BRC: Global GT Series [THE END]


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BRC: Global GT Series

Scrutineering


Out of 75 cars entered, 69 have passed scrutineering. This is the list of non-legal entries:

GT1



GT2

  • @SCSI : Reliability, Engine ET
  • @stigx24536: Power-to-weight
  • @Vixzen : Active Aero, Traction Aids, Active Springs, Active Dampers


Re-submissions will not be accepted.

21 Likes

Dragotec - Gladius GT2

"Pink Pig"

The Gladius always has been in close relation to its racing brethren, and now we proudly present its entry to the BRC Global GT series: Thoroughly modified into GT2 spec and wrapped in a wonderful livery design made by famous artist Bruno Utcher. There may be rumours that the back end looks similar to a Nagase design and that there has been a photographer in relation to us has been sighted hanging upside down in their HQ, but we assure you that those are absolute bullocks.

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BRC: Global GT Series

107%



Good news! Out of 69 legal cars entered, 69 have passed the 107% test on the standard Automation Test Track in-game (standing start as usual). The cut-off times would have been:

  • GT1: 2:00.47*
  • GT2: 2:02.94

(*) one outlier not taken into consideration - time is based on 2nd fastest car.


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Howler Automotive in conjuncton with Howler Robobro Racing Division are pleased to announce the entry of our Codename Alice GT1 vehicle into the BRC: Global GT Series.

The Codename Alice GT1 is a specialised racing unit, based on a carbon chassis with carbon body panels and weighing in at 1101kg. Our 6.4TT V10 PowerElemental engine has been detuned to deliver 605hp over a generous powerband, through our patented Torque Three racing gearbox, to the rear wheels.

The #1 car will be piloted by Paua Torxdottir (20), most recently the two time winner of the Turbo Tourers World Championship.

If you were selected for the opportunity to purchase one of the limited Codename Alice homologation units, your car will now have been dispatched.


(Abandoned Rogue concept at the back. This is the second time in a row that’s happened.)


Witnessing Paua

Wall of text warning

When I pull into the ATT Raceway parking lot, Paua Torxdottir is already there. She looks confident, leaning agaist a teal first-gen Howler Rogue R12, and starts laughing when I look at my watch.

“You’re not late. I just like being first.”

That much is true. In case you’ve been living under a rock - Paua’s motorsport awards could cover a living room wall, and at twenty years of age, she’s just getting started.
If you’re still not convinced - and I shouldn’t need to do this - Paua is the daughter of the legendary Torq Sidvusson. She seems to have inherited both his piercing green eyes and the ability to fly fire-breathing monsters around a racetrack at unbelievable speeds.

Thank you for seeing me.
“It’s a pleasure.”

You’re probably short on time these days, with the Global GT almost underway. Are you ready?
“More than. I can’t wait. Driving in testing is great, but driving in competition is glorious. That’s when I’m most alive.”

Has there been a lot of testing?
“Day and night. It’s been really hectic, getting the new car ready. But Codename Alice is done. The scrutineering is over, everything is locked in. I slept ten hours tonight, almost feels like too much.”

/…/

"Always been a Howler household for you?"
“Lots of them growing up, of course. Vudus, the Godiva. But there was other stuff, too. I always loved the 2000 GT. RX-7. I’m mostly attached to the older cars. When I was too little to be allowed in the garage, I would sneak and prod at them. Those ones have stuck.”
(She pats the R12.)

Your favourite?
“Yes. It used to be father’s, but I wanted it since I was learning to walk. He was silly enough to say I could have it if I beat him at go-karts a couple of years ago. He claims he doesn’t regret it, but I know he’s looking for another one. Sometimes I catch him admiring it in the garage when they come over.”

Can we use it for the photo op?
“You don’t want to use Codename Alice?”

The face I make is clearly amusing.

Can we? I didn’t even think to ask. It’s been so closely guarded.
“Scrutineering is done. It’s going to be under a lot of cameras from here on out. Press release is going out tonight.”

Yes. Yes, please. Can we go now?

Paua doesn’t seem to mind having lost my attention. The Codename Alice GT1 is Howler Automotive’s bid into the 1996 GGT Champtionship. Aside from spy photos so fuzzy they might as well be of Nessie, nobody seems to know anything. There are rumors. It’s supposed to be pretty fast. My credentials are thoroughly checked when we enter the pit area, she is clearly just coming home.

