QFC68 - To Golf Club and Beyond [Results out]

Community Challenges & Competitions
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To Golf Club and Beyond

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The year is 2020. Anton is a 68-year-old owner of a fairly successful construction company somewhere in Northern Europe. He was able to retire long ago with the income from his company. The winters are cold and dark, so he spends them in Italy, Thailand, somewhere closer to the Equator. But he still spends his summers home, driving around in his 1999 Jaguar XK8 Convertible. More often than not he is on the road to or from the golf clubs all around the country. Or he was…

His Jaguar has been horribly unrealiable and has drinking problem. And now it has finally come to the end of it’s road. With catastrophic failure, the time has come for Anton to buy a new convertible.

He wants a car that will start every time, has no creaks and squeks on the inside and does not need refueling every 100 kilometers. He expects a car of this kind to be more expensive to service, but he does not want to pay more than he has to. He needs the car to be able to transport at the very least himself and a set of golf clubs, but if he can fit a friend and their clubs, all the better. It should be an actual sports car or a purpose-built coupe/convertible. A BMW 3-series without a roof is still a 3-series, but a Z4 definitely is not.

Rules

Al-Rilma only

Car must appear road legal. Must have front and tail lights, third brake light, front, rear, and side indicators, side-view mirrors, windscreen wipers etc. Any kind of unscaled EU license plate front and rear. Lights do not need to be set up to work, but a nice light signature may add to exterior styling.

Anything that says Race, Billet, Offroad is banned

Car model year: 2015-2020
Engine family year: 2000-2020
Trim and Variant year: 2020

Body: 2- or 3-door convertibles only. Must be a coupe or a sedan body
No detachable soft/hard top
Wheelbase: Between 2.4 and 2.9 m, no rounding
Seating: 1 or 2 rows, must have 2 full seats in the front

Engine placement: Any
V16 banned
Maximum of 6 cylinders and 3500 cc
Fuel type: Unleaded 98 RON. No benefit for 95, he expects all cars in this class to use 98 RON
Exhaust: Must have any type of 3-way catalytic converter, at least 1 muffler
Emissions: Must meet WES 11

$300 service cost penalty for superchargers

Drive type: Any
Drivetrain: Any, 4x4 banned
Transmission: Any, Sequential banned

Wheels: Radial tires only
Width must end in 5
Minimum 30 profile

Aero: No positive downforce

ESC mandatory, LC optional

Advanced Trim Settings: Within reason, don’t make it look like something it isn’t.
Any kind of wheel width or diameter adjustments are banned. Minor ride height adjustments are fine, but gaming this by having a higher ride height, while making the car appear to sit lower is not allowed.

Cost: 55 000 maximum
Tech pool: 55 mil combined engine and car, no negative tech pool

Interior: A detailed interior is not mandatory and will not be judged. If you present you car with the top down, even a basic interior is appreciated

Realism: The car must be realistic in engineering. This means if it could plausibly exist in real life, it’s allowed. Cheesing by prioritizing one stat at the cost of all others is not allowed. Meme entries are not allowed. It is up to my judgement if an entry is allowed or not. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions about this.

Naming scheme:
Model and Family: QFC68 - [Your Forum Username]
Trim and Variant: Free

Priorities

★★★
Driveability: He is a good driver and he trusts modern stability control. He might have to do an occasional Moose Evasion Maneuver at highway speeds and he’d prefer to keep driving after

Reliability: He is done with his old car breaking down all the time. He does not want to have to deal with that. The car must work perfectly all the time, every time

Fuel economy and service cost: He has money, but that doesn’t mean he wants to literally burn it. Using less fuel means he has to spend less time refueling, which leaves him more time for other activities (golf). Lower service cost means he can justify buying better golf clubs

★★
Looks: The car must appear well designed and realistic. Having the nicest car at the club is nothing, but a positive

Comfort: He is old-ish and he’s buying a sport-ish car, but having a sore butt isn’t good for golf

Practicality: He must be able to fit himself and a set of golf clubs in his car. This can be achieved using solely the front seats. But this leaves him no room for passengers. Having back seats and a reasonable trunk allows him to take a passenger and both of their clubs. This will be judged by cargo space, practicality stat, seat configuration and overall type of car.

