Okay sorry so I did intend to post this earlier but it was actually kind of hard getting enough of a window of time and internet working on this vacation. As it stands I’m able to do this now not because my internet is good but because I can’t do anything else because I think I ate too much cheese and those of you who read the Kinda Grand Tour know how that pans out.
Stage 4 Analysis
I’ll first post by the time, which, since this is done in seconds as it was rather approximate, was also organised by lower power to weight ratio for cars with the same time to the nearest second.
The Rocinante really ran away with this one, with the highest grip and useable power ratio. To be honest it’s a finnicky handler that doesn’t actually like rotating that much compared to the Fore GTi which can’t get enough of corners on any incline. But the Bomba was there purely to show what you can really do if you tune a rear-engined car hard enough.
There were some real surprises here. First and foremost that big fat wagon which had no business going so fast down the touge, and far from what I expected when I tested things like the Kitanshi Fleuris and the Scarab Nova. It really gave zero fucks about how big it was and loved getting the nose in.
The real emerging stand-outs made their impression here too. The Jesta Baleno excelled despite having no ABS and a solid rear axle. The Smooth shows what you can do with a tame rear-engined car. Following these were a few cars that were extraordinarily quick despite having some serious brake issues.
I was pleasantly surprised at how well the Kuma did here, but that’s probably explained by the fact that the Kuma’s issues are mainly in power application and it otherwise handles just fine.
I figure anything 170s and below was either a) actually not powerful at all b) had some dynamic problem that was either unmasked by this stage or was already well known.
Now if we turn our attention to organising it by ratio:
I think the lesson as mentioned from the MM Excelsior topping this list and the ATT list is simply: “if you have a lot of tyre with low profile the car turns and stops gud”. In real terms this means for fairness what I really should be doing in tests like these is tightly regulating the tyre profile and width as well as the compound.
The Cerberus Track needs a mention here: usually marooned somewhere in the middle of where and not particularly standing out on the board, it’s actually a strong performer despite my expectations given how uneven parts of the road can get.
Unsurprisingly the cars with lower power got higher delta scores because of gravity assisted acceleration lol. And that weighting was quite overwhelming. The main exception to this that surprised me was the Geschenk Gato: it seemed like a decently easy car to drive and so I thought it’d be a few seconds faster downhill than it was. Then again I realise my assessment of “easy” was “when it gets loose I can gather it up again without crashing”, and it did get loose rather often, it’s just that it wasn’t too bad because it was also not very fast.
Overall: not surprising. I mean I’m still not sure there wasn’t a whiff of fantasy in the plot of Initial D but the premise certainly rings true… if you also account for the fact that it featured a lot of shitty drivers 