Since the last time we checked in Keith and Anissa have purchased a more upscale home in the Meridian district of Boise giving the now 14 year old twins a great place to live. The Norðwagen still giving great service, but the Tanaga has since been replaced with a modern large SUV for the drives to the store 1 mile away and going to the drive through fast food restaurant.
Keith has climbed the corporate ladder and many of his exec level friends enjoy spending the weekends flying their light aircraft from the local airfield. Now Keith doesn’t really have that level of funds, and doesn’t really like flying so buying an aeroplane is kind of out of the question. If he can keep up with his friends from the ground however then he can at least be onboard with the radio chatter and hanging out at local airfields.
The obvious answer to this is a motorbike, but Anissa doesn’t much fancy being a widow so Keith is left with a small sports car. If he can also run the car at track days then even better as it has a dual focus. To that end it needs to be light and maneuverable enough to be trailered behind the SUV by one person.
Keith isn’t a pro driver by any stretch so a lighter less powerful car will be easier to drive than a Le Mans style racer for him. This car will be used on the road as well as track days so nothing too extreme now people.
Rules
Stable only
No meme, legacy or open wheel bodies. 3D builds are allowed to make a car look like an open wheeler.
Family and model no earlier than 1990
Trim and variant must be 2002
Either 2 seat only, or 2 front and +2 rear
Coupe body styles only, open or closed top. #
Some kind of in car entertainment.
Any engine position and drive type is fine.
Wheelbase range of 2.2m to 2.5m (using the in game figure rounded)
No race parts.
80 noise limit
95 Ron unleaded fuel
WES 9 emissions.
Interiors not required, something to see through the windows is always appreciated though.
ATS can be used don’t go making the car look crazy, obviously with 3D builds there might need to be slight movement of parts.
Techpool of $35m, no negative techpool.
$35,000 max price.
Max weight of 1200kg, but that really is the ceiling. A lighter, less powerful car is going to be easier for him to drive at something approaching the limits.
extra $250 on supercharger service costs.
Priorities
Sportiness
Design, why buy a lightweight track style car if it looks like a grocery getter.
Driveability
Prestige
Fuel economy and svc cost
Purchase price
Comfort
Safety
Reliability
Environmental resistance ( least important stat in priorities as it’s janky)
Couple things, I understand you probably got this out because the pass-the parcel game from last round but regardless.
Firstly, the weight limit is a neat idea, though I feel like I should mention that one of the cars in the inspirations [The TVR] would exceed this limit. Perhaps 1200 instead?
Secondly, why exactly are we needing to use autos? It doesn’t seem very realistic, given that only 1 of these cars had that [The MX-5], and even then there was 2 Manual options, it just seems off, it sounds like we’re building a sporty car for a client who doesn’t actually want one.
And lastly, I presume all the other stats not mentioned in priorities aren’t going to be a factor, such as Reliability?
The manual ban could realistically make sense for the slovenly wasteful morons who get a large SUV for getting their daily ration of supersized McMurican feed at a drive-thru within walking distance. Of all the possible vehicle types to ban one, the kind of car the brief calls for is the DFL one where this would be plausible. I’d go further and say that it’s one of the few that should allow sequential boxes.
Tbh I was originally going to do full size SUV’s but that was done not long ago, so small sporty cars seemed easy enough. But again it has been done to death for this year range. So I decided ultra light sports cars would be a ice change of pace, the auto rule is literally just to see what happens really. The obvious choice is a standard manual on this type of car so why not shake things up a bit. Like when we have a luxury car round and for some reason people make manuals.
The weight thing makes sense, I’ll go to 1200kg because of the weight of the gearboxes too, but I’ll put weight in as a priority somehow.
Reliability is an oversight on my part, things like utility, practicality and off-road are basically pointless though.
Like, if you go through and analyse it, you’ll find that there’s a lot of inputs to it that make a lot of sense. Quality in certain places, including in the engine. Performance (and especially race) intakes with their reduced filtration doing worse, because it’s the whole environment and not just corrosion.