Prestige: If he want’s a Hyundai he’ll buy a Hyundai. But he doesn’t. He wants a car that everyone knows. Having the nicest car at the club is nothing, but a positive

Sportiness: He wants the car to feel planted, to have enough oomph in it so he doesn’t feel like he’s getting run over on the highway, to make him remember how it felt to terrorize the streets with a Opel Manta back in 1972. Actual performance isn’t that important, look at the inspirations

★
Purchase cost: He is willing to pay the full 55 000 for a car worth it, but between two equal cars, he will always pick the cheaper one. Just don’t go too low

Safety: Modern cars are safe. But he would like to keep his head should his MEM be unsuccesful

Enviromental resistance: If he’s home, he will drive this car every chance he gets. If it’s warm enough to drive, he doesn’t care about a bit of snow. He would like his car to not care about a bit of salt in the frame

Inspirations

Ford Mustang EcoBoost

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Porsche 718 Boxter S

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Jaguar F-Type P300

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BMW Z4

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Mercedes-Benz SL450

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Changelog
  1. Specified unleaded fuel, hidden automatic soft/hard top penalty, unscaled license plate and radial tyres
  2. Specified Practicality penalty for Automatic Hard Top only and car size affecting perceived practicality
  3. Moved entry period, overhauled rules, specified practicality stat
Submissions

Naming scheme:
Model and Family: QFC68 - [Your Forum Username]
Trim and Variant: Free
Send your .car file to me with a DM here on Discourse before the deadline

Submissions open 2026-01-20T00:00:00Z→2026-01-28T00:00:00Z
Unlimited resubs within the entry period, in the same DM thread. Only the last one counts

4 Likes
QFC67 - Roofless Aggression (Completed, results announced)
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A hidden hard top is basically what the game calls an automatic hard top.

Correction: you meant radial tires. I don’t think having carbon-fiber wheels would make sense for this era and segment, though. Nor, for that matter, would semi-slick, race, or off-road tires (the latter of which includes all-terrain and utility tires).

What about license plate sizes? Are the plates supposed to be unscaled (i.e., X, Y, and Z scaling all set to 1.00?)

With the era in which this QFC is set, that has to be super unleaded fuel.

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What purpose is the calculator meant to serve? I get the ”tax” thing but Imo it only seems to open an extremely ulgy can of abuse worms.

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It’s supposed to keep engine type open while giving small and efficient engines an advantage

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So what exactly does this refer to? A minor increase in price? And if so, by how much?

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This seems a bit complex for a QFC honestly.

Whilst I am aware this car is an outlier, and in all likelyhood nobody would design a car that would utilise this, but would a roof system like the Ferrari 575 Superamerica be allowed?

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It is going to be a practicality penalty as the hidden roof has to be stored in the trunk. The game doesn’t account for this, Automatic Hard Top seems to actually get a practicality boost, so this will be accounted for in the perceived practicality. And I had completely missed the fact that the game doesn’t even have an option for Hidden Automatic Hard Top, so the penalty will be given to Automatic Hard top only, not to Hidden Automatic Soft Top. Basically you are never going to fit 2 sets of golf clubs in that trunk, but with a Soft Top you might

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Like I said just above, I was under the assumption that there are separate Automatic Hard Top and Hidden Automatic Hard Top, this would be the former. But since only normal Automatic Hard Top exists, this has to be it. Although as a mechanical system it doesn’t even take up space in the trunk, but I have no way of policing who gets to have this and who has the roof in the trunk. Feel free to RP it as whatever you want, but that won’t affect the scoring in any way.

I am aware. That’s what rules deliberation is for. It’s also why I don’t want to have any stat modifiers. The calculator I feel like is fairly simple to use and all of the values that go in there are very easy to find. The reason why I have the calculator is so I don’t need to ban any type of engines, which keeps the challenge more open. Looking at the inspirations, it is very much biased to the kinds of engines those cars have.

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The cost calculator is needlessly complex for a QFC, and it really just seems like throwing random stats at it for no discernible purpose.

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Supercharger surcharge? Ok. Displacement tax and stricter emissions? Maybe a bit complex for QFC, but ok. Cylinder and lambda tax? Neither realistic nor appropriate.

Auto manual banned why?

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By 2020, I don’t think anyone was using it in this segment.

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Any two door cabriolet?

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2 Likes
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I’d say reduce the tax to just displacement, as is in the campaign. Cylinder count brings a cost penalty by itself. The lambda slider could stay as it’s directly adjustable.

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Lambda tax exists because it goes hand in hand with everything else, larger engines are harder to get to meet emissions, but the Lambda slider is basically a cheat that gets every engine to meet emissions if you use it enough. So discouraging its use encourages engines that are easier to get to emissions. Although Automation is a fairly realistic game, it’s still a game with limitations and we need to do what we can with those limitations. It doesn’t have CO2 emissions, the Lambda slider itself has no effect on cooling for example even though it should. The slider directly improves emissions without any actual drawbacks, at like above 50 it may lower torque a bit at low rpms. Which to me is more unrealistic than working with whatever limitations we have to get the best result. So as I said it’s a cheat so I feel like it’s very appropriate to limit the use of it.

