CSR161 - With an Attitude [DONE]

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CSR 161 - With An Attitude

by @Texaslav and @Maxbombe


The Full Prelude

Atlanta, Georgia; January 1993

"Alright, daddeh, I like your moxy. You still have '*it*', an' I'll be damned if yer rustlin' job don' make you all gruff and scareh. We'll bring ya in as a dirty face an' I'll see if I can get ya a program for that US strap early on."

The corpulent yet energetic booker rocketed out of his chair to extend his hand to Mike. The soon-to-be-ex-lawman, for his part, looked stoic as he approached the jubilant old legend, but inside he was all but dancing. The 80s had been wild for Mike Maverick, the once-rising star in the Northern pro wrestling scene - who, sometime in 1983, got on the wrong side of that territory’s golden boy and paid the ultimate price.

Maverick was slandered and smeared by his own employer and, for a time, ended up essentially blacklisted from the industry. In the intervening decade, he ended up working as a bail enforcement agent - essentially a modern and typically non-lethal version of a bounty hunter - and accrued a fair amount of money and infamy from the gig, being named on multiple occasions one of the toughest S.O.Bs in all of America.

"Mr. Dream, Sir, you don't know how much this means to me. Home again, after all these years - honestly, I never reckoned I'd find my way back after what they did to me up North. Makes me wonder, actually, did you get any calls from up there?"

“Aw, sure did, but I ain’t lissen to ‘im. An’ even Eric, scat-fer-brain he may be, ain’t lissen either - he wants anyone with a rep from up North to git down ‘eer an’ show ‘im how real *rasslin’*s dun. 'Speshly given yer Irish tor-mentor’s gunna be in jail a year from now, we do believe.”

If the words of the rotund “Dream” sound a bit too incomprehensible to your ear, here’s what he’s going on about: after Mav was kicked out of the Northern wrestling scene, that place underwent a serious business boom. The golden boy that got Mike Maverick erased from the big time took that spot for himself and ran with it for ten long years with only minor detours - but now that guy was getting old, grumpy and too big for his britches, with Hollywood aspirations and the like.

After willingly shooting up steroids for years to preserve his, uh, hulking physique, the golden boy turned on his benefactors as the steroid culture in the company came under scrutiny - and as that controversy bloomed rapidly into a trial, he was likely to testify against the hand that fed him. A side effect of this controversy, which first surfaced in 1991 and had been brewing for over a year at this point, was that the Northern promoter no longer had the vigilance to blackmail other promoters into blacklisting Mike Maverick.

“It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Well, Dream, there’s just one more matter. I’m happy just to get back in the business and all, but I gotta keep earning, too. Didn’t pack my savings shoving skips behind bars just to charity-wrestle.”

“Well, daddeh, you ain’t gotta worry. Scat-fer-brain that Eric may be, he got that Billionaire Ted moolah. We’re thinkin’ of signin’ yer cowboy ass for three hunnit fiddy grand downside.”

Now, if your jaw dropped at that figure, it dropped the wrong way. A wrestling career in the 1990s is kind of the opposite of a military career in that nothing’s paid for: You need to hole up in your own hotel, pay for your own gas, pay one-time fees at gyms when you pass through a town, and use tanning beds so that the promoter won’t tell you you look bad on TV. And with all the stress, you’re bound to at least be drinking a lot. So while the $350,000 a year Maverick is being offered here is a substantial amount, it’s not crazy or all-liberating for this manner of profession - the top stars back then were earning up to triple that. That said, it’s still a fair bit more than the no-downside, per-night income Mav was working on in the 1980s

“It’s something, alright. Deal me in.”

“Now I got one mo’ thang too, bebbeh. As I been sayin’, Eric’s a scat-fer-brain, and ya report to him now. He plays the tuff guy, he’s got that biker jacket, but he ain’t no son of a plummer, no way. Ya gotta be profeshnul wit’im; Ya gotta be respectful wit’ im, no lip or nuthin’; and ya gotta look like a million bucks, even if he pay ya tree fiddy an’ no mo. Maybe git yerself sum new wheels now that yer in da big time, bebbeh.”

“So he’s a pencil pusher who just acts tough? Damn, it’s just like the North all over again.” - this is what Mike thought, but did not say, as he shook on it with Dream and left. That said, the prospect of getting a new car was not an unwelcome one. In his Northern years, Mav would putter around in a funky Swanson hatchback - which fit his needs well enough initially, but turned out problematic towards the end of his run when the promotion started hiring bigger wrestlers and he promptly ran out of people who’d been paying his gas costs. Mike’s next vehicle, one he used in his later years as an enforcer, was a half-ton Bowie crew cab. Neither of the two looked nice by 1993. Mav recognized, too, that at 38 years of age he was tired of vehicles with only “adequate” comfort levels; with his life’s profession restored and much vigorous touring likely to commence soon, he wanted a ride that would involve and disturb him less. On top of it all, it could furnish him with the reputation of a good road partner - and thus good friend to have - in the locker room.

