some things just don't workout the way you think they will. lets take weight as an example. anyone who spends more than five minutes learning how to make a car faster learns that weight is one of the most important things you can do. by removing weight, you affect acceleration (less weight to speed up), handling (less weight to move around) and braking (less weight to slow down). your car becomes faster in every important way. shit, it even improves tire life and fuel economy.
that all makes sense, right? good. so, yesterday, when i was predicting about a half second of time gained by dropping 286 lbs off the weight of the car, i thought i was well within my right mind. the car weighed in at 2,738 lbs yesterday. today, 2,464 lbs. time dropped: +.162 seconds. yes, that's a plus. the car is slower than yesterday. i've tried changing settings too, and nothing. the only thing i can think of to explain it is that the car doesn't heat the tires fast enough to get them to prime operating temp and that i wasn't doing enough laps to get them up to temp. i'm fucking flabbergasted.
to avenge my incomprehension of the above event, i did what any car guy does when his car is not as fast as he wants it to be; i added more power. headers, high flow cat, titanium race exhaust and an ecu upgrade added 50hp (235 - 285). my time dropped to (drum roll please...) 1:03.889. mission success! not as lofty a time as i had hoped for yesterday, but to pick a target time for a car i had never used in the game and hit it is pretty impressive. i still need to buy racing hard tires and run them for time, and if i run in the sub one minute range with them, i'm playing the lotto tonight, because that will be one hell of a fucking guess.
the downside to making a street/track tuned s2000 that runs in the 1:03s at tsukuba? it is fucking garbage in the rain now. it's two seconds slower than the stock car in the rain. that brings me to two points. 1) i really wish they didn't get rid of the multiple setups you could use in gt4. i had a 2004 sti spec-c that had a tarmac, gravel and snow setup, and i could switch to whichever one i wanted to use before each race by hitting one button. now, i would have to keep a piece of paper (or in my case, a word doc on my laptop) that has the 3 different settings and manually change them for each race. polyphony, stop moving backwards.
point 2) they need to add the ability to change rim width, tire width and sidewall. why the need to change both wheel and tire width? because you can widen or narrow the width of a wheel while keeping the tire width the same and get different handling feel. at the moment, the s2k is running the stock 215 front tires and 245 rears. i want to run 255 tires on 9in wide rims all around. it will give me more neutral handling, sharper turn in and more grip. while we're at it, i want to change diameter too. 3) wheel diameter change. sure, in some cases a thinner sidewall will help handling, but i want this for cosmetic reasons. okay, i'm done. tomorrow i will throw the racing tires on, run laps until i can't lift my arms, and give you the fastest time i come up with. then the s2 is done. the next car will either be a 3rd gen rx-7 or a honda cr-z. letme know if you have a preference.
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