Hypercar Shootout (discussion)

strop · 29 June 2016 02:51

Continuing the discussion from Le Mans Hyper Car Racing Challenge Competition 2017+:

Well ok that collapsed pretty quick, sadfaec

If I may, I’m going to submit my own suggestions for rules and regulations for this kind of contest, because I’d be interested to see if it could work, and for another, while I’m not in a position to hold a tourney right now (not for another few weeks, I don’t think), I do need to gear up for a something More likely I won’t be running this myself, but I do want to see what people think, gauge interest. I’m aware that I let one of my previous hypercar projects wither away a couple of years back, and the problem there was that I attempted to put too much into writing an article for it. It’s still sitting there half done in someone else’s inbox for proofreading This one’s going to be straightforward and all about getting a solid challenge structure.

Anyway, I would recommend that the focus be, instead of an all-out racing challenge (because then all you’d get is stripped down cars that aren’t even road legal), but trying to capture the actual essence of a modern day hypercar: superlative performance, actually approaching accessibility. There have been quite a few hypercar challenges and reviews but none yet that have tried to take into account every aspect except USDMFTW’s review, and that only had 3 participants.

One model and trim per user
I’d suggest years 2011-2017 inclusive (prospective prototypes for reasons below). I’d love to have 2011-2020 but I don’t know if that’s realistic.
No limitation on car body except you’d look pretty daft if you rocked up with a hyper truck, or a hyper pickup. But hey, I wouldn’t stop you myself from doing that. Old bodies are old bodies and they get a penalty, I wouldn’t adjust for that.
Any drivetrain, any format
No intrinsic restriction on materials
No minimum or maximum restrictions on power or weight
Minimum safety 40
I’d probably also stipulate a minimum average reliability, or at least a minimum cooling of engine requirement, and then factor reliability into the scoring metric.
Recommended fuel 95RON, maximum 98RON (this will affect your scores)
Qualifying time of < 7:03 around Green Hell (Nordschleife). I realise that not many people like building cars that go this quick, so maybe we can loosen it up to 7:15 for variety.
Maximum emissions <300
Maximum fuel consumption …? (I know that this is a hypercar, they don’t have to be economical, hence I’m hesitating. Depends on scoring.)
Maximum engineering time? (I also hesitate to impose limits on this, because it’s a hypercar, damnit. Instead, I will suggest a metric that will allow for a slightly more flexible, tycoon approach, see below).

As for scoring, I’m quite partial to @sillyworld’s 3 round template in the Fruinian Muscle Car challenge of value, speed and style. This lends itself fairly well to the hypercar challenge, except for a few changes:

##Round 1
Instead of bang for your buck, I’d propose a function of two factors: value, and exclusivity. The more exclusive a hypercar is, the more desirable it is and the less value for money you need to shift a unit. I thought about including the tycoon component as in @Der_Bayer’s tycoon challenges or scoring metrics that I believe @Packbat has developed/used, but I have no idea how to make those work. Obviously, though, for this you would need to use the factory components and exclusivity would at least in part be derived from projected numbers of units produced. Then overall performance would depend on how well you balanced exclusivity versus value versus units. What I haven’t decided here is whether the scores should be distributed normally across the pool of entries, or just take raw values.

After all that I would also propose there be a weighted contribution from both the Gasmean and Fruinian markets (though the game already weights the market demographics, so I could possibly just use the competitiveness scores… which would render some of the above obsolete, but on the other hand the competitiveness scores may actually be of some use by the time this is ready to go, because I’m making this iteration of the hypercar competitors and believe me, I did not make it easy). It’s probably a bit ‘regionalist’ of me to ignore Archana, but I’m willing to think like a hypercar marketer haha.

##Round 2
Here, it’d be essential to use probably 3 tracks: a high speed one, a very technical low speed one, and a mixed track. This is to give cars of different sizes and abilities a more even playing field. Track times are important but I’ve noticed that hypercar talk tends to revolve around fastest lap times as opposed to how a car does in a prolonged race. For that reason, this is easy: just use the simulated track times! A points system would probably be the easiest way to deal with this, but I’m not sure on the balance. I’d probably give more weight to this round than I would to rounds 1 and 3, but that’s me and your opinion may differ.

