The Purfekt Garage

[Blooze]

One of the things I have found is that one needs to perform a sort of Pareto, or ABC analysis on his Forza efforts.  You know, the old Bell Curve - where the Y axis is Elapsed Time, per Track, per Class, or Overall, and the X axis is effort, say in man-hours.  Now, judging by what I see on the leaderboards, the most common condition is "Piss on it" and start up a war game and toss Mr. T bombs around. 

Next would be to take a stock car for the class and to run a "One and Done" on the track.  Minimalist effort for the most improvement.  1740 seconds off for 60 seconds effort.  If you did that for every track in every class, you would wind up fairly close to the top, mostly cause there are a big bunch of the "Piss on it" kinds of guys.

From there it sort of depends on what kind of guy you are, and let me guarantee you this - I make no judgements here.  You can put an hour into tuning and practice and knock maybe 10 seconds off.  Another hour and maybe get another 2 seconds.  But it won't take long and you are dealing with multiple hours to get a tenth.  When is enough enough?  Sooner or later you have to draw a line.

My line is "failure to improve in two straight 5 lap races".  That is when I decide that I have this car as good as it is going to get at this time, and I move on.

I guess what I am saying is, we all have to draw a line - "this is the amount of effort I am willing to expend towards this result." - and then learn to live with it. 

And the result will be the perfect garage for you at this time...

$

[TheJohnNewton]

I guess I tend to be the "I know I can shave another couple tenths off" guy and then the next thing I know it's 3 hours later and I may or may have shaved that tenth off. 

[barumba]

Interesting discussion, the last few posts. I found myself doing the same thing since signing on to the Let's Chase Blooze. I went back to F, ran a bunch of laps on the tracks I had "missed" and re-run most of the one's I had posted a time. I found I was able to improve my personal times (I think that's redundant) on some tracks in some cars after a number of laps. I was still off the top 1000 in some cases, so persisted. Tried different tunes, different cars, but even though I may have improved, could not get above the top 1000, or even a previous best time, again in some cases. So, after beating my head against the wall on more than one occasion, I finally resolved to say..."Oh well. That's as good as it gets". Then move on. It took some time, but finally the light went on. It doesn't make sense to spend 2 or 3 hours only to find it was time well wasted (still having fun) instead of time well spent.
Cheers!

[EXOR Warpedo]

I already know my cars, builds and setups will continue to improve. I accept that.  A couple of months ago I was struggling to get a F Class car to run a 45 second lap at Maple Valley Short, now all of my F class cars will turn a 45 second lap at Maple Valley Short. My garage is in a continual state of flux. The perfect garage for me is one I know in which I know the cars, what they will do, and why I have them in my garage. In FM2 I had hundreds of cars most of which I never drove and barely knew. Even a year and a half later I was discovering things about tuning and building those cars I expect it to be the same in FM3 I just plan to stick to a much smaller garage to begin with. Even with my Elan I just made a change to the build from the one I had before my "Elite Garage" to the one that is in my "Elite Garage" and improved it quite a bit.

There is a lot more time I could take off in F Class but will I? I don't know. I do like to run the lower classes more than the upper ones so it is more likely. The key is I do what I feel like doing and right now that is my "Elite Garage".

[Spiny Anteater]

Looks like I'm the opposite to the rest of you guys.

The "random car" thing means that I am headed for getting most, if not all cars in the game. Currently I have every car in classes F to D, and a good proportion of the other classes. And for the most part they were picked up off the AH for less that dealer price which helps a little with the finances.

I know I'm probably not getting the most out of each car, but I figure that there's over 400 cars in the game, and I'd like to have a go with as many as I can, even if I don't bottom out many of them. But, as I don't want to do drivetrain swaps except in extreme circumstances, I know I'll always be struggling to match the AWD Golf/Celica/Viper etc. so why not have fun getting my cars decent, if not perfect?

Like I said, different philosophy, no less fun

[Blooze]

And that right there, folks, is why this game is so neat. 

$

[EXOR Warpedo]

Day 7 WDE(7/02/10} - Car number two has been added to the Elite Garage - 1994 Mazda MX-5 Miata.

Elite Garage

[Blooze]

I think my BucksToon garage is going to wind up something like Warped's Elite garage.  Very, very few cars that are all used to the hilt.

The Blooze garage is going to be a bit more cluttered since I seem to make it the home of every dumb-assed project I dream up...  the car count just jumped by 6 over this Pony Car challenge.  I now have 4 pairs of Mustangs and Camaros to build out.  One pair has a Corvette instead of a Camaro.  Now, if one of the new DLC cars happens to be the GT2 Camaro, wouldn't that be cool...

