When DiRT Rally launched, it carried over all of the leagues from GRID Autosport. This includes a Giant Bomb league I created on a stupid whim, Gran Turismo joke and all. That Gran Turismo/FIA joke doesn't even make sense in this solo racing context.

Sure, OK. That's weird, but whatever. We might as well roll with this.

How to Join

1. Go to https://www.dirtgame.com and sign into your RaceNet account.
2. Go to the Leagues section, select Find a League, and search for Giant Bomb. Alternatively, just go here: https://www.dirtgame.com/uk/leagues/league/4916/giant-bomb
3. Join. Maybe race in our league. I don’t know. Do whatever you’d like. Events will happen as long as there's interest.

Current Season

Season 12: Giant Bomb Dirt Rally CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION!

That´s right. 4 weeks of rallying with each week gaining you championship points towards an overall standing - the winner will be crowned at the end of April!

Week 1 - The Blizzard Controversy

This one's all about the rear...wheel drive. And Blizzards.

• CARS: Group B RWD
• STAGES: 6
• REGIONS: Sweden/Monaco
• SERVICE: S4
• CONDITIONS: A lot of snow.
• CHANCES OF SURVIVAL: meh.

Week 2 - Fairweather Friends

A long summer day.

• CARS: 1970s
• STAGES: 6
• REGIONS: Greece/Germany
• SERVICE: S4
• CONDITIONS: Sun!
• CHANCES OF SURVIVAL: good.

Week 3 - Those damn millennials...

They just wanna be high and fly.

• CARS: 2000s
• STAGES: 6
• REGIONS: Finland
• SERVICE: S4
• CONDITIONS: slowly improving.
• CHANCES OF SURVIVAL: alright.

Week 4 - The Dark Below

Don't lose your head...lights. I'm getting really tired of these bad descriptions.

This is long and brutal. It's the finale after all.

• CARS: 2010s
• STAGES: 6
• REGIONS: Everything.
• SERVICE: S4
• CONDITIONS: nocturnal racing experience.
• CHANCES OF SURVIVAL: could be better? could be worse.

Past Winners

• Season 1, The Beginning: PsEG/Zeg (tie)
• Season 2, Modern Reset: jmacdoug
• Season 3, Audi Service: LaJm
• Season 4, Just Climb: MajikMouse
• Season 5, Weekly Challenge 1: Zeg
• Season 6, A Song of Ice and Fog: WooDooUK
• Season 7, The Welsh Mudslide: CasinoGhost
• Season 8, Be Brave Into Crest, Into Crest, Over Crest: WooDooUK
• Season 9, The Greek Gravel Graveyard: WooDooUK
• Season 10, Q3DM17: WooDooUK
• Season 11, Rapid Fire: jjd

I think the current composition of short and longer stages works well with service every 2 stages or before location changes.

You could throw in more extreme weather, as for resets let people have them since its all in good fun, anyways keep up the good work and keep racing.

It seems like everyone is going for the Fiesta this round.

I like the MINI, it feels weighty and stable, even if it also feels slow.

I do like the Wales tracks the most, being from Gwent; The forest roads give me flashbacks to pleasant walks in the times of my youth. I always appreciate that all Codemasters games differentiate English, Scottish, Welsh and British flags, I can't think of any other game developer that gives you anything other than generic "UK" as a nationality choice.

I also find it baffling that Vinny likes Torchwood, and sees it as a great Welsh export. It is terrrriiiiiibbbblllle.

Retries, Huh? That's unfortunate.

(for the record, I know you're not a fan as well)

Damn I didn't even notice the retries. I ended up getting a flat about a minute in to a pretty long stage, and limped all the way through.

I made that critical mistake on the 5th course this week. Fuck.

I was wondering where that retry button came from (and where my points went haha)... I kinda like committing to whatever may happen though, so I'll probably just refrain from using the retries regardless.

It was almost certainly just fast adaptation that let me do as well as I did the first rounds though. I think I'm not actually better than average at driving games.

Speaking of retries, I'm going to go ahead and put this out there, so nobody feels shafted for not knowing when they still have time to run.

Aurahack discovered on his stream earlier that using "Save and Quit" in the middle of a bad run on a stage will allow you to repeat that stage without consequence. That definitely shouldn't be the case; if anything, it should force you onto the next stage with the maximum time applied to the stage that was quit out on.

So yeah, unless this is a consequence of allowing event restarts (doubtful), sounds like we have unlimited stage retries until Codemasters fixes this. Go nuts, y'all.

Just out of personal interest (and after me jumping in to do some proper research into car setups), does anyone have a particular driving style that they tweak their car towards?

I've discovered that I actually quite like to set my cars to intentionally have a hearty bit of understeer (regardless of terrain); I find it easier to control at high speeds with foot breaking without causing excessive roll, and when I do want oversteer, I will tap-dance on the handbrake for 0.1 second fractions to nudge the rear around corners in low gears. I've found this revelation has slashed 15 seconds off of my clean lap-times, so it's worth self-analysing how you drive also!

I should say that I play using an Xbox One controller, so I find fine use of opposite lock to balance oversteer difficult without a racing wheel.

Also, manual transmission 4 lyfe. I could not survive without engine braking, or experiencing because of my own hand, the satisfying *thunk* sound of the gear changes in the '95 Subaru.

I kinda feel awful about that, tbh. I'm down for full event retries but being able to reset individual stages made it a lot less stressful.

Hey! Haven't posted in the forums before, I don't think, but I joined the league for some hot off-road action!

@casinoghostt: I generally prefer understeer but the amount differ from location to location, most in Monaco less in Wales and closer to neutral in Greece. I have found nailing the suspension set up have given me the most gains but I'm still losing to much time in the medium-slow corners.