##Round 3
This is self-explanatory. Styling counts for a lot in this sector

What do people think? Would you participate in a properly run hypercar challenge in a forum where it seems over half the users build overpowered fancy machines? Does anybody have any thoughts on the regulations, particularly the scoring of round 1?

Darkshine5 · 29 June 2016 03:08

Well you could count me in.

Ideas for tracks maybe

Good all round and much faster to load etc then green hell

A real world top speed ring

And a flying lap of Laguna Seca

I would def weight rounds 1 and 2 more than 3 and maybe have the beauty contest first

And scoring of round one:
we could take all of the attributes (if a minimum is set we only add the points above the minimum ie. 40 minimum safety but a car has 58 safety we only add the extra 18 points above the 40) add them together and then divide by the cost of the car to get a score. And a production unit limit could work with scores weighted towards how close to the set production units your vehicle is
ie. the production unit limit total is 1000, however you can use less units for a higher score or more units for a slightly lower score( if you use 950 production units you have an extra 50 points added to the 1000 benchmark, if you have 1050 you have 50 points taken off of the 1000 benchmark) Because think of the ford GT when it first came out demand was really high, too high for the company to actually produce enough vehicles to sell to the market so even though it was desirable it was still not as competitive (in Europe and Asia and Aus) than the big three hypercar makers (ie Ferrari, Lamborghini, Pagani)
Edit1:Also we could take an average of the competitiveness across the 3 regions in the hyper categories and add to the total score before dividing by cost.

And I swiped this from the net thank you wikia
The term hypercar has been used to describe the highest-performing supercars. For example, the Ferrari Enzo[1]. On Series 13, Episode 02 of Top Gear a drag race was made between a hypercar, Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren 722 Edition and a less-expensive supercar, Lamborghini Murciélago LP 670-4 SV. Another drag race was made between new hypercar, Bugatti Veyron and older hypercar, McLaren F1. Specifically, it is used to refer to next generation supercars.[2] Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson defines the following difference between supercars and hypercars (season 9 episode 5): “Supercars are designed to be very, very fast, drivers cars above all. Hypercars are designed to show off, turn heads, and be as flamboyantly exotic as possible, which is why Lambos have always been more exotic than Ferraris but they have always paled in performance…” Hypercars tend to be high horsepower cars with a supercharging or turbocharging systems[3]; they are also 240 MPH plus cars (McLaren F1 setting the top speed standard for 12 years[4]). The cost of a Hypercar can vary between $500,000 to no limit[5]. The idea of the Hypercar has been floating around for many years such as Ford’s GT90[6] concept and the McLaren F1, but production of these cars has only come about in recent years. Hypercars are produced by a production car company, but some companies like Underground Racing[7] take regular Supercars like Lamborghini Gallardo (200 mph car), and give them Hypercar quality such as their 250 MPH Twin-Turbo Lamborghini Gallardo[8][9].
List of HyperCars (top speed 240 mph or faster)Edit

Koenigsegg One:1 (280 MPH est.)
Peugeot Onyx (248 MPH est.)
SSC Tuatara (275 MPH est.)
Koenigsegg Agera RS (275 mph est.)
Koenigsegg Agera R (273 mph est.)
Koenigsegg Agera S (273 mph est.)
Bugatti Veyron Super Sport (267 mph)
Hennessey Venom GT (265 mph)
Porsche 9FF GT9R (256 mph)
Bugatti Veyron 16.4 (253 mph)
Dauer 962 Le Mans (251 mph)
Koenigsegg Agera (269 mph)
Saleen S7 Twin Turbo (248 mph)
W Motors Lykan Hypersport (245 mph)
Koenigsegg CCX (251 mph)
Vector W8 (242 mph)
McLaren F1 (240 mph)
Locus Plethore (244 mph)
TVR Cerbera Speed 12 (240 mph est.)