Auto manual I consider to be obsolete at this point, technically there is nothing stopping manufacturers from using a 60s design automatic either, they just don’t because there are better options.

No, I will specify this more

I will get back to this after some testing

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Mostly agreed regarding lambda. It does reduce efficiency (sometimes) and throttle response (usually), but it should affect cooling and power, you’re right. The cylinder tax, tho, should go.

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Rant incoming: QFC stands for quick fire challenge not quite f***ing complicated :sob:

How the hell is a tax on lambda values supposed to even work? That’s not a value you can really do that to. It’s not like that’s a number that’s actually seen in reality, it just models optimizations for… something related to stoichiometry. (I’m not as well-versed in the real side of things as I’d like to be in order to comment more in-depth on it yet.) Most engines perform optimally somewhere between, say, 50 and 75, as I’ve seen… so you’re just randomly penalizing people who know how to engineer things for apt performance?

And a tax per cylinder? What? When has this ever been a thing for any segment, let alone this one you seem to be set on? Displacement, sure, I guess, but… what???

And why is auto manual restricted? What’s with a tire profile restriction on the upper bound? That’s a problem that handles itself, usually.

Really, I don’t get the point of a fair number of these restrictions. It’s a mess.

I’ve come to understand some stricter rulesets for realism’s sake (some of you may recall my poor-taste rant about the strict tire restrictions in QFC49 — it’s something I’ve since realized was a relatively simple and genius way of getting more lifelike results), but this is just… why?

Just my Great Value brand extremely blunt thought process, so you know, take it or leave it.

Suddenly edited in PS note: this was written and sent before my browser refreshed and showed the most up to date posts, sorry if anything was previously mentioned.

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Is this the in-game Lambda-slider? If so that’s just poor engineering. Nothing I’ve made has ever made it past 15 and that’s trying to make it bad. Most of them are at 5-8. So because the Lambda slider is a complete cheat that has no drawbacks, but can get anything through everything, it’s just stupid not to limit that imo. If you are talking about the actual Lambda, where Lambda=1 is stoichiometric, that’s completely irrelevant to how the game works. Some engines might run rich at Lambda=0.75 at some points, but that’s not how the game works and definitely not what the slider number means.

It isn’t, it hasn’t. Automation is a game. Nobody in real world would make 4 liter NA i4. Sure maybe that happened in 1909, but it isn’t happening in 2020. If I only “tax” displacement it leaves the cylinder count completely out of the equation.

I fit all 4 (HC, Lambda, Cylinders, Displacement) variables into one calculator because I feel it makes things more simple actually. Big engines bad, small engines good. If you want to build a big engine you are free to do so, just know it will cost a lot more.
I purposefully did not set any engine limitations just so the ruleset doesn’t need to be so restrictive. But I have seen all the comments and I’m working on it.

This is fair. Maybe there doesn’t need to be an upper limit. It’s just there so people don’t game comfort.

As far as I’m aware only the calculator seems to be an issue, there hasn’t been much talk about anything else apart from some minor corrections and clarifications(?)

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I’m just going to attach this link from a video kindly provided by the developers with a relevant timestamp regarding how the lambda slider actually works. I reviewed it myself to double-check to make sure I was recalling it correctly, might’ve been a little off.

In short, it optimizes the fuel map to play nicer with the catalytic converter based on AFR. Like a more dynamic version of the old “emissions optimization” button from Ellisbury, I guess.

So, no, it is not “poor engineering,” thank you very much. Taxing AFR is ridiculous.

5 Likes
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I’m gonna agree that the cost calculator is overcomplicated for QFC.

It would be a great way to add unique depth to, say, a CSR, but this is a series based on simplicity and accessibility. Instead, just having “max displacement 2500cc” and maybe “max Lambda 20” as rules should approximate the same effect, much more simply. And sure, some goober might present you a 1.5L V12; this would score poorly anyway, since reliability, fuel economy and service costs are top priorities.

Also, a lot of these rules seem a bit prescriptive. For example, given that regular auto, auto manual and sequential are just inferior types of transmissions by this point… why restrict them? Anyone who uses them is already just handicapping themselves. It’d be a lot easier to have a “be realistic” clause in the rules, and use that to spite any cheese that shows up.

