AC Abarth 500/Mazda MX5@Portimao, Wednesday 4th May 2022

[stigs2cousin]

Apologies to @stigs2cousin for my unsafe rejoin and collision. I was completely disoriented and actually thought I was on the tarmac runoff at that point.

Don´t sweat it, just another freebie for me.

MFG Carsten

 

[Douglas Aird]

They say:

"a bad day at the track beats a good day at work"

but today I call bullshit on that.

Put myself on Q5 with a last lap effort and PB, lost some ground to quicker guys (deservedly ), than managed to anoy Andre for two laps with my "tank tactics" .

After a little "Oopsie" found myself on P12 and outpaced by the midfield I´d hoped to scrap with.
Two freebies later came home sweaty and pissed and denied my self the "debrief beer"

Tomorrow I´ll have to crack open my PC and find the reason for my underwhelming performance
Have a new GPU on the bench which of course will solve all my problems

MFG Carsten

Is that the turbo that Ernie is looking for?

What card do you have? For the record I have an AMD RX 6800.

 

[stigs2cousin]

Treated myself to a ROG Strix 3080 as it was 20€ more than the TUF and (barely) fits into my case.
Will be a bigger operation as I also have to swap the PSU and will add a HDD.

Till now I only have swapped the fans so this will be learning by doing

MFG Carsten

 

[Dzul]

Thanks @Douglas Aird, that was quite an intense race and I really enjoyed it! I think this combination of cars is a ton of fun and a great challenge for all drivers!

This was the first race in months in which I had zero off-tracks and almost no incidents, except for bumping into @a_murel on the first lap and @Allan Ramsbottom on the straight (slightly), sorry guys! That helped my race a lot. Further than that, I managed to find a good line and pace on practice and a decent Qualy with P7. My start was a solid one and I managed to keep the position for a good bunch of laps, following Andre and Carsten until they bumped into each other and gifted me both places. I got into a rhythm and caught up with Allan who was scrapping with an Abarth (sorry, can't recall who it was)... I'm gonna say something that may sound cocky but I had better pace than them at that moment (mostly because of their battling) but I just couldn't find a safe way past them 'coz they were at each other's bumpers, left and right, so I decided to simply follow them, enjoy the scrap (which was really good), and wait for them to make a mistake... and it happened some laps later at the second to last corner when they touched. So, that was another two places gained for me...

The rest of my race was about clean apexes and exits. The guys ahead were 10 seconds further and although I managed to chop 3 seconds with 10 minutes to go, I couldn't really catch up at the end. The one who did caught up with me was Allan, who had blistering pace on the last stint. He was gaining a lot on the first sector, where I was being a tad careful due to fading tyres. I focused on keeping the pace I had, which got me into the low 06's at some point, but I made two consecutive mistakes when trying to defend (coz I never practice that) and he managed to pass me with 3 laps to go... I noticed I had still the pace to follow closely so I did that hoping for a misstep from Mr. Skiddy, but that never happened. I did keep him close and finished P4 from the Mazdas (P5 overall) which is my best result so far since... Portimao a while ago (P9 then). There's something about this track that just suits me... I guess I'll have to go there for real for a track day. And a holiday.

I am very, very pleased with my result since it was hard fought and, finally, cleanly achieved. But also with the race overall, it was close scraps all over the place. This combo is fun! Congratulations to the winners and podium finishers! Thanks for putting this one together Han, hopefully they didn't catch you peeking into the results, haha!

See you guys next week at Mount Panorama... it's gonna be crazy with this combo, lots of fun!

 

[thom462]

I love this track so I am happy to have won this, think it was my first MX5 win in the RD club races.
Had pole but Allan was at my back wheel at turn 1 so I went wide to the left not to risk too much, but he was able to overtake. Little later had a good fight with him lasting couple of corners and I could regain first postition. Nearly lost the car while going two wide into the uphill left with the bump . Had to countersteer completely but could catch the car. After few laps Josh was couple seconds behind me and I had to push at the limit as we did the same laptimes, that was sweaty but great racing.
So thanks Allan and Josh for the great racing and of course every one else who showed up.
Did a couple of laps with the Abarth after the race, could do a 2.06.0 after some laps (but different temperatures than the RD race I think), so I think for me it's little bit slower but not too much.
Thx Han for organizing and cu all next time.


results: https://simresults.net/220504-EU6

down the roller coaster fighting with Allan:

 

[Douglas Aird]

Treated myself to a ROG Strix 3080 as it was 20€ more than the TUF and (barely) fits into my case.
Will be a bigger operation as I also have to swap the PSU and will add a HDD.

Till now I only have swapped the fans so this will be learning by doing

MFG Carsten

Nice card, should be worth a few tenths at least.

I have built and upgraded a few PCs over the years. The PSU will be the trickiest part due to the cabling. HDD should be relatively easy and the GPU is simple. If you are upgrading from another nVidia card you won't even have to install new drivers. Good luck.

 

[Dzul]

Lap Ricciardo and Lap Perez were eventful...