List of HyperCars (top speed between 200 and 240 MPH)Edit

McLaren P1 (217mph)
Zenvo ST1 (233 mph)
Pagani Huayra (231 mph)
Ultima GTR (231 mph gearing limited[10])
Ferrari LaFerrari (230 mph est.)
Gumpert Apollo (224 mph)
Enzo Ferrari (221 mph)
Lamborghini Veneno (221 mph)
Ascari A10 (220 mph)
Aston Martin One-77 (220 mph)
Pagani Zonda Cinque Roadster (215 mph)
Lamborghini Reventòn (213 mph)
Jaguar XJ220 (212 mph est.)
Ferrai FXX (211 mph)
Lamborghini Aventador (217 MPH est.)
Porsche 918 Spyder (211 mph)
Maserati MC12 (205 mph)
Porsche Carrera GT (205 mph)
Falcon F7 (204 mph)
Ferrari F50 (202 mph)
Ferrari F40 (201 mph)

Edit2: Also If we could get multiple people to run this ie; someone does the races and math’s someone does the reviews and someone does graphics

Edit3: I just threw this together to get an idea of what a hypercar is[200% markup and roughly 1000 manufacturing points] (this took about 7 mins total)
juliusgraham5485 - hyper demo.zip (96.8 KB)

squidhead · 29 June 2016 12:14

How do you people manage to end up with cars as heavy as this? Is there a pig iron body option that I didn’t see?

strop · 29 June 2016 12:17

In the body shown above, that weight is indeed quite surprising. I suspect @Darkshine5 went heavy on the Handcrafted, Advanced Safety, Luxury HUD interior, because even if I go balls out on the power, in that configuration, I tend to get closer to 1200kg.

rcracer11m · 29 June 2016 13:07

Hmmm I think I’ve just gotten the idea for what I want to build.

DeadBuckInc · 29 June 2016 14:11

I was able to get similar results but my weight is nearly the same with 4 doors and 4 seats and my markup is a little lower at 170%. This hypercar business is interesting.

strop · 29 June 2016 14:14

An arithmetic system may work because the requirement to improve a stat by a certain amount increases significantly. However I’m not certain of the weighting of these scores. I do wonder if @Sillyworld or @Packbat have anything to say about this.

Packbat · 29 June 2016 19:16

Run. Run now, before it’s too late.

…seriously, though: I’m not sure what you’re doing. You have a lot of proposed rules in this thread, but I never saw the original thread, so I don’t know what the shape of this is. What do you want people to be trying to do? Make a profit? Improve their brand image? Win a race?

If the entries are supposed to be prestige projects, like the Ford GT or the Lexus LFA or the like, then you’ll probably want to come up with a good measure of awesomeness and score cars on that basis, and mostly ignore profitability - the goal of the build is to advertise the manufacturer, not make money directly. As for what’s a good measure of awesomeness … experiment. Build a half-dozen very different test cars, plug them into whatever formula you’re using, see if the results make sense to you, and change the parameters (or the whole formula) if they don’t.

Other than that, I’m not sure what you’re asking for.

(Quick unrelated note: if you haven’t already, check out what happens to engineering time when you select “Limited” or “Concept” for the trim in the engineering tab. “Limited” I think is something like the dozens-to-hundreds range; “Concept” is literally single-digits. From what I know about hypercars, they’re very low-number vehicles, and that means you might actually be able to impose a reasonable engineering time restriction and still allow some impressive vehicles.)

Sillyworld · 29 June 2016 23:26

There are not that many rules, when you put it like this:

Minimum safety 40
minimum cooling required
95RON - 98 RON
emissions <300
Qualyfing time of <7:15 around green hell
minimum fuel economy (???)
% mark-up (maybe… 300%? that’s the value in killrob’s spreadsheet for the competitors thing)

Determining the value of a car is quite tricky, in the experience of the fruinian muscle challenge, the significant cheaper cars will win, even if they have lower performance. Instead of weighting some stats, maybe a better idea would be to give points in different challenges (kind of like @asdren 's american road trip challenge) 1st, 25 points, 2nd 18 points and so on… and at the end divide the score between the price of the car.
So if a car has an score of 120 and it costs 560,000, the value will be 0.214, and a car with 80 but a cost of 460,000, the value will be 0.1739.
And some of the challenges could be lap times around a track, the better looking and stuff like that.

