#4 R2 Corvette C6R - Return to the Leaderboard Cars

[Spiny Anteater]

I'm still going on the random cars, although progress has slowed somewhat in December due to online racing, GT400 testing, HLCs and other distractions. For me, running random cars helps keep the game alive outside of online racing as I get the chance to run a variety of different cars which may or may not be good, and see how they stack up against the others. Snyder has mentioned recently that his interest is starting to wane now the leaderboards are complete, and we lost TJN a while back for similar reasons. I'm hoping (and it's working so far that by running some of the lesser lights there is always the potential to find a surprise and beat my existing times. If I'd just jumped into one of the leaderboard cars straight away that incentive wouldn't be there. I really believe that the random cars are prolonging my enjoyment of the game.

That said, using a random car doesn't preclude the running of a leaderboard car. We saw it with the R4 Audi S4 while other cars have proved their worth in certain area. But, another leaderboard car has reared its head - the #4 Crovette C6R in R2 Class. Granted it gives best to the Saleen on more than half the tracks, but on most of the power circuits it's usually well up there.

So, just how good is it? Well, about 10 months ago I ran the #11 Ferrari and almost got it into the top 100 overall. That position has slipped dramatically as other people have completed their R2 hotlapping. But, I can see how much faster a "leaderboard" car is than a normal car. And the answer is... it's a lot faster.

I've only run the ranking tracks so far, but the Corvette has been faster on every one. The only areas where the Ferrari seems to have an advantage are on the really tight corners, but I feel that the main issues here are turn in and getting the power down. A slightly longer 2nd gear has pretty well solved the traction issue, while I'm content to leave the turn-in as it is as it's not a major issue and any attempts so far to improve this have led to other issues.

As I said, the 'Vette has only been run on the ranking tracks and both ways around the Nissan Speedway, but the improvement is massive. It QR's 3 seconds faster (159.165s vs. 162.189s), while the Power Rank, Flowing Rank and Twisty Rank are 2.5s, 2.5s and 1.5s faster than the Ferrari respectively. Considering that the ranking tracks are short, I can see it knocking somewhere around a minute off my R2 time. It just goes to show (to me anyway) that the Corvette and Saleens are outliers in the R2 Class. 

[Spiny Anteater]

And for the tune... (this is the one I used for the Time Trial at Laguna, although it turned out to be one of my worst tracks in this car)

Tyres: 28/28
FD: 2.44
1-6: 2.25, 1.79, 1.51, 1.35, (1.20), (1.08)
Camber: -1.0/-0.8
Toe: 0/-0.2
Caster: 5.4
ARBs: 20.01/20.01
Springs: 452.1/330.6
Rebound: 7.9/8.6
Bump: 4.0/4.3
Aero: 298/694 (max)
Brakes: 47% Front/105% pressure
Diff: 40/25

Benchmarks:
0-60: 2.941s
0-100: 5.350s
Top Speed: 181.3 mph
60-0: 84.8ft
100-0: 207.9 ft
g's @60: 1.46
g's@100: 1.70

[fndrbndr]

I actually really like this car, LB car or not.  Then again, it did win its class the first year I watched the 12 hours of Sebring (if it's the one I'm thinking of).  Seeing that made me run to the xbox and fire it up...lol

[Spiny Anteater]

It's the newest model (C6) - I'll get the pic up tomorrow with a bit of luck so you can confirm (or otherwise) that it's the one you saw.

It is a surprisingly fun car to drive if you can keep on top of the traction, although it doesn't quite keep up with the Saleen ghost where one exists. That said, it has beaten the Ferrari at every track I've run so far, although surprisingly the 3 tracks where the two cars are closest are New York, Sunset Infield Short and Boomslang (the last one isn't a surprise).

With New York and Boomslang though, it is apparant that the car's greatest strength is also it's greatest weakness - torque. It produces lots of it and from a low rpm so you can run the gears quite far apart, but it can be difficult to get all that torque to the ground in the lower gears. Get that right though, and this car rewards you I'm about halfway through track time wise, and I still think I should end up around a minute ahead of the Ferrari total.

[fndrbndr]

Yeah, the torque can be a bit much on that one.  I tried to run this at Suzuka in the pro series....It went kinda poorly, to say the least.

[Spiny Anteater]

I would have put the tune up, but there was an accident on the A1 tonight and the traffic was horrendous - took me over an hour to get home instead of the usual 15 minute drive. Hopefully I'll get it uploaded tomorrow. When I do, you'll see that I have counteracted the torque with high gearing - it will reach 100mph in 1st and 130mph in 2nd. You still have to be careful on the throttle in 1st but at least it doesn't always try to kill you. In 2nd it's much more tractable once you're going - in fact for Boomslang I ran the whole lap in 2nd.

In the meantime though, the pic is up. At least you can tell whether it's the Corvette you thought it was

[fndrbndr]

That's the one!

