SMRW14 - Initium [Production Car Subs OPEN]

Soccer Mom Race Weekend 2014

Background

“Oh come on! A minivan only race is a brilliant idea!”

The fan whirred overhead as the manager facepalmed.

“Please tell me this isn’t your plan to help the track, Jordie,” He grumbled.

“But it is!” Jordie’s face beamed. “Think of it, minivans are some of the least track ready vehicles out there. Imagine how fun it’d be to see a whole field of them racing!”

“About as fun as me receiving overdue bills and noise ordinances from the owner,” The manager sat up in his office chair.

“Look man, there are many successful school bus and hearse leagues out there!” Jordie pointed towards the window. “This could be the next big thing! Nobody else does this!”

“And for good reason.”

“Where’s that passion of leadership and innovation that the track owner wants, hmm? You know street racing is a big problem around these parts, and you know used minivans are dirt cheap now that SUVs are all the rage.” Jordie grinned, “It’ll get law enforcement off your back some I bet with those noise ordinances.”

The manager stared out the window at the sun-bleached track, “Alright, you’ll get ONE weekend to prove that this works.” The manager whipped around, “But if this falls flat on its face, your performance review may not be so bright this quarter.”

“I have full faith in this sir!” Jordie nodded. “I’m sure you’ll have nothing but good things to say in a few month’s time!”

Welcome all to the Soccer Mom Race Weekend 2014 (SMRW14)! A local track decided (perhaps against their better judgement) to host a handful of races only open to minivans!

For this challenge, you will be submitting two cars: A production car to be sold to the masses and a race car that a future owner will “improve” from the production model.

Don’t want to submit a production car? No problem! You can get a pre-assigned vehicle to enter the racing portion! More details will come later.

Rules:

Production Car Phase:

Your boss tasked you with creating a minivan to join the not-so-exciting model lineup. This vehicle will be the underpinnings of your fire breathing race machine.

Remember, even though the intent is to race the vehicle, the production car has to be a reasonable common vehicle. No, your carbon fiber space frame 1.2L V16 Quad Turbo minivan on semi slicks does not count.

General rules:

  • Car MUST be in a stable build of Automation.
  • No meme entries.
  • No legacy bodies.
  • No min-maxing.
  • Interiors not required.

Production car build rules:

  • Body style MUST be minivan/people carrier/MPV as viewed by the game.
  • Entry must be a “reasonable common vehicle”. See above statements for more information.
  • Family/Trim years must be between 1980 and 2014.
  • Cost must not exceed $32,000.
  • No negative quality.
  • No race parts.
  • Car must “look and function” as a production car (headlights, wipers, gas cap, etc).
  • Default techpool (all at +5).
  • Tires must stay at 0 quality.
  • Car must run on unleaded pump gas (unleaded fuel only, octanes no higher than 93 AKI).
    • Trims before 1985 can run on leaded gas no higher than 93 AKI.
  • Car must have at least 90% normalized desirability in one of the following markets:
    • Family.
    • Family Budget.
    • Family Premium.
    • Family Utility Budget.
    • Family Utility.
    • Family Utility Premium.
    • Premium.
    • Passenger Fleet.
  • Car must meet Hetvesian emissions regulations for its trim year.
  • Car must have at least two seats in each row if a three row body OR have more than 4 seats total if a two row body (aka, car must function as a minivan).

Production Car Submissions:

You must submit your car through a DM to me here on the forums. If you’re new and can’t DM yet, browse some other posts to earn the rankings to do so.

  • Naming convention:
    • Car model: SMRW14 - USERNAME
    • Car trim: Car name - (Prod). (ex, ACZ Concur S4C - Prod)
    • Engine family: SMRW14 - USERNAME
    • Engine variant: - Engine name - (Prod). (ex, 2.3L I4 - Prod)
  • You must indicate if you would like your car to be available to others to download and modify.
  • You must post a picture of your production car in the thread with a short blurb advertising it (1-2 sentences is all that’s needed).

A submission with no advert or vise versa does NOT count as complete.

Since I am competing too, I will not check any submissions until the deadline has passed, so in theory you have unlimited re-submissions.

Design Inspiration

Production Car Rule Deliberation Deadline: 2025-01-25T05:00:00Z2025-02-02T17:00:00Z

Production Car Submission Deadline: 2025-02-02T05:00:00Z2025-03-02T04:59:00Z

Race car rules TBD.

8 Likes

So we start off by submitting a road car, then submit a race car based on it once the road car submission deadline has passed?

Correct. Tempted to have a market/randomizer scenario, where you would get someone else’s production car to modify to race, but that would be more overhead on my part.

for those of us who have never used this feature, how do we check?

Judging by how tyres are +0 quality only, is this a beam competition?

Short answer, it’s the default setting.

Long answer, in the statistics tab, you can toggle which markets to set as active incase you want something “market specific”. In short, the rule is there to stop people from gaming the system, but I should add that all 5 markets are the default setting.

EDIT: Apparently the market toggle doesn’t affect desirability at all.

2 Likes

Nope, this is automation only. The tires being at +0 is to make sure the playing field is even grip wise and to ease calculations for my sim.

alright then, thanks

1 Like

Are interiors judged/necessary?

Interiors are not required, but you can make one if you wish.

Where does it say this specifically?

Here:

3 Likes

Thanks, ill look for that when i get off work tonight.

Should there be a rule to have 3 seat rows?

That’s a good rule especially since that’s kind of the whole point of a minivan, but any car with 3 full rows of seats takes a huge practicality hit, which may be hard to overcome in the desirability front. So that either leads to:

A - No seat requirements.
B - Require 3 full rows and adjust normalized desirability threshold if needed.
C - Require 2 full rows of seats and have the third row be +2 or +3 configuration.

I’ll have to poke around with B, but I do want to incorporate it for realism purposes.

To be fair, not all passenger vans have 3rd seat rows. Sometimes, especially in the case of compact or kei vans, the goal is just to maximize interior space/comfort.

If you want to require 3-row vans you could, but this is also something you could cover by a realism or “no minmaxing” rule.

i’ll say, this option (personally using 2/2/+3) has no problem getting over the normalised desirability threshold, and is also realistic.

C is my vote

If I change my seating arrangement from 2/3/2 to 2/3/+3, my car falls below desirability, so I’d vote for A. Let people decide how to equip their cars. I’m definitely not just saying this because I’m too lazy to redo my engineering if the +3 or +2 becomes mandatory.

Hmm, maybe a good compromise would be “Car must have at least 2 seats in each available seat row OR 5 seats combined.”, which leaves it open for a +2/+3 option, doesn’t force out any minivan/MPV bodies with 2 rows of seats, and hopefully gives breathing room for kei cars to still be submittable.

A realism clause is good as well. A two row minivan based off a hatchback with a second row having a +2 configuration is not very realistic (min-maxed I believe is the term). I’ll update the main post once I figure out how to word it.

1 Like