You can do minimum weight, and maximum displacement restrictions. However, again with the body sizes, if you do pick minimum weight, take into account the materials you’re forcing us to use (I note that there are no restrictions on quality/tech sliders or total cost. That’s probably the easiest way to level the playing field otherwise there’s going to be a lot of +15 slider abuse).
A 2.5-ish m wheelbase car with an AHS steel chassis, and partial aluminium panels, in AWD, might weigh about 1300kg if it used standard safety. For a car like that, making about 420bhp is pretty easy, an NA 4.5L V8 ought to do it while running very lean (3.8L for running rich), and for a turbo engine, that’s pretty doable with a 3.0L if you’re running the turbo restrictions. At least, those are off-the-cuff guesses for the year 2016. I could be a bit off here and there.
Does this mean you are now prohibiting partial Aluminium panels?
I get that Magnesium isn’t exactly a commonly used composite. But why disallow AlSi?
As far as engine block and header compounds go, AFAIK (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) AlSi has been around for nearly 2 decades and is more common than Aluminium by now.
I take it we will be restricting width at some point too. Actually, wider tyres are bad for rally, so that’s one of your main challenges: finding out how to use the offroad stat to determin how good a rally car is.
I beg of you, please don’t make ALL the sliders 0. That kills off about 75% of the variability and complexity of this contest given how restrictive the rest of the regulations are. The rest of the restrictions are pretty reasonable.
What you’ll probably want to do, however, is definitely put a maximum tech level on the tyres. Stipulating a minimum safety level is pretty reasonable, though be careful with this, you don’t want to mess up our ability to alter the weight of the car further!
I would use actual weight instead of minimum weight, otherwise it means you HAVE TO go for a 1200kg 300bhp car to be competitive (so, less variance between the submitted cars)
Also, I would go for a displacement limit instead of hp limit; hp limit means you have to go for low-rpm torque to be slightly faster, which isn’t really what a race engine should be.
For the cost limit, $50k (I assume that’s total cost, not estimated market price) is too much, the cars from BRC are $5-7k in the current stable and you could go quite high on quality sliders.
Ooh, that’s probably one of the first things you should mention if you’re going to make a contest: mods or not, and how flexible you are to change this. Are you running standalone?
I mean, most of us who use Steam can probably simply click the option to disable the Steam mods, and that’ll solve most of the issue, but it’ll also suck out a lot of the enjoyment from building cars, because most of our visual content actually depends on the really good mods.
No mods is good for me, as I’m the kind of person that really doesn’t like dealing with mods - but if most people want visual mods (that don’t affect competitveness too much) its to consider.