TL;DR: CSR154’s protagonist returns to his beloved wrestling business after years in exile. To re-establish himself as a professional to his corporate boss and a locker room leader to his colleagues, as well as to preserve his body on the road between events, this wrestler - the incomparable ex-bounty hunter Mike Maverick - needs a nice, modern, premium ride to depend on in his travels.


THE RULES

Model and Trim

  • Years: Model Year - unrestricted; Trim Year - 1993.
  • Body Type: Sedan, Coupe, Hatchback, Wagon.
  • Wheelbase: 104.3 inches (2.65m) minimum, 124.0 inches (3.15m) maximum.
  • No Legacy Car Bodies - if you mouse over a body and it says “Legacy Car Bodies” in the Mod Name tab, it’s banned.
  • Suspension: For balance reasons, certain rear suspension designs - Double Wishbone, Multilink, and Pushrod - are subject to a $1,400 price penalty. Thus (for example) $21,100 listed approximate cost is equal to $22,500 if any of those three suspension types are chosen. This applies both to front- and rear-engined vehicles.
  • Wheels: Radials required. No race tires, no semi-slicks. Tread width must end in 5, never 0.
  • Interior: 5 full seats or more
  • Safety: Only Standard 80s/90s or Advanced 80s/90s allowed.
  • Price (as per Detailed Stats): No more than AM$28,000

Engine

  • Years: Family Year - unrestricted; Variant Year - 1993.
  • Architecture: No V16s.
  • Fuel System: No Race intake. Unleaded fuel required; Regular and Premium both allowed.
  • Exhaust: WES 7 or better emissions standard required. At least one muffler required. No Race or Turbo Race headers.
  • Loudness: 45 or less.

All entries are allowed $40M in techpool costs. This is the sum of total costs for car and engine, as illustrated above.

If your installation of automation has exported the wrong techpool values in the past, you may send a screenshot of your techpool screen alongside your entry, in the same DM. In all cases where such a screenshot is sent, I will double-check your submission’s values with those on the screenshot, and correct if necessary.

If you do not use this feature and the techpool ends up wrong - or if the techpool sum on your screenshot is invalid as well - you will be binned.

Negative techpool values are prohibited.

Style Guide

Make sure your car has lights (headlights, taillights, turn signals), wipers, side mirrors - you know, make sure it looks like a car that could exist. Given the following priorities, a pretty one is preferred.
You are not required to hook up every light properly with automation’s lighting feature.
A center-mounted third brake light will not be required to avoid a bin - but you will get points off for not having one.
Do not make the car look like something it isn’t, either via fixtures or advanced trim settings. If you lose the roof on a fixed-roof body, use ATS to raise the suspension by 10 whole inches, or somehow manage to have your car only have 2 visible doors when the body sports four - you’re out.

Interiors are not required and will not be judged in this CSR - as usual.


THE CRITERIA

:star::star::star::star:

Design

Let’s put it in plain text: Following his time away from the industry, Mike needs all the confidence he can get. Make sure his car looks good and tells him: “You’re still the man!”.

Prestige

If there’s anything Mike has learned as a bail enforcement officer, it’s that people’s cooperativeness is based entirely on appearances. He is convinced that if he drives something nice, problems on the road will be harder to come by. That, and he’s kind of a sucker for a household-brand car himself, as is his wife.

Realism

OOC: The 1990s saw many methods to make a premium/luxury highway car. You do not have to adhere to some rigid blueprint. However, if Maxbombe and I see a BMW S85 engine 10 years ahead of time nestled between the rear wheels of a body-on-frame barge, mercy will not be shown. In all seriousness, this is a CSR; you are expected to do your own research, and take only well-calculated risks. Not our fault if your “math” ends up being off. Also: in this challenge, you are able to submit several different types and classes of cars, and will be rewarded for cohesion and common sense in that class. For example, if you manage to make a V12 7-Series, maybe allow it the dignity of drinking premium gas.

:star::star::star:

Comfort

It’s one thing to tolerate and stand up to punishment in the ring. That’s Mike’s job. Suffering on the road, though, is not his job; He wishes to spend that time in comfort. This would also earn much goodwill from his colleagues - having the cushiest ride in the locker room.

