BayouRally

Well, that didn't last long. 1st stage went OK. 2nd stage I slipped off the outside of a hairpin left (I hate hairpins) and got high-centered on the snowbank. I did what I usually do in such circumstance in real life, switching from forward to reverse while rocking the wheels. And after a bit of that, it said I was disqualified. End of event. Oh well. You all will have to do without crawfish this time 😉

I reckon a wild hog. I keep hoping to see roos in Oz

Thanks for the info. I was just going by the number of bars in durability shown in the game. Hards have all 3, mediums have 2, softs and wets have 1. Also, I was kinda roleplaying with this. But if there's no rule against going with whatever works, then I'll downsize my tires from here on 🙂 Ahem. I only barely kissed the walls twice. Unless you consider ALL my driving 1 big mistake start-to-finish, with which I'd agree 😄

I'm really confused about tires. I read about how they don't wear out as fast as they should so it's OK to use soft (or wet, which has the same low durability as soft). But I haven't played enough to really have a feel for it yet, and I'm trying to minimize risk in this thing, so I'm going conservative. I did all the long stages on hards. Didn't notice any real difference in grip between dry and wet roads, no doubt because I don't drive fast enough 😄 But I did use wets for the final, short stage.

Yay, you made it! Still some crawfish left, don't know about the beer. What tire compound did you use? Do you think it might just have worn out after 3 stages?

Y'all are as bad as Jay Leno and Billy Gibbons 🙂

First I had to look up what "unexpected events" are. Now that I know, I can report I've always seen a fair amount of them in all aspects of the rally side of the game (events, freeplay, and club). I've seen plenty of wrecked and smoking rally cars along the sides of roads, at least, and also had a close encounter with a drone or 2. Haven't noticed any wildlife (although I thought the drone was a bird until I saw the replay). Also seen small rocks and chunks of snow/ice fall into the road from the cliff above, and I could have sworn some drunk spectator threw a beer bottle at me once. Is that even a thing? Anyway, this is a new install from the end of March.

@UnderclassGDfan thanks for the info. I hope someday to reach that level 😉

I'm trying to get the most realistic sim experience here, which has led me to ponder the assist settings in DR2. All through my brief DR2 life so far, I've had them all off on the advice of experienced drivers. However, because I'm new at this, I didn't know anything about all the classes/groups of cars in the game, so I started reading the FIA regulations that define what they are, just so I'd know what I was looking at. In so doing, I also discovered that the cars of DR2 span a large swath of time, when different regulations applied. Sometimes VERY different. The rules for the current generation of top-end WRC cars (which aren't in DR2 anyway) explicitly ban ABS and traction control, but this was not the case a few years ago, and we have plenty of cars from earlier eras. As for other classes/groups, the rules allow ABS if the homologized car has it, although it can be removed. In addition, all the rules require "mechanical, limited slip" differentials, which were invented specifically to provide a degree of traction control, although they can't have electric or hydraulic components. It seems other "assists" were also allowed at various times for various types of cars but these are the ones I'm focusing on now. So, my questions are as follows: 1. Does the game keep track of all this itself? IOW, if a car was built under different rules than today (so had various assists), does the game include those in the basic performance modeling of the car, so even if you have the assists off, you still get some of their effects in specific cars that had them? If so, then I can quit worrying about this. Leave assists off and you'll have realism. 2. If not, then wouldn't it be more realistic to set your assists differently for specific cars? This would entail researching which cars had which assists, then trying to decide how much of a setting to use. Then there's the question of even if the street car had ABS, would the race crew have disabled it? 3. Either way, shouldn't most cars have some amount of traction control due to the mandated limited slip differentials? Or is that already handled by the game itself? This is all so complicated to the uninitiated 🙂 Thanks for the knowledge.

Thanks for the info, @IgorPr This sort of research is something I dread having to do because I don't know anything about the cars to begin with, unlike the devoted followers of the sport.

@UnderclassGDfan answered this better than I could. You might also read a thread called "Tyre Strategy" that explains how the tire wear model is not as drastic as you might think. I only use hard tires in the forum's DRC club because the format there is 3 longs, service, 3 longs, service, 1 short. However, I'm a noob being cautious. More experienced club members report getting along fine with mediums. I'm leery of wet tires because their durability is the same as soft tires. The club is currently in Spain and it's raining a lot. Despite this, I used hards for all the long stages and only put wets on for the last, short stage. I found the hard grip on wet pavement adequate as I wasn't going very fast anyway, being a noob 😉 Yeah, this confused me a lot, too. All the things on the Events tab use cars from your garage. Once you enter one of these events, that car is unavailable for other events until it completes the event it's in. So, dailies have only 1 stage, so any car used in them are available again immediately. Weeklies have multiple stages and monthlies have multiple events each of multiple stages, as do the career championships. You can grind out a weekly in 1 sitting if you have the time and the servers are up, but the careers and monthlies will take you days to complete, and the cars you use for them are unavailable for the duration.

Yay! Just in time for the 2nd batch of crawfish, which is an order of magnitude spicier than the 1st. Hope you brought some beer 🙂

Thinking about this some more, it seems to me that real rallies last only 3-4 days with multiple stages per day, at different times all through each day. Real weather patterns frequently last that long. So to me, the realistic options are for an entire multi-stage rally to be either all rainy/wet with overcast, or all dry (clear and/or overcast), or change only once between these 2. It would be silly if consecutive stages alternated several times during the rally, as most of these stages are happening on the same 1 or 2 days. That said, I've been from Land's End to John O' Groats and back on the opposite diagonal, plus to quite a few surrounding islands, over a number of trips to the UK. These trips have happened at all times of the year, for weeks at a stretch. And it's rained on me pretty much continuously everywhere, whenever I've been there, unless it was sleeting instead. I have come to the conclusion that every calendar with 12 pictures of lovely UK scenery under sunshine must have taken 12 years each to compile. Further, I regard as total BS any and all theories that Stonehenge and the many other megalithic circles scattered about the place had anything whatsoever to do with solar or lunar observations, because their builders couldn't see more than bottoms of rainclouds except once or twice per generation, far too infrequently to work out a calendar. Hell, they probably regarded the occasional appearances of the sun and moon as decidedly ill omens 😄 I might be exaggerating slightly, but I live in a semi-tropical jungle where it rains quite a lot, and I thought it rained much more in the UK.

No problems this evening at all, during times when for the last couple days I've had major connection problems. Thanks for the hard work.

AFAIK, you can have as many as you can afford, until you collect them all. And you usually start out with BUCKETS of credits with the all-inclusive versions of the game being released now., HOWEVER, don't go blowing all your cash on filling up your garage. You have more important things to buy first. Like training your team. Also be aware that except for the H1 Lancia Fulvia and the RX S1600 Opel Corsa, none of the cars you start out owning, or buy later, can be tuned until you spend a fair chunk of change on the upgrade that allows this. And you'll also want to upgrade their components to reduce wear. And also, all the other cars except the Fulvia and Corsa cost money to repair, and you can't upgrade their engines until you've driven them a fair amount. So, I would recommend being slow on buying cars you don't already own. Just get one every few days to a week or so, in a class you're particularly interested in and need for a daily, then upgrade it to allow tuning, have better parts, etc. Meanwhile, focus on training your team and upgrading cars you already own. You can usually do at least 1, maybe 3 dailies per day with the cars you start with, and just completing them in last place will, after a couple days, bring in enough credits to buy another car or upgrade one you already have.

I believe everything my codriver says even when I misunderstand, don't understand, or just didn't listen because I was dealing with the cascading consequences of a previous misunderstanding. I'm crazy that way. So when this happens, it's all his fault, obviously 😄. To get back at him, I tell him some line of BS. And because we're obligate symbiotes, he believes everything I say, even when it's total BS. He's stupid that way 😄

YAY! Hope you like crawfish and brought some beer 🙂

If you say so, but on my department's oldest firetrucks, which have stupid hydraulic instead of air brakes, loss of hydraulic pressure is the same as loss of air pressure with airbrakes: the parking brakes come on. Except with airbrakes you have 30 seconds or so to make a controlled stop as the storage tank bleeds down. With hydraulics, you only have pressure as long as the lines are intact and the pump's turning. Lose either, and the parking brakes come on INSTANTLY. This is rather annoying when it happens at 70mph 😄

Yay! Been looking forward to this!

I dunno. I did a daily on Tuesday in Spain, in the rain, at night.

I don't think that's the direction they're going, as the whole system can be disabled and apparently they'll still have manual transmissions. If you've got a manual transmission, you can't really have the electric motor turning the engine on and off at will. The motors I figure should last at least a full season if not more. But yeah, the batteries are going to be a concern. They'll definitely need to be in an armored box to prevent punctures from debris and also to contain any fire that might happen.

Well, there's this.... https://auto.howstuffworks.com/28000-traction-control-explained.htm

That's a good rule--I see the logic of it-- and it makes me feel better 😉 I'm not playing to win, I'm here for the camaraderie and just hoping to survive and gradually get better over a long period of time. Besides, I missed the 1st 1/3 or so of the season anyway. While I've got your attention, I want to thank you personally for all your excellent set-up and other tutorial videos. They've been a big help to me. Please make more 🙂

I did some more research on the 2022 hybrid system. While the full technical specs for cars ain't out yet, the general gist of the matter is already decided. And it's rather strange. The new cars will be more like the early hybrids from 20 years ago than a Prius from even 9 years ago like mine (let alone today). For them as don't follow EV/hybrid tech, here's a little background. Back around the year 2000, some very simple hybrids came out. This generation was basically normal production cars--same engine, same transmission and drivetrain, all that. The only difference was, they had a small, disk-shaped electric motor inserted between the engine and transmission (plus a "medium-voltage" battery around 60V, and a simple regenerative braking system to keep the battery charged). The engine wasn't on/off nor cranked by the electric motor, and the control system for the hybrid part was pretty basic. So, these cars operated to all intents and purpose the same as they're non-hybrid contemporaries. The only difference was that some of their kinetic energy was saved when they stopped instead of all radiating away as brake heat, and then could be fed back into the powertrain, allowing the engine not to work as hard when accelerating again. This seems to be what the 2022 WRC R1 cars will be like. They will be required to use the hybrid system on the transport stages and when putting around in the service areas (IOW, all low-speed operation). However, during actual race stages, the electric motor will mostly be disengaged, but can be turned on for a limited period to provide a boost in horsepower/torque. IOW, kinda like turning nitrous on and off. So for the most part, the cars will still work the same as now (meaning they'll still sound the same), they just have to lug around the extra weight of the hybrid system, which is mostly for low-speed, non-racing conditions. This all makes me wonder, "why bother?"

It's a real shame about the servers. They're going up and down at irregular intervals. so it's all luck of the draw if they happen to be up when you've got the time to play. I was lucky on the timing so got to do this event, but others won't be able to through no fault of their own, which is disappointing for everybody, not just those directly impacted. How can I see just how bad I am if most drivers can't play? 😄 The really disappointing thing, however, is that if the servers keep enough people out of this event, I might get some points by default, which I would feel like I stole. So actually, my "oil leak" makes me feel better, ensuring that I'll be properly last place in a limited field. I mean, if everybody was playing and I did NOT have the "oil leak", I'd be last of the finishers anyway, I'm sure, so the "oil leak" would have cost me nothing. Last by an extra few minutes is still last 😉