Does that make it a better or worse stat for judging in a challenge? I have no idea, I went mad from understanding it.
If environmental resistance had a detailed stats pane, it’d be a perfectly cromulent stat for challenges. Unless the black box hides some godawful secrets.
Editing to add a question for Martin - any expectations or guidance on what’s considered to be acceptable safety? I can hit the 45 safety target for sale in Gasmea, but it comes with a substantial degree of effort. Light cars have issues with safety, it’d be appreciated to have a rough “this is where you won’t get binned” number.
Requiring anything than a manual or (racing) sequential gearbox is a nice curveball, and one that can be accommodated with the right choices. I could even see something from QFC62 being adapted for this round - which is exactly what I’m considering.
One note on gearboxes… While Auto Manuals and DCTs are theoretically available, they’re not really viable, at least I don’t feel so. Automanuals offer no explicit sportiness bonus. They save a little weight and a little cost, but they have a massive penalty to comfort and drivability. They are a bit better for fuel eco than Advanced Autos, I suppose, but I’m just not sure they’re worth it.
DCTs, meanwhile, are set to unlock in 2008, so you need to pump 6 points of techpool into unlocking them. Maybe they can work, but you’d need to save a lot of money elsewhere for what is still only a 5% gearbox modifier (which is additive with all the other positive modifiers we’ve been racking up) - and it still costs drivability, comfort and reliability.
I like the idea of “wants a track car but doesn’t want to drive stick”. It’s just that the options outside of a full Automatic aren’t exactly great.
The first four of these changes I would definitely agree to; as for the fifth (and last) one, it could be worth trying, but I’m not entirely sure if it would actually be necessary.
Do the “Any road tyres are legal” and “Positive downforce is legal” rules actually represent changes to the rules?
The “one fixture per end” rule seems incredibly restrictive for this brief as well. The 340R in the inspirations is two aero fixtures on the front (splitter plus canards) and two on the back (wing plus diffuser). The Radical is three on the front by my count.
Dropping the budget by an entire 3 grand due to the addition of manuals is pretty stiff too. Swapping from Advanced Auto to bog-standard Manual only saves me one grand. Did you use test mules to check the impact? Autos aren’t that expensive.
Regards the first bit I wanted to make it clear since a lot of challenges ban semi slicks and lots of aero. Both seem pretty par for the course for these cars though.
I guess I just didn’t want too much aero really, like mental amounts of downforce.
I also didn’t really want people making something a Ferrari challenge stradale or le mans prototype with lights on it either.
Short of making a power to weight limit, which I know full well people will lose their mind over anyway lowering the price seemed a way to limit that a bit. Though I know you can build a supercar for $10k if you want in the game.
The issue with using a budget limit to try and regulate power is that there’s plenty of cheap ways to make power. I’ve got a car in the mid-200kW range, based on some real light sports cars available at the time. I could easily strip a few comforts out of the interior and run larger tyres, slap a turbo on it and upsize the engine to get well over 500 kW and hit a top speed of 400 km/h while being cheaper.
But that’d come at the cost of stuff like reliability, drivability, comfort and even sportiness (because I annihilated throttle response via the turbo, and was already grip limited on acceleration).
If you’re worried about people going with the wrong approach, your real options are either to explicitly limit power or to address it in the priorities. Sportiness actually does a decent job of minimising the efficacy of power spam, and a simple enough note around that or drivability to the effect of “while our protagonist may be willing to try a stick shift, he’s still an inexperienced yuppie who is liable to crash. About xxx kW ought to be enough for him.” would be sufficient.
Just as a suggestion, a numerical downforce limit would both be easier for you to judge and for participants to not accidentally break than an aero element limit. Something like 50 kg max at 250kmph (I believe that is what the stat page shows, but the graph is more accurate), or less if you prefer it that way.