$

[EXOR Warpedo]

The Elan entry in my Elite Garage is updated and now complete.

It is limited to F, E, and D class.

Elite Garage

[Blooze]

The Garage looks pretty good, Warped.

Good Job!!

$

[EXOR Warpedo]

Day 18 WDE(7/13/10): A third car was added to the Elite Garage - 1999 Honda Civic Coupe - F and E class monster that it is.

Elite Garage

[EXOR Warpedo]

Garage further updated with some E class builds and information for 99 Civic and the Miata. 99 Civic is now complete as I like other FF cars above E class. New Miata pic to better reflect current builds.

[Blooze]

Ah, the 1999 Civic!  An excellent choice for an F Classer - I don't know about E yet, but I do know that it is one of my best and favorites in F.

$

[Blooze]

For most of this week I was busy kicking off a new project that operates a subclass of Forza cars as an entirely independent league, yet ties back into the Forza Class time and money system seamlessly.  It came off without a hitch.

And that is another step in the Nirvana of the Perfect Garage.  The ability to be halfway creative with the oranization yet still keep things in order.  In this case, the cars, (registered as R3 cars) were moved to a new subclass (R3 GT3) and a whole new leaderboard system.  Yet they were still able to report money through the main R3 conduit.

Without the oranization, the system, the whole thing would have wound up as a scratch pad affair, and two datasets would have had to be maintained.  Duplicating data, and data entry effort is always a bellweather for a database system that is not suitable to the task.  Back when I was a design consultant, that was one of the things I always looked for when going in on a new job.  Where is the data duplicated?  You would almost always find that production had their own data, and accounting, had their own, and purchasing had a whole separate system for tracking their version of the inventory. 

So, right now, we here at B2 Racing are feeling rather smug about our system.

Now, we just got to get some racing done...

$

[EXOR Warpedo]

Recently my thoughts have returned to the "Perfect Garage", as we have been involved in a discussion of tire tuning it has kind of led me to explore what I call "optimal" car builds. When you pick a car that you want to build to the top of a particular class you have a certain amount of PI to use. How you build it depends somewhat upon the initial strengths and weaknesses of the car but really you only have two ways to go. You can add power or you can add handling. For me the optimal build is the one I can use on the most tracks. If I take my car and add only power mods I may end up with a car that is not drivable or that is only comfortably driven on the tracks with the least amount of turns and the longest straights. If I take my car and add only handling I may be able to drive flat out through the twisties and still not be fastest enough overall to set a decent time on many tracks. The optimal build is somewhere in between. It would seem that you could reach that point where taking off a bit of tire and adding power adds a diminishing benefit the same as taking off a bit of power and adding handling adds a diminishing benefit to the car's overall ability on medium tracks.

I have one car that I feel is optimally built and that is my F Class 1972 Elan Sprint(rwd g x). I have tried adding a bit more tire/less power and running it on a general track say Motegi East and it is slower than my current build. I have also tried adding a bit more power/ less tire and again it loses time at a track like Motegi East. I will literally run my currant F Elan almost everywhere and it is surprisingly competitive losing out some to grip builds on the very tight tracks such as Amalfi Coast/Camino Mini etc and to speed builds on big tracks such as Sebring Full/Road America.

I quit quick ranking my garage, mainly because of Amalfi Coast. I did not want to substitute another track because then My QR would no longer compare with other QRs. But I think I will go back to quick ranking my garage, I just need to find a substitute for Amalfi Coast. I will be able to compare my garage against itself which is all that is really important. The reason I do not like Amalfi Coast in the QR is that I do not run a general build there in any car, it is always a specialized build just for that track or at the very least what I would call a P2P build. I will run a general build at Tsukuba or Mugello Club but not Amalfi Coast. The reason for this is in actual racing against human opponents. I may be able to pick up a couple of tenths at Tsukuba in hotlapping by running a grip build but in a race against real opponents they are going to get past me on the short straight and then I will probably never get back by them because it is much more difficult to pass in a corner than at the end of a straight. So a general build can survive at a short track with a straight, but Amalfi Coast is all corners so an ultra-grip build is not at a disadvantage there.

The exploration of optimal builds on general tracks has caused me to open up my garage a bit more again as you can take any car and try to build it so it will set its own best time on as many of the general tracks as possible. If it is QR'd you then also have a guide to decide which car you want to use depending upon the competition you are competing against. The Perfekt Garage can then be a very broad garage as far as number of cars that are optimally tuned