It looks menacing. Low to the ground. Riddled with vents and covered in greebles. Well, I’m sure they’re good for something if they’re here. There is a big bulge on the front bonnet.

So it’s true?
“That it’s powered by a djinn? Yes. No, not really, it’s just a very special engine.”

At the front?
"We were testing the Rogue and the Firebrand. Rogue was winning, but both had their upsides. Prototyping division was here, helping us do the aero, and said, “well, let’s combine them”. It was a joke at first.

They have computer models of both cars. Some wizards put the geometry together, just to see what happens in simulation.

Next thing I know, we have two cars, brand new off the production line, being torn to pieces. The Firebrand chassis was shortened, but kept the track. Rogue body and engine on the front. It was like a frankenstein’s monster, nobody really expected it to work - we had been getting great times out of the Rogue.

And then I took it out and it just demolished everything. With every tweak, sector times were disappearing - like down a rabbit’s hole. That’s how it got the name.

I mean, somebody proposed that since it was the puppy of a Firebrand and a Rogue, it should be called Firebrogue. After all, it does go like its pants are on fire."

How fast?
“Amazing. It’s still based on the frankenstein monster, but everything’s been made bespoke. I’ve never driven anything like it. The whole thing is one big wing. Rear end especially. We can’t get it to be slippery so it’s been harnessed for downforce. That big shelf at the front? Aero. Big wings at the back, aero, of course. Wheel wells, aero. Undertray, aero. Wing mirrors, you guessed it. Aero. If you took it up to 200km/h on a dirt track, I’m pretty sure it would sink. But on tarmac, it turns so hard you have to mind your eyeballs. It did the ATT in 1:50.99 yesterday.”

Can I print that?
“Not a secret any more. I don’t even know all the secrets. The amount of work that has gone into designing, building, maintaining this… It’s incredible. There’s thousands of man-hours in the smallest details. The team is amazing. Every single person around me. Nobody ever comes to do interviews with them or take pictures, but they put in more work than I do. (Laughs)”

Sounds like a good job.
“I mean, I don’t always get what I want. If something feels strange in testing, but is effective, then we work with it. Just what you do. For example, this thing is surprisingly soft at slow speeds, but then you give it some welly, and it hunkers down, and goes. Faster this way. That’s more important.”

Are you going to win?
“Of course we’re aiming high. That’s the point. But it’s going to be really hard. There are so many fast teams this year and anything can happen on track. I think we’re competitive. Time will tell. It should be a great show for the audience either way.”

When we set out for our photo-op, I hear the car for the first time.

It’s surprisingly quiet. I expected it to scream, but it doesn’t. It’s guttural. Tectonic. It rattles my bones in their sockets. I have to be given a ride to the shoot location, because the race car only has one seat. It leaves us in the dust in the first corner.

I doubt I would have the skills to handle this beast. Thankfully Paua does. I’m happy just witnessing them.

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Thought it was Eddie Izzard!

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In seriousness, resemblance to anyone would be unintentional. The picture is based on a very successful career racing driver. She was wearing sunglasses, so I took the opportunity to add a random set of icelandic eyes and simultaneously distance the picture from her likeness.

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BRC: Global GT Series

Progress



Sorry for the delay, work and some issues with cars (from collaborations and with extreme aero settings) slowed me down a bit. But you may expect continuous progress now.


3…2…1… - takeoff !

Some engineering “decisions” have been done in a way that a few cars will actually take off due to high front axle lift before they can reach their top speeds. The acceleration test in Automation currently does not stop when the non-driven axle lifts off (bug). Thus also the track simulation does not hold the car below takeoff speed and thinks the car is still on track and accelerates further. Only the cornering simulation will stop in time when the car lifts off - the affected cars therefore have very bad cornering capabilities in corners > ~400 m radius, but only when the cars are approaching above takeoff speed.

There are also some cars with extremely rear-heavy aero without taking off - but still some of them have issues in the very fast corners. On the Automation Test Track this does only show in the Slingshot corner - now who observed the whole lap and saw that the car couldn’t do it at full throttle?

There are only a few large-radius corners approached at high speed in the calendar, so this effect was very hard to observe. Especially when you only take a look at the track times, optimize the track time in complete “brains out mode” and not watch how fast the car is going through each corner.

