QFC70 - Family Fun/ction [CLOSED, judging in progress]

Community Challenges & Competitions
1

Previously on QFC

Abbotsbury, Dorset, England 2003

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An idyllic small family in an idyllic small village - but for clinical engineer Patrick and teaching assistant Sarah, picking a car for themselves and their 16-year-old daughter Zoe is far from the easy life.

For a start, Abbotsbury is almost a ten-mile drive from the nearest towns of any size, and by implication most shops (and Zoe’s school). So it’s going to be covering some distance, and in a country with infamously high fuel prices.
Secondly, the village is on the scenic B3157 coast road between two of them that is so twisty and challenging that through traffic between the two is signed to go via the third instead - and even that route has a hairpin along the way! - but if you’ve got those kinds of driving roads on your doorstep, there’s a fair chance you’ll want to have fun using them.
Thirdly, a big part of the reason for through traffic being signed away from the coast road is the tight junction in… Abbotsbury. (It’s the one in the picture.) Having a big unit of a family car might be a problem round here.

Rules

Al-Riima/stable branch only

  • Trim and Variant year must be 2003
  • Must have 4 or 5 doors
  • Hatch, wagon, sedan, and people mover body styles all legal
  • Must have 2 front and 3 rear seats
  • Wheelbase 2.45-2.85m (rounded 2.5-2.8m)
  • Race/Billet parts banned
  • Superchargers legal (one of the inspirations has one, even!) but SVC +$300 for balance
  • 95 RON (91 AKI) unleaded fuel
  • Must have a cat and muffler (of any type) and meet WES 9 with max 45 loudness
  • Minimum Basic 90s safety with better preferred
  • Maximum cost (in-game) $18,000
  • Techpool cap $30m, with no categories below 3
  • ATS banned for wheel/tyre width/diameter, camber, and wheelbase
  • No positive downforce on either axle
  • Tyres to be radial, with width of xx5 not xx0, and with a road compound (no off-road/all-terrain/semi-slicks)
  • Interiors are not required and will not be judged
Priorities

Note: some of these may not end up being judged on the pure Automation stat as they don’t always tell the whole picture.

★★★ Drivability: Whether powering along twisty roads or negotiating market town streets, the last thing Sarah and Patrick want is an awkward car to drive. Especially when it rains. And while south Dorset is sunnier and drier than much of England, that’s pretty relative…

★★★ Reliability: When you’re ten miles from most amenities, you really, really don’t want your car to break down on you.

★★★ Fuel economy: This is 2000s England, where petrol prices have soared high enough to have sparked a blockade that ground the country to a halt a couple of years ago. A car being used in a rural area like this really can’t afford to be uneconomical!

★★★ Price: They’re happy to go up to their budget cap for the right car, but needless to say it’s better to spend less than more upfront.

★★ Sportiness: While the B-road blasts this car will be taking are largely practical, this busy couple will want to put their foot down a bit for fun and time saving alike. And they don’t want to be caught out when stuck behind a tractor or dealing with the 17% gradient of Abbotsbury Hill…

★★ Practicality: On one hand, it needs to be spacious enough to fit all three of the family plus a big grocery shop (because, again, nearly ten miles to the nearest supermarket) and/or Zoe’s cello - and eventually everything else she’ll be taking to uni in a couple of years!
★★ Footprint (-): On the other hand, the bigger it is, the more awkward narrow roads will be to navigate - and going taller in the MPV style would surely sacrifice sportiness…

★★ Comfort: Considering how long the family will be spending in this car, it’s best that it doesn’t feel like a boneshaker. Sedans will be given a buff in this category due to extra sound isolation and as a balance to their nerfs elsewhere

★★ Design: The priority here isn’t so much looking good as not looking ugly. Just a normal car for a normal family, no shouting about performance from the rooftops. Wouldn’t want to stick out in this little village and be mistaken for boy racers… Sedans will be given a buff in this category for their aspirational image and as a balance to their nerfs elsewhere

★★ Safety: It’s a family car being driven in an area that’s not the easiest to drive in, so it simply has to not be a death trap.

★ Offroad: While they probably won’t be tackling anything more than their house’s gravel parking area or similarly surfaced car parks at tourist attractions, this also serves as a proxy for ability to handle steep hills and bad road surfaces that they absolutely will experience.

★ Service costs: Being cheaper to run in general will be helpful, though Patrick can do some basic maintenance himself and fuel prices will be a bigger part of the cost calculation in this part of the world.

