Real Driver Challenge - Fastest Automation Test Track Car - OFFICIAL RESULTS!

Community Challenges & Competitions
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Real Driver Automation Test Track Challenge

Hello There! I would like to invite You to the first challenge I host. I am new to the discourse but not new to Automation nor Beam.NG. I hope this challange is gonna be slightly different from all the previous challenges here so far. I say slightly cuz i realize it is nearly impossible to create something completly new.

Well the objective is simple – build me the fastest car around an Automation Test Track. This time however You will not score based on the ingame algorithm but You will score based on the real performance in Beam.NG while the car is driven by a real performance driver.

So what are the rules?
I think there is only one rule that applies here. Cars have to be created using sandbox mode (not campaign) appart from that, there is a goal only :blush: It means You can use quality sliders how You want and so on. There is no minimum or maximum power, torque nor weight. So it is enterily up to You how You will approach this challenge. I decided to make it a sandbox mode after being warned by a more expirienced player about some exploits.

What car will win?
The winner is a car which will cloak the best lap time while in my hands. How Do I approach it? I simply spawn on the main straight and run the laptimer app at the point of the spawn.

Of course I realize that it may be biased due to the driver preferences, skills or knowledge about the car. But well, let me tell You few words about the driver…

Driver Discription:
Well…, It’s me. I really hope it is not gonna look like a „show of” but rather it will make a challenge more trustworthy. My name is Michał Pryczek and I am licensed rally driver competing in a Polish Rally Championship. I have two individual championship titles in a historic class achived with my Subaru Impreza GC8 555 car. Next year we gonna take part in the European Rally Championship (ERC2) in a Subaru Impreza N14 car. You can search my YT channel by typing my name in a search field if You wanna check if I am a good enough driver :blush:

I have been a rally driver since 2009, which is shortly after I passed my driving license exams. Cars are my main interest since early childhood. I have played and finished loads of driving simulation games such as: Gran Turismo, Richard Burns Rally (with some online successes), Toca Series, Asseto Corsa and now Beam.NG mostly.

Well, when it comes to Beam.NG I fell in love with an Automation Test Track and I drive it daily A LOT! Build number of different performance cars in Automation – purpose made for this track.

So well, yeah, I have a great knowledge about car handling in general, I know how to set it up for different purposes and also i guess i know the correct racing line quite well :smiley:

About the Challenge:
I am not really sure how many entries to expect. I wanna to testdrive each car up to its capabilities for ten straight laps and chose the best lap time from among them. Then comes the issue, if I drive every car for 10 laps and there will be 50 entries it means im supposed to make 500 laps which is about 1000 minutes (16-17 hours) of pure driving. Therefore I wanna ask the community if I should stick to 10 laps or maybe reduce it to 6.

When it comes to a look of a car dont go to crazy but dont give me an empty shell either. Im not gonna judge the looks at all, but cars with no fixtures at all will be instabinned.

Other Instabins criteria:

  • Car undriveable (wheelspin at 3rd and 4th gear so big, that there is no way to go smoothly around a corner)
  • Cars which engines fail due to overheating (or others) before lap 10 is reached
  • Cars which brakes fade before reaching lap 10
  • No fixtures at all or nearly plain shell

My recommendations:

  • Equip Your car with ABS, as im using a Logitech G27 steering wheel, which does not provide correct brake pedal feel.
  • No, making Your car 3500 HP will not make Your car fastest :wink:
  • Please Focus on a handling and braking performance
  • Toe can be adjusted in Beam.NG as can be a tire pressure – please include this in a PM if You want me to set any specific values different than default
  • Please drive Your car first, there are some differences in Automation and Beam.NG algorithms, especially when it comes to aerodynamics. What is good in Automation is not always good in Beam.NG

What will You get?
Well satisfaction for sure but also I will try to provide You with best feedback possible regarding cars characteristics.