 

[maxilogan]

"apexes and braking points" as Crew Chief calls it.

"Apexes and exits, apexes and exits Danny, c'mon!" I know it very well, as it was the same for me

 

[maxilogan]

Tomorrow I´ll have to crack open my PC and find the reason for my underwhelming performance
Have a new GPU on the bench which of course will solve all my problems

Will report this to @HF2000 for him to give you a proper ballast for next race

 

[stigs2cousin]

Will report this to @HF2000 for him to give you a proper ballast for next race

Already did this myself, this thing is heavy

Car is completely topheavy now, will have to adapt setup and learn how to drive around it

So, no need to panic just yet

MFG Carsten

 

[danny26]

"Apexes and exits, apexes and exits Danny, c'mon!" I know it very well, as it was the same for me

That's the one! I struggle to catch the exact wording when I'm screaming "FFS SHUT UP JIM"

 

[Kek700]

I have the times for Mx5 with top notch drivers at Bathurst, so this time I have a target time for a direction.
I will not have to rely on my crap times in the Mx5 as a reference.
Although I think Bathurst has Ito own
set of difficulty that only applies here.
The Mazdas will have to be on it here to be competitive even amongst their own, let alone the Abarth's ( hopefully )
To be continued.

 

[stigs2cousin]

Ok, card is in, effect to the surroundings is much better than just cleaning the windscreen, also stutters have disappeared.

I´m most surprised that the effect on the engine is negligable, I hoped this thing would run way faster now

Mechanically/ electrically no biggy, just getting the HDD to work took some googling as it was recognized in the BIOS, but not explorer ( solved)
( Yes, i´m new to this)

I´ll probably skip Bathurst because it´s too frustrating for me, my safety rating is taking a dive lately.

have fun, carsten

 

[Kek700]

i assume that you have just upgraded to a 3080, AC strongly relies on the Processor, especially processor speed.
My FPS has not really changed since my 6600k, but my graphics cards have gone from 980ti to 1080 to RTX 2080 to an RTX 3070ti and as you described graphics has got much better, FPS not so much.
I now run AC with triple 1080p monitors on everything maxed out and virtually constant 140fps irrespective of player or circuit.
Every time I upgraded the processor from 6600k to 9600k and now 12600k the fps has got better and better with the advantage of better consistency.
if I have grabbed the wrong end of the stick, ignore it all.

 

[Alfred Wayne]

Can we skip practice and quali next time we run this track? I can't take these track limits lol

Had hoped once the race started that would change, and by the time we all got to T1 it was clear it would be a race . For such a wide track we all did a pretty good job clogging it all up. Apparently 3 wide into t3 doesn't work , but luckily I think it was just me who learned the lesson and no one else got collected.

Rest of the race went about that way too. Hung around with Doug and Andre most the race. Unfortunately Doug got caught up in a mess midway through , but Andre stayed close, eventually getting passed me in the last couple laps, just outside drafting range (1s). Great pace and respect from the two of you leading to some good close racing .

Thanks Han for setting us up with these. Really enjoyed the multi/mono class format of these two cars together.

 

[stigs2cousin]

I now run AC with triple 1080p monitors on everything maxed out and virtually constant 140fps irrespective of player or circuit.

Same here, FPS "tanks" to 100 with 19 AI at race start , later on limited to 139 FPS

CPU is a R5 3600x which had me little worried but its fast enough for the system (also FHD triples)

Most importantly the "moire' " pattern at armco and graveltraps is gone which I found really disturbing.

Today I tried same visually demanding tracks like LAC, Union Island et al. It was a treat

MFG Carsten

Edith:

test race at NOS revealed that the ugly artifacts at the armco and especially the FIA fences are a part of history. I´m happy

 

[Kek700]

Yes, I know it is boring.

But anyway...

I cannot obviously know the pace here { Bathurst } but I think it is looking more favourable for the Abarth.
But unfortunately, my money is still with those rotter Mazda's, but not as much as Portimao.
But unfortunately, the Abarth can be somewhat unstable here, so again it is even between the Mazda and Abarth, but the Abarth does not seem to totally lose it.

 

[stigs2cousin]

You'll find a way, as life always does....

Good Night, Carsten

 

[Douglas Aird]

@stigs2cousin Have you enabled FSR through content manager? It works for nVidia cards as well as AMD. Even with fast cards you can still gain FPS, especially on triples. With my 6800 I got about 25% gain with no discernable visual quality issues, to my old eyes, anyway.

 

[stigs2cousin]

@stigs2cousin Have you enabled FSR through content manager? It works for nVidia cards as well as AMD. Even with fast cards you can still gain FPS, especially on triples. With my 6800 I got about 25% gain with no discernable visual quality issues, to my old eyes, anyway.

I had with my 5700xt, with the Nvidia I have FPS to spare. With all Eye Candy on it tries to deliver 180-200 FPS which completely overwhelms my 144 HZ monitors.

I don't want to fuss with GSync so I limit FPS to 139 and save some electricity.

Thats of course hotlapping, with AI diots I'm CPU bound.

MFG Carsten