@casinoghostt: Unless I'm missing something, I actually like the default setup of the Mini Countryman, with exception of modifying the gear ratios to be a lot shorter. I've found this to be a common trend among all cars and their default setups though. Too much doddling around in the 1st and 2nd gears when the action should be in 2nd to 4th.

For what it's worth I set a decent time for this Season 2 and placed 2nd overall as of time of this posting - I have no idea how Aura-Shin-hye posted almost a full minute difference from my time - I'll just assume he's the living spirit of Colin McRae himself.

New to the site, and just requested to join the league.

Did a custom event last night in the Stratos.

@Trace: Are you having any issues creating a new event for the league on the Dirt website? A separate league I've got going with friends can't seem to create new events anymore, just curious if this is more widespread or not - surprisingly nothing in the Steam community forums says otherwise.

@heatdrive88 said:

They've always said I was part Scottish. (I'm not.) I think I gained most of my time in the hairpins. I tried my best to Scandinavian Flick my way through 'em and it seems to have worked pretty well.

I haven't had any problems, but a suggestion: When creating events, always make sure the start time's somewhere in the future. If you take the default start time it gives you on the site, it'll be in the past by the time you save the season settings, and it'll fail to save anything as a result. Kind of sucks.

Anyways, my apologies for the delay in setting up season 3 -- bit behind the ball this week due to a business trip. This one's back to evil stuff. Be careful out there.

Just joined the league, will be interested to see how real people compare to the AI drivers. Also Codemasters just issued the first big (5.1GB to be exact) update, details here.

Hey guys, don't frequent the forums much, but I just joined the league in season 4. Good luck all

How often do seasons change? Or did the league play get busted with the recent update? Looking forward to the next rally with some of the new stages from tarmac terrors.

@Trace Yeah Im interested to try out some league play! When is a new season going to start!

Any interest in restarting this league? I've been getting way into Dirt Rally over the holiday.

@datarez: Check out the NeoGAF League. There are a decent amount of people playing and it's updated regularly. I hope someone brings the GB one back to life, but this has been good in the meantime.

I've given a few league members I trust the rights to create seasons for the GB league. It sounds like I'll be waiting forever for any non-hillclimb cars to get the right to challenge Pikes Peak, given how the game apparently sets all this up physics-wise, and I'm not interested in continually setting up events that can't ever subvert the usual Dirt Rally structure, especially with the garbage league tools.

Stay tuned here if anything develops, perhaps!

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!

I'm looking forward to total some 1980's cars into some trees!!!

Let's do this. RALLY HYPE!

Thanks @Trace and @iron1c! I'm in 100%

I hit a rock really hard and killed my car :(

Hi chaps.

Just finished my rally. Looks like I'm the only one so far.

I'm happy to see this revived though, and I hope there's more interest.

I had a couple of good stages and a couple of really bad stages, but at least I finished. Only 4 minutes off the pace :P (lost 2.5 minutes just on the final stage with some huge barrel rolls)

I'm 6 stages in, but wow... the first 2 were really tricky, I forgot how to drive a RWD car on wet tarmac. I was lucky to finish them with just a few scrapes.

I need to get back to this game and this league!

Now the game crashed twice in the first Finland stage, making me repeat stages 5 and 6. Welp, at least is fun.

Edit: Just finished the Challenge, ended up driving 80% of the last stage on 3 wheels and just a few seconds off the pace. Not too shabby.

I finished. We'll say that was an achievement after what happened in the last stage.

I saw this was back up when I was doing my friends league at the weekend.

I did alright until the last stage (of course). Beached it and had a meeting with a wood pile.

Though in an earlier stage I did get away with some ridiculous luck:

I'm still terrible at the Finland stages. That dropped me a good number of places after a puncture repair and several crashes. Still, happy to hang on through that many races in a RWD car.

Bottom of the charts! I guess I'm glad to have survived though after coming into this pretty raw - played about an hour when this game launched on Early Access and then jumped straight into this after reinstalling.

Wait... you can repair punctures?

@lobster_johnson: Yeah. If you stop, you'll get a prompt to repair it, but it does come with a significant time penalty.

Well that's good to know; there's nothing worse than when your co-driver calls out a puncture 2 corners into a 14km stage.

Here are your winners for Week 1! Unfortunately neither the site nor the game shows the actual times after finishing, because it is still bad.

So, prepare for....

THE GIANT BOMB DIRT RALLY WEEKLY CHALLENGE EPISODE 2 - A SONG OF ICE AND FOG

I am really sorry about this. This week features the 2010 cars on all of Monaco Route 2 and Sweden Route 2. All conditions are very bad + you only get service 3 times: halfway through Monaco, at the start of Sweden and halfway through Sweden. Just...survive. It'll be enough for a good position.

This actually hasn't been as bad as expected. I'm half way through with minimal damage and haven't had to take any recovery penalties (although I have spun my car 180 degrees a few times and had to waste time turning around). I have been pretty cautious though, so I'm sure some more adventurous drivers will probably be able to surpass my times...assuming the risk pays off and they don't die.

Be careful with that R3 near the start of some of those Monaco stages. I came really close to eating it on that every time

I did not get very far

Almost took myself out by catching air and landing on top of a boulder in Sweden (so many bumps!), but I managed to hold it together long enough to make it through to the end.

@khann: I pretty much did the exact same thing today with one of the Group B cars in the monthly :(

1st so far, but as usual Sweden completely got the better of me. That last stage was just one long, terrifying blur of snow, cracked windscreen, and half heard pace notes.

Phew this is a long one. Monte Carlo I just went through to survive, but actually felt good in the non-ice parts. But Sweden I was able to keep on it. Did have a big moment though. Survived and kept on going though.