Reliability

What did all the promoters use to like about The Maverick? He always showed up when and where he was needed. This is because his Swanson hatchback didn’t take days off any more often than he did. Though Mike is a bit older now, he knows he can’t afford no-showing because of a catastrophic failure or something.

Practicality*

This one’s self-explanatory. You being on the road means you have all your gimmicks with you, and so does everybody in the back - and it can be all kinds of stuff. There was this one heel manager who used to carry around a tennis racket case fulled with bricks…

I will not purely judge the in-game stat; instead, this scoring area will be based on a holistic reckoning of the vehicle’s ability to carry several large individuals and their gear and beer - from the shape and size right down to the suspension bits.

:star::star:

Drivability

Mike knows how to handle a car, and he’s confident in himself as well as his judgement of possible replacement drivers. That being said, it’s always nice to have a vehicle that keeps itself straight and stable.

Fuel Economy

While Maverick is more comfortable in his wealth now, overhead is still overhead, and a wrestler covers a lot of miles on the road. Apparently some kid from Texas in the territories saved a whole lotta cash driving a Hyundai and offering to pay for gas if his friends paid for beer, and if that isn’t a hustle, Mike doesn’t know what is. So… Maybe do better than 10 mpg or something crazy like that.

Value

For what it’s worth, Mike has been a pretty good skip rustler. The budget he’s set himself for his own discipline doesn’t reach all the way down his pocket, so he’s fine buying a car that uses it all. He’ll be pleased to bits if he doesn’t have to, though - thrifty habits die hard.

Safety

The road is as hazardous a place as the ring. Should the an accident occur, it’d be up to the car to save Mike from a career-shortening injury. No tin cans, please.

:star:

Service Costs

It’s a reality of the luxury car sector that they’re more expensive to fix. Mike understands that he won’t be seeing the same repair bills as with an old Canadian sporty-ish hatch or his spartan truck this time around; still, it’d be nice not to break the bank with this stuff.

Performance and Sportiness

Mike isn’t a massive performance junkie - though he’d been a fan of how spry his Swanson felt, cars are faster as a rule now, and he’d found out quickly back in the early 80s that once up to speed on the highway, having a mammoth under the hood didn’t really help in many ways. As long as the car’s good enough for basic merging and evasion, he will be satisfied.

Environmental Resistance

The Maverick is not blind. He knows a war is coming eventually, between the currently-Southern promotion he works with and the people up North that threw him out - so he is not under the illusion that he will face no road salt. Give him a car that stands a chance.

Note: If a stat or aspect of the car is not listed here, that’s no reason to dump it to salvage the other stats. Eventually - and doubly so for the finals - the cars will be judged holistically, and any shortcomings your cars may have will bubble to the surface. You all have been warned.


INSPIRATIONS

Cadillac Seville

BMW 5-Series

Acura Legend

1993-Lincoln-Mark-VIII-1-630x390

Lincoln Mark VIII

Citroen XM

sddefault

Buick Roadmaster

Lexus SC

Audi 100 Avant

Chrysler Concorde


SUBMISSION RULES

  • Submissions open on April 2, 2024, 11:59 pm CDT (UTC-5)
  • Submissions close on April 21, 2024, 11:59 pm CDT (UTC-5)
  • The naming scheme is CSR161 - (forum username) for the car model and engine family. Trim and variant are free.
  • A complete submission includes a .car file sent to either of us - @Texaslav or @Maxbombe - via Discourse PM between the opening and closing of submissions, as well as a post in this thread with at least one picture of the car no later than 12 hours after the round closing.

CHANGELOG

  • 04/01/24: Added Safety as a 2-star; clarified tread width rules.
  • 04/02/24: Challenge open. Clarified the seat count rule.

11 Likes

Let’s get this outta the way first: will transverse boxer engines get you binned this time around?

Well, the realism priorities and warnings are still in the brief, aren’t they?

:wink:

Another idea: Tires must have sizes ending in 5, not 0.

Also, shouldn’t coupes be allowed to have 4 full-sized seats (2 rows of 2 such seats each) instead of 5?

I suppose 0-index tires oughta be marked as a foul, seeing how TRX was dead and gone by the late 1980s. As for the coupe 5-seat problem, it’ll stay as is: In the inspirations, there are two coupes, with one having a full rear bench and one having a rear bench with 2 seatbelts but no real obstacle to a third person sitting.

I do not wish to have entries that claim the status of a “4-seater” get more comfort than those that claim a full rear bench despite similar rear room; I do open the floor on whether people want to allow +2 seat configurations in.

2 Likes

Would minivans (possibly even SUVs) be allowed?

Minivans, SUVs, and pickups are not on this list, so they’re out.