[Spiny Anteater]

Finally got around to updating the tune for anyone still reading It looks like I'm on target to beat that Ferrari by a minute, although it will be close.

The tune is for the Time Trial at Laguna, although the car has gone better at the more flowing tracks, and struggled most where traction is important. Best track so far is Copperhead Reverse where it did surprisingly well (for me) with the tune above, only with altered gearing.

[Spiny Anteater]

And it's done, and a quick comparison to the Ferrari just shows that the idea of "leaderboard cars" is genuine, although it should be said that any car needs a leaderboard driver to get right to the top. But overall the Corvette was over a minute faster than the Ferrari, and that jump cannot all be put down to an improvement in driver ability over the months.

To show just how much better the Corvette was, it went faster than the Ferrari on every single track with the standard deviation (admittedly not the best stat when there's only 2 variables as I'm sure fndr will point out ) being between 0.27% [New york Reverse] and 1.85% [Copperhead Reverse]. Strange as it seems considering the huge amount of torque and power in the Corvette, it was the power tracks where it seemed to struggle most, even though the stats suggest it's the twisty tracks. Or rather, as mentioned earlier, it was the tracks which required it to accelerate out of slow corners where the torque caused problems.

Still, the times (with the Ferrari in brackets to make the comparison):

Overall: 1h 3m 5.681s (1h 4m 10.431s)
QR: 159.175s (162.189s)
PR: 162.765s (165.378s)
FR: 123.459s (125.896s)
TR: 123.987s (125.631s)

[fndrbndr]

That's a pretty impressive difference.  So at least in the R# classes, the LB phenomenon is real.  Have you had similar results with production cars?  I wonder because during GT400 testing, where I ran several cars on the entire schedule of tracks.  A couple of cars were noticeably better than others as all-arounders.

[Spiny Anteater]

I must admit that this is the first time I've come across such a stark leaderboard car phenomenon.

Then again, in R1 I've only run 2 cars over the full set of tracks (13 seconds difference) and the same in R3 (15 seconds). In both of those cases though, no one car dominated on all tracks like the Corvette did here. But, in both those other classes, we were talking about "normal" cars as opposed to the one normal and one leaderboard car here.

Another aspect that we could look at is the QR, and it's validity as a predictor of overall times. I keep meaning to run a comparison between QR and overall, to see how accurate that prediction is. As a predictor or rank it seems pretty good. I'm thinking of trying to get some calcs running to see how good a predictor of time it is, but that's for another thread.

And the reason for all this waffle is that I don't know the answer to the production car question. I haven't run a complete set of times at all for B, S or U Classes, while I only have a complete set for one car in D ('07 Civic), C (Infiniti) and A (Spirra) Classes. So, I can't give a definitive answer, but if the QR is good, then I can give a strong hint.

Looking at D Class, it's pretty obvious that the Trans Am should be the fastest at the power tracks (and it is by 3 seconds). But, looking at the individual rankings (PR, FR, TR), the 2000GT should be way faster than the other cars as it has the fastest flowing and twisty ranks and is second only to the Trans Am in the power rank. And yet, despite some pretty large time gaps on those ranks to the Civic and Stratos it is only about a second quicker in the QR compared to those two and has a slower QR than the Trans Am.

Now, if the QR is accurate, that would suggest that, in D Class at least, even very unbalanced cars are equal when the full set of tracks are taken into account. Of course, there is another aspect to this - my QR's are not run with the same tune which should negate the usefulness of this. So it is perhaps surprising that they QR times are so similar. Even more noticeably, the two slowest cars (Civic and Stratos) are those which started very close to the class limit and so had very little which could be done to them. I suspect that there woudl be very little to choose between the cars at all if they had been run in the same build.

So, for now, and in view of the fact that the 2000GT is a bit of a leaderboard car in some places, I'd suggest that the PI system is broadly accurate as an overall indicator. In fact, when you rank the cars by PI, you can see that some of the race cars have differing PIs within each class, and that could be why we're seeing "leaderboard cars" in the race classes.

[fndrbndr]

I've wondered about that last point (variable PI in the R classes) as well.  I wish the formula for PI would be made public, assuming it is indeed mathematically derived.  Of course, some combination of physicists, statisticians, computer modelers, and other geek types would get hold of it and figure out how to abuse it....

[Snyder005]

I've wondered about that last point (variable PI in the R classes) as well.  I wish the formula for PI would be made public, assuming it is indeed mathematically derived.  Of course, some combination of physicists, statisticians, computer modelers, and other geek types would get hold of it and figure out how to abuse it....

yeah, because you can notice the difference in stats between say the R3 Audi and the R3 Viper, a big difference, which could be a good 30 or so PI. 

[Spiny Anteater]

I'll need to double check next time I'm on, but I'm pretty certain that the PI for R4 varies betweeen 930 and 956. When you think how much of a difference 25 points makes to the production cars, it's no wonder some cars are faster than others.