Yup, that pig button is called “advance safety and interior without negative quality sliders” xD

squidhead · 29 June 2016 23:36

Most places in the world also have a noise limit, so that’s something to think about.

strop · 30 June 2016 01:36

This is my actual conundrum Obviously I can’t run anything or ask for any math without figuring out the vision, and I’m trying to figure out how important value really is compared to other things. Hypercars tend not to be about that at all, so am I barking up the wrong tree?

Then again I would like make an assessment of a car based on its viability. For example, VW lost money on the Veyron. It was never designed to turn a profit, of course, it was just supposed to be an icon, an engineering landmark. VW could soak it up because it’s a huge company and the upshot elsewhere was equally massive. A small manufacturer can’t really do that, and when they try to continually innovate on a small turnover, their bottom line struggles (see: Koenigsegg).

Hypercars are all about awesomeness, yes, but essentially I don’t want this to turn into a 15+ slider everything has everything with bells and whistles on it festival, even though that’s really what it ought to be. I want there to be some import, some weight on what’s being submitted. I basically want it to feel a bit like a tycoon challenge when the mechanisms aren’t quite there yet. On that note, the size of the run doesn’t yet strictly factor the total number of cars produced, just how fast they’re produced, which of course does impose a soft limitation given that you do need to figure out just how long you’re going to produce that one model for. The even bigger problem there is that in order to really recreate tycoon conditions, you’d need to allow for multiple trims to be built (base model, supersport version, convertible version, anniversarary edition). Yeah, no, I don’t think that’s practical for a self-contained challenge, and I certainly don’t have Der_Bayer’s mathematical know-how to make it work.

So here’s what I’m thinking of doing for this part of the challenge:

One model, one trim
Do use the factory tabs. Specify whether concept, limited or full run. Stipulate the total number of models created.
This last bit I’m a bit concerned about because total number of models created implies that these models can be sold over a number of years, but to calculate this I would need to calculate the decay in the desirability of these cars. That’s easy enough (just look at the scores for successive years and factor it in relative to the score from year 0), but I can’t do this past 2020.
Fewer units and smaller staff involvement will contribute to an “exoticness” multiplier which will offset the exorbitant costs of the car as a result.
The total projected sales will be calculated against the projected costs (engineering time notwithstanding at this stage), to determine just how big a dent on your company finances this will make. Magic happens. This results in a “viability” multiplier.

Ideally what I’d like this system to achieve is a spectrum of balancing optimal engineering choices such that viability and exoticness balances out along a spectrum, so that the little guy can compete with the big guy if they make the right choices. This also means you can’t be a little guy and go +15 on everything or you’ll definitely go bankrupt before you even begin. Also the big guy can turn a profit with a great car but if there’s tens of thousands of them on the road, then nobody will care because it’s too common to be a real “hypercar”. The final score from this function will modify the score from the rest of the stage.

And @packbat you’re absolutely right, I’m going to have to playtest this a lot to find the right balance. I’ll do it once Beta duties are done and the beta’s been released, because the balance will have changed again.

This is a great idea. I think @asdren was onto a good thing there and I may actually use that format, except the scoring will be altered. If people haven’t already figured this out, I’m thinking about how I might be able to reflect the game’s developments in the next installment of BSLL, if I can get it to work (the main difference being that the scoring of BSLL is primarily about sprint racing and time trial, and emphasis on complete madness over thinking about making viable engineering decisions. I’ll think about that some more.)

In this case, I’m most interested in working out how to better integrate Automation’s objective, quantifiable metrics and our own subjective metrics. We (some of us) go gaga over lap times and so and and so forth, which the game can’t really do, hence their weighting on drivability vs sportiness etc. Given I’m aiming to simulate a field of competitors, I’m strongly considering using a standard deviation from the mean model to calculate the scoring of each challenge, and then give each challenge a relative weighting parallel (but not necessarily the same) as the Automation weightings. I’m not quite comfortable with the idea of a point scoring system because, for example, giving 25 points to somebody who scored 49.2 on comfort, and 18 points to the entry that scored 49.1 just doesn’t seem commensurate.

