of a lap is a bug, that made me very upset. Another driver did the same an he only was given a 25 second penalty. Any guesses?
I attached the log-file. I renamend the xml-file to txt because xml-files are not allowed... Driver 7 received the penalty.
If you have the replay, check the lap 8. The crossing of the sector 3 is missing. I don't remember if it's at the beginning or the final of the lap, then check from the final of the lap 7 to the beginning of the lap 9. Check if you have an off track. If it's the case, could be that there is an error in the XObjects of the circuit and you have jumped one of them.
@Oliver Almkicker I think it's fairly obviously a bug, but I'll give a multi-part answer as it may help explain what the game was intending to achieve (even if it did it wrong). First, my understanding of the situation from a quick look is this: Driver 6 wins the race. Driver 7 finishes second, with an unserved penalty, with Driver 8 a lap down and within 25s (of Driver 7). Driver 3 finishes the race with an unserved penalty but has no cars a lap down within 25 seconds. What you're probably expecting is what I think is commonly done, for example in F1: time penalties applied post-race, where the number of completed laps doesn't change but the finishing time does. As far as I know (and I just checked the F1 sporting regs without finding anything different) even if the leader finishes the race with a pending time penalty there are no special provisions for lap subtraction or countbacks. So you're on solid ground there, but that doesn't mean it's what the game tries to do. What can happen, is a car failing to serve a penalty directly stops a following car potentially challenging their position. For example, a car winning the race will mean that another car 1 lap down and immediately behind cannot start the last lap - their race ends as soon as they cross the line, as the winner already ended the race. Had the leader served their penalty that second car would have been able to continue driving (the car 1 lap ahead would have dropped behind, so now they're no longer a lap down) and complete the last lap, and depending on lap length and relative lap times that could mean they would have challenged for the race win. By the same token, a car just ahead of the leader will complete an extra lap if they don't serve a penalty, putting them a lap ahead (and out of reach) of a following car if no lap adjustments are made post-race. As you can probably imagine this sort of thing can get messy very quickly, but depending what happens in those last laps (damage etc) the act of avoiding serving a penalty can lead to a tangible gain, and in effect nullify the penalty completely. I've personally been adjudicating a league and seen enough examples of this sort of thing to warrant doing a countback when unserved penalties exist at race end. It's certainly not what happens in real life (at least in race series I've watched) but sometimes in amateur competitions people take advantage of regulations in relatively unsporting ways and there isn't the scrutiny and reputational risk of real life racing series so you need a heavier hand. It's also worth pointing out this sort of situation will occur much more with shorter laps, so oval racing especially. I suspect the game has some elements more suited to oval racing than the big european series because of its North American base. (I haven't looked into NA series regulations to see if any of this sort of thing is written in, and don't even know if any equivalent penalties exist) Now, while I think that's the reason for that message shown in the log, it certainly appears to have been applied incorrectly based on my understanding of the situation as above. But maybe that at least helps explain the message. Any league admin should have some sort of policy on this sort of thing and will need to correct the logs and results accordingly, as in many situations the game does some strange stuff. Unfortunately penalties aren't able to be vetted through the plugin interface or this sort of thing could be handled in a much neater, and series-specific, fashion.
Thanks for your good explaination. This all makes sense for the leader. I was in 2nd place, so the time penalty will have no effect on the race length of lapped drivers. Only the driver in 1st place is relevant. So its a bug as you say.
The same happened to me yesterday while on P1, got smashed back to P10 https://forum.studio-397.com/index.php?threads/after-race-penalty-bug.70795/