In my opinion, the point of rules should be to create interesting design limitations; and in the case of QFC, to do so as simply and minimally as possible, even if imperfectly. Plus, especially since it’s intended for newer and more casual players, it’s ok for QFC to be tolerant of decisions that aren’t perfectly realistic, as long as they aren’t completely outlandish or blatant min-maxing.

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It doesn’t help that the information is not explained too well. If you can’t simplify your rules down to a few clear sentences, you probably need to reconsider. Incidentally, this calculator ends up hiding some… odd implications.

The formula is Cost * MAX(0; MIN(1,5; 0,9 + (((Displacement/1000)^1,0001 + Cylinders*0,45 + HC*0,18 + Lambda*0,4*(Displacement/2000)^0,5)/28)))

Note that this is in a European format, where the comma is the decimal divider. Let’s walk through this function, shall we?

  • The initial max is completely superfluous. The min() adds a constant factor of 0.9, and then a bunch of various terms that can only be positive.
  • Displacement gets converted to litres, raised to 1.0001 then divided by 28. With an 8 litre displacement and a 70 thousand dollar base prices, the power of 1.0001 adds… under five bucks to the cost. Why is the exponent there?
  • Each cylinder increases your car’s base cost by about 1.7%, unless you’re at the cap. So this is an additional 19.3% for a V12, 4.8% for an i3.
  • At WES11, the maximum HC is 100. So if you’re just barely legal, you get an extra 65% to your price and hit the cap. You need to substantially exceed WES11 to actually have the other stuff make a difference.
  • Finally, the lambda slider. We convert displacement to litres, halve it, take the square root of the result, multiply by lambda, multiply by 0.4 and divide by 28… But why? Lambda is literally free for car makers to implement, they’re just tuning an ECU. No tax regime cares about how you get your emissions, why do they care here?
  • From an engineering perspective, this is hell. Does increasing the lambda slider make a car cheaper? Who knows!

Let’s go through the inspirations, one by one, and evaluate them. I’m going to assume 20 HC and 20 lambda, fairly low values overall.

  • Mustang Ecoboost: 2.3L 4-cyl. Gets a 48% cost penalty.
  • 718 Boxter S: 2.0L 4-cyl. Gets a 45% cost penalty.
  • F-Type P300: 2.0L 4-cyl. Gets a 45% cost penalty.
  • BMW Z4: 2.0L 4-cyl. Gets a 45% cost penalty. Unless it’s the 3.0, of course.
  • SL450: 3.0L 6-cyl. Gets the maximum possible 50% cost penalty.
  • Hell, with the 62.0 HC shown in the post, you end up getting a 43.5% cost penalty for most of the cars.

Let’s talk about the engineering perspective more, though. You want prestige. One of the biggest components of prestige is your engine, and your top speed, and your power. You want sportiness, which wants acceleration and braking. You want comfort, which wants smoothness… And if you get good emissions with moderate use of the lambda slider while using the configurations that your inspirations show, you end up shaving off a tiny amount of the price.

So the meta ends up going one of two ways. Either I go even smaller than the inspirations and sacrifice the higher priorities to pursue a 1-star or try and free up some budget (in other words, I submit a rather nice Hyundai), or I say “screw it”, chuck a decent-sized V8 or V12 in my car, abuse the hell out of the cap and get massively high results for the stats that actually matter, assuming I can tune said engine to be reasonably economical. Then when you get these cars, you wind up with a bunch of stuff that doesn’t really match the brief, and it’s a bit of a crapshoot for you judging.

So… Not only is the calculator unrealistic in the things it chooses to punish, it’s also conveyed poorly and it’s incredibly at odds with the rest of the brief.

You also have an incredibly vague rule about the penalty due to certain convertible types. There’s a small practicality penalty, but how much? Is it a percentage of my practicality? An absolute thing? Relatedly, why is there the positive downforce rule? Are you saying that our buyer here would choose a 718 Boxster S if it was in his price range, but not the downforce-producing 718 Boxster GT4? That he would be turned off by a slightly faster car that’s just as comfortable, purely because it’s 2020 and auto makers understand aero? The downforce rule kinda sometimes makes sense in the early days when you want to simulate a lack of aero knowledge, but not in 2020.

In short: The calculator is the most egregious, but the way it conflicts with the priorities and inspirations is even worse, and there’s some rules I’m not too sure about.

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Not strictly true - see: displacement tax - but I’ve never heard of cylinder count taxed, even in the most batshit despotic head-in-arse idiocracies.

@AMuteCrypt Excellent deconstruction of the flaws, both conceptual and as-implemented.

Might I remind of a proposed global rule: if something doesn’t clash with realism or give an unfair advantage, don’t ban it. Let the priorities weed out unsuitable choices.

3 Likes