Absolutely, I actually did think about it and then forgot to type it down lol. How’s an engine noise upper limit of 50 sound? (Bypass valves allowed).

Darkshine5 · 30 June 2016 01:47

I can get the weight right down to 1200kg’s if I use sliders on the body and chassis. I also use BIG engines even though I do not have to. I believe this car had a minimum of +3 sliders across the board with top end entertainment, safety and I think it had a sporty interior. I can drop the weight to just under 1000kg’s but then I personally believe you are looking at a pure track car and not a hyper car

Jeremy Clarkson defines the following difference between supercars and hypercars
Supercars are designed to be very, very fast, drivers cars above all. Hypercars are designed to show off, turn heads, and be as flamboyantly exotic as possible, which is why Lambos have always been more exotic than Ferraris but they have always paled in performance

strop · 30 June 2016 01:54

The Top Gear crew may have been extremely influential in attracting attention to the super and hypercar segments, but they are far from the sole authority on this topic. Of course, part of the reason for that is because this is so damn subjective. This is why I’m willing to let a broad variety of high performance entries through to form a “constellation” around the “hypercar nebula”, if you will, but naturally the term is up for vigorous debate.

Yes, this means I’ll allow track cars as long as they’re still road legal and streetable but they’ll definitely suffer in the prestige and user accessibility sections.

squidhead · 30 June 2016 01:58

That sounds pretty good and tame enough (I’ve made louder econoboxes in the early 50’s)

Also, could we submit cars that have already been presented to the public? I mean if they fit the description. Eau Rouge needs more headlines and all… helps sell mistrals

Darkshine5 · 30 June 2016 02:01

I guess what I was trying to point out was this[quote=“Darkshine5, post:12, topic:16903”]
Hypercars are designed to show off, turn heads, and be as flamboyantly exotic as possible
[/quote]

Which is exactly as you say. Some could argue that Bentley is a hypercar based on performance, prestige and comfort…but then so is a Ferrari F50 with a very basic interior and safety

strop · 30 June 2016 02:08

Absolutely, I already lambasted the rule when it appeared in the precursor to this because I think it’s a rather impractical requirement. Also, I won’t be able to host this for at least another 2-3 weeks at the minimum, and until the new beta becomes stable, so there’s that.

Between then, a shit ton of balancing will be required anyway so that I don’t screw one approach over another unfairly.

You’re right, I aim to dodge much of the controversy by not being strict about the definition, hence no limitation on body, or engine. If you want your hypercar to be a jeep with a 4L i4 turbo, that’s absolutely ridiculous and you’ll do really shitty on certain challenges, but I’m not going to stop people from being ridiculous. However if their values are too far an outlier from the rest of the pack (as in too poor) I may actually reserve the right to drop them from the weighting when calculating the mean, which will penalise them even more as they’ll end up being even further away from the mean.

Also, there’ll be at least one voting round in which people can exert their opinion on whether what they’re looking at is a hypercar. That’ll balance it out significantly.

Speaking of which I do need somebody with a bit of statistics in their brain to refresh me on how to model the values, because it’s been over 14 years since I touched the stuff

abg7 · 30 June 2016 19:02

Now this will not only require tactical ability (in the sense that contestants build cars for submission), but strategic skill (optimizing profits by using the factory tabs and assigning engineers).

I have plenty of experience in building hypercars, and making them profitable to boot. Then again, so do many other users…

But is this challenge still active, or has it been abandoned? To be fair, @strop is hosting CSR 17 so it might be better to suspend the Hypercar shootout, before resuming it after CSR 17.

strop · 7 July 2016 06:47

Somewhere in the wall of text that is this thread, I mention that I’m not thinking of picking this up until the next beta becomes stable. That will likely be a few weeks away.

abg7 · 7 July 2016 07:03

I can wait until the next stable release for this, by which time I may use my Mephisto replacement for CSR 17 (which I ultimately did not submit) for this hypercar challenge.