1 Like

Hey who wants to collab and do the design :slight_smile:

I suspect the reason why safety is not even a minor judging criterion in the OP is because of the requirement for at least standard or advanced 80s or 90s safety.

Simply clicking the seat count arrow is the lazy way out, but supposing a four-seater were done quite deliberately and with purpose (that is, properly modeled)? I wouldn’t go full Marqaba Supremacy on this budget, but the E34 (my beloved!) for example was available as a four-seater.

BMW E34


BMW E32

Benz W140


Jag X330

DCMW Al-Sayaadim

3 Likes

I’m sticking with 5 seats for my entry (for now) on the assumption that Maverick will occasionally have to carry four other people along with him instead of three, and thus must take such circumstances into account.

And so far, I’ve made two test mules (both I6-powered) - an E-segment sedan (2.7m wheelbase) with struts up front and a premium interior/CD player as the value play, and an F-segment luxury car (2.85m wheelbase) with a dual-wishbone front end and a full luxury interior/CD player to make full use of the budget (after the extra cost of DW/multilink/pushrod rear suspension is factored in) to test the waters for this round. The latter car has an extra 1.0L of displacement compared to the former, and while not quite as reliable, is even more prestigious and comfortable due to its fancier interior.

Again, would love to have people pitch into this discussion - and I’ll leave a message on the main discord to start talking about this stuff. The 5-seat requirement itself was initially put in because the client doesn’t want to be limited to four in case he has extra souls on board. As a traveling performer who is deliberately building a behind the scenes “sphere of influence” or “clique”, that is important to him - so it’s not that the brief is denying the existence of deliberately 4-seat sedans and coupes, it’s that the client would be reluctant to seriously consider them.

The possibility of allowing 4-seat sedan interiors thus joins the possibility of allowing +2 coupes: do we want another “relatively neutral and balanced” trade-off between my hand-calced practicality stat and comfort via seat count (and for that matter, do I even bear the responsibility of making such a trade-off fair rather than biased), or do we accept that the client wants a rear bench for the versatility of it, and to maintain the practicality bottom-line set by his CSR154 car?

3 Likes

Tbh i like the requirement of minimum 5 seats in the car because it also allows for +3 rear seats on coupes and such. where there might be 3 belts, but not the full size seats of a traditional sedan.

Why are coupes with “plus” rear seating allowed when the car will need to regularly transport adults in the back on long drives? Aren’t there numerous cars both in real life and in the game that have two doors but sedan-like rear comfort, and can fit full-sized rear seats to represent that?

I have not made any changes yet. The floor is still open, but you raise a good point: Either we allow 2 or +2 seats everywhere and let people make that choice despite a high risk of it being detrimental - or we keep with the current, 3-back-seats-only rule.

Allowing a +2 row in the back would effect a certain change that allowing 2 full size seats would not - that being certain coupe bodies, which may be limited to +2 (not +3) in the rear, becoming available This subset of bodies, in the game, includes many bodies that are large enough and have ample enough rear space to fit spacious rear seats in reality. Those debating on the point of rear seating may want that fact taken into consideration.

2 Likes

As someone who takes pride in chauffeuring people, and does it often enough (though not as much as Mr. Maverick, likely), my take is that even if 1-3 passengers happened as often as 4 - which it doesn’t - the increased seating quality from having a center console and rear amenities more than makes up for the lost quantity. If the use case has a genuine need for hauling a crowd, he should be looking at a van or a big wagon, and certainly not a coupe.

Now, in reality it’s possible to have the best of both worlds: flip-down console and stowable center table. Many 5-seaters are set up to have 5 by default and 4+armrest when deployed, but I’d do it the other way around: default position is a large and comfortable center console, that in a pinch can be put away to squeeze another backside in. In-game, this would be modeled as: comfort and prestige of 4, weight of 5 if not more, practicality of 5, cost a bit more than 5.

Short of manifesting that ideal, I propose, for the sake of a level playing field, that the requirements be either:

  1. (2/+2 or 2/2)
    or
  2. 2/3
    and not both.

What about a 2/2/+2 wagon?

1 Like

If 4 seats is allowed then isn’t everyone going to then use 4 seats instead of 5 since the game runs on an “all seats filled” rule when giving a comfort score

3 Likes

I may or may not have been gearing to go 3/3, so none of this bothers me. LAND YACHT SWEEP

Who wants to assist in the continuation of the legacy of Ascot Automotive?

…i.e. who want’s to collab on the visual design of my engineered entry?

I will have to mule that. Currently I don’t know how exactly that would stack up on stats; thus, how to regulate it.