Calculate your car’s takeoff speed here:
Takeoff Calculator

Unfortunately this is a behaviour only discovered very late during the submission phase, so rule changes were not possible anymore to at least avoid the takeoff bug. I will work on a bug report and potential solution for the Automation acceleration test and track simulation. A warning indicating takeoff would be nice to have as well. :slight_smile: For now we have to live with the bug (good for the affected cars, they will still accelerate beyond takeoff speeds) and hope that the flying cars are at least punished in 2-3 corners during the season (good for all the others).

So by accident this BRC is accidentally a really good simulation of GT1 reality. One question remains: Did Mercedes-Benz use a very early version of Automation to develop the CLK-GTR? :exploding_head:


Top Trump Cards - Part 1

Here's the first bunch of GT2 Top Trump Cards! Yay!

(BPI is “Bavarian Performance Index” calculated from a few Automation performance stats with an overly complicated formula - it’s just there for the fluff, don’t put too much meaning into it).



Practice Results and Strategies

I still don't have all cars transferred to the BRC, so please be patient for the official practice results before we get to work on the strategies. Strategy submission deadlines will be delayed accordingly, you will have at least 9 days to work on the first races (so the deadline is not before end of January). So long please do not send strategies and wait for the official announcement.


42 Likes

Oh man, those are really cool.

I’m also laughing in a “one of these things is not like the other…” way.

All I know is that my car, once again, was DFS…no, not the sofa sale!!

Couldn’t make it faster so am relying on attrition to climb the ranks!

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Some really nice looking cars here, but by far my favorite is the Kaizen VSCPR GT1. So sexy!

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What does the green line on the engine chart mean? Also, how does the difficulty rate? What is an easier car to drive, one with a 1.25 or one with a 1.75 rating?

There is a lot of very sharp cars here. I really hope before I turn 50 I can watch a race where all of these good looking cars are on display racing, like any other televised race. The unreal engine allows for raytracing, so a render of these races could be stunning with the casual viewer not realizing it is not an actual event.

Engine efficiency.

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I believe the lower the number, the easier the car is to drive.

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It would be dreams for that to happen, but it would take a lot of modelling for circuits and would basically become its own game. I would expect if that were to happen Der Bayer would probably be worth releasing the thing as a “Race simulator” with all the strategy sheets etc included. It would also need a more advanced simulation system that tracks car position in 2d or even 3d space, making it possible to actively block cars passing. This would undoubtedly be brilliant but a hell of a lot of work and would require a team to make it.

It could incorporate into the process of how the BRC program already works. After the sim runs, there is an advanced log file that allows for another program to then resimulate where and what the cars are doing and play it as a 3D movie in the Unreal engine. The “filming” process would not need to know anything other than the cars’ telemetry data so there would not necessarily be a huge file for a long race. Between this and BeamNG I have over $60 in this game already, what would be another $30? If these developers keep showing up to work and increasing the quality and content it would be well worth it.

You’re assuming the cars have telemetry data based on overtaking around each other. Every car starts from basically a line and follows nothing but the racing line. for a truly real experience, it would requite a lot. You’re also underestimating the effort it woould take to model the surrounding area of the circuit, walls, fences, kerbs, grandstands, the pitlane etc. The problem here isn’t money, either. Sure, more money is always helpful, but when a game this big is being made by a squad so small, time is the biggest killer. What you’re asking would add a not-insignificant amount of time to a part of the game that would bypass the major market of the game, car company tycooning. Things like the BRC and other automation challenges lie within a niche within a niche community, and we must remember that. Even if numbers pick up, it would take a significant amount of time for something like this to be implemented.

After 40 years of video games, the time here is the easy part. I recall Der_Bayer saying that the sim tracks data from the cars at 10 times per simulation second. As far as the overtaking and what not, that can almost be fuzzy, if a pass is made and it is clean, does it really matter if it is an inside or outside? As far as modelling UE4 already has a track creation kit for $40. https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/race-track-kit-pack

The track sim is running with a time step of 0.01s - but it really does not provide enough fidelity to create nice movies. I would say it comes somewhat close to the amount of race realism of Motorsport Manager, which is also not very correct when it comes to displaying car interactions and racing lines. So what @th3maldonado says is very true.

In addition to that: For performant rendering of 30+ Automation cars, which can have a lot of polygons, you would need some kind of lower LOD models from all cars in a race. I am not a 3D artist, but I assume it is not too easy to generate good looking low-fidelity 3d models from the automation cars automatically.

4 Likes