When will the entries open and close?
Submissions open at 6th March 2021 – 00:00 CET
and will be closed at 14th March 2021 – 23:59 CET

Result Publication:
I will update results every time i complete driving a particular car with some feedback on handling. I hope I will be able to complete a run for every car maximum one week after submissions close (21st March 2021) if a number of entries do not excced my expectations :blush:

Naming and exporting rules:
Please name Your car as follows: User Name – Car Name
Export me both Beam.NG file as well as Automation file so I can check if there is no campaign mode exploit.

Last but not least:
After im done driving each car I will also publish a time of my fastest car ever made for a comparison purposes. My car is not included in the challenge as I have driven hundred of laps with it and spent to much time on setting it up :smiley: :wink:

So who will make a fastest car ? Please let me know if You have any idea how to make this challenge more interesting or trustworthy. I know sometimes my english is crap, so if anything needs more or better desription lemme know :slight_smile:

Cheers!

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this sounds like an awesome idea! especially since its gonna be a real driver doing the testing! you can really go balls-out in this challenge… which will make for some interesting cars. this is gonna be exciting!

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hoo boy, time to see a big wave of optimizations and improvements in the endless quest of the fastest Automation car ever

Mind throw us the time that you got in your car? So that we’ll have a target to beat :wink:

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Yeah I decided to publish it after on purpose. The purpose is not to discourage the players who are far from getting there. Therefore I can send them some tips and hints after the challenge which hopefully will be valueable for their knowledge. Maybe my thinking is wrong, but also I wanna see diversity of designs. Giving the result will propably limit this diversity.

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Also I promise to be honest with my result, I hate cheaters and have no point in cheating here. I accept the fact that someone might be better so I can learn from him or her :slight_smile:

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At the very LEAST, this could be be a benchmark for cars submitted period.

Will there be a points system like Doug on youtube?

Great idea, if you could get like 5 more expert drivers to test vehicles like this…it would be FIRE

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You want me to score weekend categories or daily ? :stuck_out_tongue: Well I voided the scoring system so that this challenge is purly about driving and the rules are simple.

Good idea with other drivers, well I know quite few but they are not really familiar with Beam.NG so I am affraid they would have to learn the track and game physics first which means later submissions would propably benefit from that.

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A few things;

First; Will we be handing over the .car file for you to export? Or can we send over a .zip of the BeamNG mod with some other jbeam modded stuff?

Second; I highly suggest a “best of three” for the laps as it offers enough variation to get a good average without wasting too much time.

Third; Will there be separate classes, say fastest Front-Wheel-Drive, or perhaps fastest sedan?

Looking forward to this challenge!

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Ad 1. Well I wrote in the description that i would like to recive both .car and .zip files. Automation file is to verify that there is no campaign mode exploit and Beam.NG mod to simply paste it in the mods folder and drive. After Your comment I realized that a .car file is enough as I can export it myself. I am curious what other community members think about it ?

Ad. 2 Please introduce me to the “best of three” idea more. You want me to make just 3 laps or make an avrage time out of three best times? Yeah i wanted to make bigger number of laps so I can get a good car feeling first. Therefore a result would be more trustworthy. You might be right that 10 laps are a lot so I will consider reducing it to 6 if other community members support this idea.

Ad. 3 Surly not this time. We aim just for a fastest car. When it will come to the final results I will point the fastest FWD/RWD/AWD car but the winner can be only one.

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this seems very interesting, expect an evo9 on crack from me!

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Oops, I must’ve missed that, sorry! :sweat_smile:

That was basically the idea, yes. But I guess it makes sense for you to get to know how the car drives first, so I personally think that 6 laps would be fine, but I guess it’s up to you if you want to spend more time to get better lap results out of the cars.

That works for me!

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replaY You know how to make a Subaru driver anxious :sweat_smile:

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One more question, me and another guy has a car that worked in the previous versions Automations, however due to Automation game and exporter updates the exported cars no longer works. I can still provide a car file that when exported does not work in beam, but the other guy has a car so old that the .car file cannot be imported into Automation at all. In those scenarios, can the car file submissions be exempted?