Inspirations

Skoda Octavia vRS

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Ford Focus ST170
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Seat Toledo V5
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Peugeot 307 XSi
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Toyota Corolla T-Sport
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Changelog

14 February, 2107 UTC: clarified exhaust and seating rules, added safety floor and provisional ATS rule
16 February, 2315 UTC: added price as a priority, added tyre/downforce rules and actually added safety floor into the OP this time, added subjective sedan buffs as a balance patch, confirmed entry period
17 February, 2255 UTC: added loudness cap and officially got this thing going

Entry procedure

The entry period is 2026-02-17T22:00:00Z→2026-02-24T22:00:00Z
Naming scheme: Model and Family: QFC70 - [Your Forum Username] | Trim and Variant: Free
Unlimited resubmissions are allowed within the entry period, in the same DM thread; only the last one will be graded.

Good luck, have fun, please call the hell out on anything I might have messed up as this is either my first challenge or my first in years, I can’t even remember :joy:

17 Likes
2

Any type and any amount of mufflers as long as its WES 9? (and catalizator as in type)

Minimum or exactly?

3

Once it’s set, would reccomend specifying exactly when the deadline is.

In fact, if you use the following formatting tag, you can set the display to adjust exactly to the user’s time zone:

<b>[date-range from=2026-2-XXT00:00:00 to=2026-02-XXT00:00:00 timezone="UTC"]</b>

Also, a thing to take into account with practicality is that it strongly favors certain body types over others, even when they aren’t outwardly different (hatchbacks get a huge boost, for example)

2 Likes
4

You mention requiring 2 front and 3 rear, are 3-row MPVs allowed? Can those run a 2-3-2, where it’s 3 middle and 2 rear?

The Opel Zafira and Renault Espace show that it’s definitely physically possible within the wheelbase but I get if you don’t want 3-row cars.

5

any minimum safety?

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Rules on ATS?

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TBH wouldn’t all those have the third row being optional?

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I definitely thought about the Zafira (a Vauxhall in this market ofc - yes, I’m British too and indeed grew up in roughly this area although the family situation definitely isn’t me) - having seven seats wouldn’t be this family’s need at all so they wouldn’t think to look at those but the five-seat MPV market was thriving by then with the Scénic as its standard-bearer (would have had that as a potential inspiration if it had a sporty version, and may still have had the Zafira VXR as an inspiration if it wasn’t three years away at this point!)

I think all Zafiras were seven-seaters, albeit with the back row folding into the floor very neatly; the Scénic ended up having a seven-seater “Grand” variant with its second generation right after this.

Thinking Basic 90s as an assumption for what would even needed to be legal to sell at this point, with an expectation of better.

Provisionally “don’t use ATS to make the car something it isn’t,” but having not touched ATS in the past this isn’t something I am going to pretend to understand well enough to offer much helpful beyond that and may appreciate assistance from someone who does :laughing:

9

The rule I personally go for is “if you could achieve this with engineering, don’t do it with ATS”. I’ve got a long list of what that entails, but it’s mostly suspension and tyres.

Don’t lift the car up massively to game off-road, then bring it back down with ATS to look better. Don’t give it massively skinny tyres for rolling resistance with ATS used to hide the ridiculous size. Stuff like that.

Totally fair to say they don’t want 3 rows, I asked for a reason after all. I figured there was a chance they’d cross shop it and a chance they wouldn’t.

10

One thing about that though, Something like wheel rim diameter can be adjusted very slightly to get the ideal size, something which isn’t really possible with engineering, where the size adjustments are much larger.

11

I think this is what’s generally banned on ATS:

Wheel width, wheel diameter, tyre width, tyre diameter, camber and wheelbase to a certain point.

12

just a note, will you edit the original post with the new rules please?

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Yes, yes I will. Always going to be done that way :slight_smile:

1 Like
14

All inspirations here are C-segment cars, but could something bigger work if it’s inside the budget limit?

IDK, more budget-y 320i

15

Love that question! The brief is deliberately left open within that wheelbase range - and the E46 3 Series (2.725m) is within that range, and even in length is actually shorter than the 2004-refresh Corolla (!).

It’s just a different part of the “can handle our stuff”/“can handle our roads” tradeoff within this challenge concept :slight_smile:

16

is there any wiggle room on the budget/techpool? finding it to be a just a little too tight, i think if budget was increased to 20k or if techpool was increased to 45m it would be better

17

ESC had not yet been mandated in the UK for all new cars by 2003, but its use is still recommended anyway for the sake of drivability.

18

what about naturally aspirated engines and turbo techpool, or body unlock techpool for bodies that don’t need it?

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Techpool works on a company-wide basis. Just about all companies in this sector had some degree of R&D being put into turbos and new bodies, even if your car doesn’t use it. The 3-point minimum forces spreads that reflect the way companies actually act and work.

3 Likes
20

I would like to ask if sedans would be getting some sort of subjective buff from Patrick and Sarah against other body types such as hatchbacks, because if there aren’t, going with sedans would be shooting oneself in the foot. (lesser practicality, bigger footprint which also result in lesser drivability, etc.)

3 Likes