A while back I said to myself “how hard can driving the painful one be”. Then it got DNF’d by LS_swapped.
They say in flight school that you must never give up. I don’t know why I’m saying this because I’ve not been to flight school and forum posts aren’t books, but: https://youtu.be/F2Yk1VuSkZM
(well i suppose The Painful One is descriptive of what it is, so…)
This car is torture. Unlike most torturous activities which are fun to some people, the master here does not go one by one. No, this thing tries to fuck you in multiple ways. Vertically, horizontally and diagonally. And more!
Let’s start with Vertically, which is by far the worst. The jelly ass ‘suspension’ makes it impossible to drive faster than ~110mph, as when it meets any elevation change the suspension amplifies the bump steer (I think that’s what it’s called) and it immediately tries to rocket to one side, which immediately makes it rocket to the other side if corrected (because if you don’t, it’ll just continue turning until it flips from the sideways force). Repeat this again and again due to the near lack of dampening, and it makes for a vehicle which is plain uncontrollable at speed.
Horizontally! The center of gravity of this thing is in the ionosphere. Combine this with insane ride height and F1 grade tires and springs softer than a pillow after a day’s hard work, it makes for insane body roll. I’m fairly sure it has stiff roll bars as well, to make it even more painful as it can’t fully roll and instead flips around 12-15 degrees of roll. However! This one is at least PREDICTABLE unlike the aforementioned dimension.
Diagonally. This thing has a torque curve cliff that looks like this.
You may say: That’s easy! Just stay below 4000RPM, silly.
No
Well, in all fairness, that is how you are supposed to do it. If it weren’t for the GOD DAMNED TRANSMISSION
No, fighting the suspension wasn’t enough. You have to fight the engine and transmission as well. I don’t know what the fuck this is, but it does not allow you to throttle on while shifting, and it has a massive delay in commanding the shift and it actually going in to the next gear, along with a very messy crawl it makes me think it’s some miserable automated manual transmission. Shift delay isn’t that bad, but god damn does it refuse to let you in the gear that you want because the speed is too low. Let’s play out a normal situation:
I want to go in to 4th gear. Except, I’m going slightly too slow. It shifts back to 3rd. But in that time it took to shift to that gear, the insane rolling resistance of the tires have made that too slow as well. It immediately throws it in to first, which is basically undrivable, but still allows a deadly speed of 31 MPH. You crash and die because it refuses to let you shift up again and you can’t apply 5% throttle because even that is too much.
To make it to the finish required about 31 attempts totalling a time of about 7 hours. Most deaths are to be attributed to the stupid suspension, as was probably the intention.
Because I lost a wheel on this run, I’m sure a sub-60 minute run is possible. Whether I’ll be the one to do it? No. Please no.