I understand that there would be no way to check if the BeamNG files are altered or not if a car file cannot be provided, so I’m fine if such entrants are not allowed. But we think those cars have a chance to be competitive, so just want to know your stance on this scenario.

If you want me to clarify anything we can take this into DMs, since this is pretty specific

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I think I can answer it here. Well the rules are that both files have to be provided. You have plenty of time to biuld a new car based on the old one so it works fine in both games.

However if You want me to drive what You have feel free to send it to me. I might put it into the score table for comparison purposes, but such car cannot be a winner.

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Just to be clear, the only reason why I say add 5 extra drivers is because this challenge has the potential to become overwhelming for 1 person…I assume. At least 2 drivers. As far as learning the track and game physics, that shouldnt be too hard, it’ll be like going from Need for Speed to Gran Turismo…or whatever.

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Trust me that every game is different and I know really well that if You wanna drive fast and on the limit You have to learn the track (this is the key to winning in all racing or rally games but also in real life!!) and physics first. I am not saying the idea is bad, it would provide better feedback and slightly less biased output. I would love to implement this idea but first I must make sure that the other drivers cloak similar times to each other and myself (by similar I mean within 0.2 of a second per lap).

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Excellent to have a pro driver here, welcome. Also really nice to see the 555 livery in action.

As someone with about 700 hours in Beam and who is widely regarded here and in other elements of the Beam community as “a fast sim driver” (I am not a professional race driver), there’s a couple of notes I’d like to make:

No, making Your car 3500 HP will not make Your car fastest

Barring a couple of chicanes and a hairpin, the ATT is a very fast and wide track. 3500hp is actually reasonable, provided the car is AWD and has a lot of downforce (and all the tyre and ride height adjustments to match). If you have a small limit on the time spent trying to drive it, which is very understandable, 2500 is also reasonable.

Equip Your car with ABS, as im using a Logitech G27 steering wheel, which does not provide correct brake pedal feel.

I very much agree wrt. the G27 (unfortunately my set died just last month so I’m trying to figure out what to get next). However, as far as I know, the ABS still doesn’t work as desired in Beam so if you’re trying to slow down a very quick vehicle in anything less than a straight line, the brakes may simply not engage. My recommendation is to forego the ABS and set the brake pressure to something that doesn’t hugely exceed tyre friction limits at lower speeds.

Also the export build recently changed the tyre model, so many of us are still yet to understand their limits, particularly the new downforce gain limits.

As mentioned, I’d love to get involved with this but it seems unlikely I will source and acclimatise to a new controller within the timeframe of this challenge. That said, I’d be interested to join future rounds if you host any more, see what your times are like and perhaps even, if need be, join you later down the track as a fellow driver… if my pace is up to scratch.

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Hello! Its 733 hours on my side, so I guess we have similar expirience :slight_smile:

Thats true, Automation Test Track is fast. As I said there is pretty much no rules so You guys can design a car as You want. Maybe I was wrong, but that is my expirience and my fastest car is much less powerful. Come on and surprise me :slight_smile:

This is absolutely correct. ABS in Beam.NG needs some rework, but then if You think of it, most braking points on the track are where the front wheels are straight. I am aware of that and sort of adjusted my technique to it. ABS is crap when You start braking when there is ANY weight transition on the car. Yeah You guys may try a diffrent approach but remember to avoid brake fade.

Yes I know about it, me to is still learning about aero in Beam.Ng.

You are most welcome of course !
It is nice to have a fast sim driver here as You guys very often beat real drivers in the games! Looking forward to a fellow driver, so do Your best and try to join as soon as You can :slight_smile:

EDIT: More answers, as I hit the reply button accidentally before :wink:

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You might not be, I haven’t actually attempted a fastest lap unlimited export build for over a year and the drag calculations have also changed a lot. I just ordered a G29 so maybe I can test next week :joy:

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Yeah, I hit the reply button accidentally before I completed quoting so there is a complete reply above now :slight_smile: