IroN1c

Hi everyone! As @Trace already mentioned, we are looking to get the league going again. To see how much interest there actually is, we'd like to conduct a field experiment. I present you...

The Giant Bomb Dirt Rally Weekly Challenge

"What is this?" you ask? Well, as you can probably guess by the name, it is a week long Dirt Rally event. It'll run from this Wednesday to next week.

The Details:

7 days to complete. 8 Stages. Rally Germany Route1 + 2 Special Stages of Finland. 1980s RWD cars. Fastest time wins! No restarts! Service every two stages.

What has changed since last time? Codemasters has finally made it possible to disable upgraded career cars, same for the engineers. So everyone will be on the same level, regardless of singleplayer progress. Yay! We hope this'll get some participation. If it does, we'll run events more often. The rally starts at 6pm Eastern/ 3pm Pacific. Happy offroading!

This is a good book that actually uses a lot of "real" examples rather than just theory, somthing I always prefer.

Cool, thanks for giving away a copy! Hopefully I'll have some luck.

GT: fLx IroN1c

Setup can be found here, pretty sure the first one (just Daytona24h) is the one you want. The second one has changes that are...experimental. I just looked at other setups and what they primarily changed and then tried to combine those things into what we need. It's definitely not there yet, but like @slowbird said we preferred it to the baseline. Also: unfortunately the traction control in the Ford is junk. You lose A LOT of time, even on the lowest setting. I'll probably still run TCS during the race, but keep that in mind while setting times for hotlapping/practice/quali.

@mordukai: Oh, yeah, I second this. The stock strings on my old guitar were complete crap. I thought they were fine until I had to replace them because one string snapped. It was a revelation.

I started playing guitar with Rocksmith and yes, the beginning is overwhelming and I had the same issues as you do regarding strings and chords and thought it was impossible to actually do the 60-day challenge - but I managed to 100% a song by the end of it (god, do I sound like an ad). Anyway, this is what has helped me:

Try playing bass for a bit. Yes, you can play bass with a guitar (enable Bass Emulation in the options), its usually a bit slower paced and has more single notes and less chords, also a lot of songs have repetitive bass patterns which helps to get into a groove. Also two strings less to worry about.

Play the easy songs and don't be ashamed. "Angela" and "Next Girl" were the two songs I was able to 100% relatively quickly, they're both RS1 imports though. Especially "Next Girl" is a great beginner songs, it only uses three strings, no chords and doesn't even have a solo.

And as everyone already said: Practice, practice, practice. The human brain is a weird thing. You'll find yourself completely failing at a song, then go to sleep and whoops, next day you're doing much better.

Edit: And yeah, chords were kind of a brick wall for me for the longest time. Then they just happened and I was able to do them without issue.

@mouse: fast laps are around 1:45:xxx in 24°C weather during practice sessions. Race laps should be around 1:48:xxx with fuel,traffic and everything. Basically: Under 1:50:xxx and you're fine.

I'd like to be in a split where we are competitive, rather than being last and alone in a "clean" split. I NEED EXCITEMENT (and drama).

@khann: I dunno, if you lock up (not that that ever happens in the Prototype) and cut the bus stop you can take a pretty big bump sometimes.

I'll update my times during the weekend and will be there for most of it and promise not to get super fucking drunk this time.

GG iRacing. 43 GT3 cars, I assume.