There are two other obvious competitions, turbo v NA and slick tyres v sports.
Personally I think, those will be the big discussion points, more than car layout. The porsche has really good traction, but terrible weight distribution. FR cars have great weight distribution and can use much more rubber, but lack traction badly. MR cars are on the middle of both those issues, but with the wedge being severely limited in engine space. All of which makes for great tradeoffs and as you said, more competitiveness between different approaches.
I definitely like that there are entries going for all sorts of different layouts, even if we do gravitate to similar bodies. And I will be very interested to see if the Turbo cars doing 4 pit stops can go fast enough to make them worth while. I kind of hope not, but I think it’ll be close. I think if the NA cars have managed to deal with the tyre wear issue, then yes, they should do well I think.
It is worth noting that I still managed to squeeze in a transversely mounted 4.2-liter mechanically injected DOHC crossplane V8 into the not-Lotus body, if only just. Even with the primitive tech on offer in 1976 (no slippy diffs of any kind and narrow tires, particularly with tire quality set to its default value of 0 as stipulated by the regs) it would not take much work to make the resulting car handle well enough to be a strong contender.
Narrow tires? Back in 1945 we were running on 155s!!! For 1955 we widened out to massive 175s! In 1966, we got 225s. Finally, in 1976 we get tires that actually stand a chance to stick to the tarmac!! I mean, sure, for racing, 265s aren’t crazy wide or anything, but considering it’s 1976, they’re still wider than the average car on the street in 2016! These are super duper FAT tires!!!
I suspect @07CobaltGirl was referring to real-life tire sizes. In-game tire sizes in '76 were much narrower, particularly if default quality levels (read: zero) are used.
Speaking of tires, I meant to ask about something (it may have been talked about before). @Der_Bayer, do you have plans to expand on the driver error system to include things like spinning out, slides, brakes locking up, etc?
Man, 1945 was so good, been trying to live up to that season ever since. Was it 1945 or 1955 that I had like 800 stiffness rear sway bar… good times, good times…
Yes, very subtle.
With a longer stroke even more, but at the cost of reliability or revs.
