i knew my reliability might be a bit low but this scares me
also this round was way closer than i thought is was gonna be.
Congratulation to the winners and to whoever i am battling next good luck.
can climb hill now? no? 
Grats to @DeusExMackia and good luck in the next round. Your concern over the pairup made my day.
I didn’t really expect to make it to the finals on my bicycle tires, but after the stellar performance in the first round, I was hoping for a good run into the third or fourth stage.
My Excel table told me that Hard tires were pointless and Medium and Sport came back with a roughly even penalty rate over the course of the challenge. Since Sport would give me the faster base time before penalties, that was what I went for. Obviously now that I’ve dropped out, the “over the course” argument sort of falls down.
Since I’ll be watching from the sidelines I may as well lift the veil on what I was running:
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Ah, twas a well fought battle it seems. I am sorry you had to leave at this stage!
NO MORE REMINDERS, I BEG
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First things first, congratulations @phale
3.18 seconds behind doesn’t sound that bad given the other one was the fastest on the track. Shows ladder frame is completely underrated for performance cars and putting exhausts somewhere in the upper front improves the aerodynamic by a huge margin and saves all that trouble dealing with wings and stuff. Still, can’t beat a hole in the rear for the engine to stick out, that is the thing that makes a car clearly superior. 
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In my head, alarm bells are ringing. Not in the car though, that doesn’t have any alarms.
I could have sworn I calculated my car to have enough reliability to make it through the entire contest without taking penalties from the reliability. Did I mess it up? I thought the damage rating was expressed as a percentage of the reliability, as opposed to absolute points.
If that isn’t the case, well, I’m going to take a beating in stage 6!!! (Assuming I make it far).
The percentage of your initial reliability is deducted from your current reliability stat. Note that first stage you did not have the use of your offroad stat to counter the stage damage. You’ve just gone into sub 50 reliability.
Oh no… I just had another look at the excel I had made and turns out I was wrong about what my own calculations showed when I posted earlier.
Suffice to say the difference in tire compound balance is not as straightforward as I suggested in my previous post due to difference in track lengths and other parameters.
The lesson in this, I suppose, is that there is no point spending an hour and a half making a very powerful and sophisticated Survival Design Tool in Excel if you then won’t have the time or inclination to put in correct base track time values and actually investigate your options.
Except, maybe, that excel is fun. 
Uh.
That contradicts my understanding of what I thought you said, lemme dig it up…
So are you saying that I did receive damage on stage 1? that would explain the discrepancy. And if I’d known that earlier I would have stuck with a performance intake.
Oops. Forgot about that, looked at the stage, it didn’t say that the damage is cancelled out, so everybody got damage for that stage. Sorry, my bad.
I’m willing to bet money that this will actually prevent me from winning outright (because by stage 6 I will probably have something like a 11-12% penalty to my time, and that’s quite a bit!). But don’t worry about it too much, I’m not fussed. It’s all in good fun, it’s not like I need any particular trophy in the proverbial cabinet, and I only asked because I care about things making sense. And if there was another SoF in future I’d happily sign up.
Now that this has been revealed, I’m going to be bold and predict that I will probably get through Stage 4, along with suprec, airjordan, and phale. I think I had a decent advantage on the course due to a high drivability (started out in excess of 50), but the unexpected damage makes this a bit harder to figure out as I’m going to have at least a 3% penalty to my time. That said, I’m not even on the right compound for asphalt and I was fastest by a margin on Sachsenring (though again attributable to good drivability), so I wonder if this will hold out when drivability doesn’t make as big a difference in the dry. That said, if I’m not the fastest, my mega drafting bonus will probably pull me through.
When it comes to the battle stage, it’s harder to predict. If I meet Suprec I’d be pretty happy as Suprec also has damage issues. With Suprec running 325 fronts and 315 rears I’m very confident my drivability is higher, and I’m also running 60 more bhp. I’m going to assume both vehicles are damage proof for stage 5 given that body is naturally good at offroad, so the remainder comes down to the offroad difference. If I meet Phale, I’m not so sure, because Phale is damage free, but still think that a “surprisingly high” drivability is still quite a bit lower than mine, which is disconcerting as it’s rear-engined and turbo, so must be tuned to go wicked fast if it’s the outright fastest in stage 3. I’m also willing to bet that it’s running medium compound. I just need to be anywhere less than 1s slower after damage and I should get the job done. I actually do not know just how strong AirJordan’s car is, but I’m willing to bet that it’s at least as strong as Suprec’s, and without the damage issues, and that scares me.
Judging by the times in stage 2, I’m probably going to meet Suprec in stage 5. I honestly can’t tell if I’m going to be racing AirJordan of Phale in stage 6. I get this sinking feeling it’s going to be Phale.
That’s an awful lot of detail I’ve put in there… let’s see how much of it is correct!
Predictions predictions.
Do not think that you’re alone in this 
As soon as you see me mentioning some sort of a technical problem it means the car has dropped below 50, does not mean there are no cars running 50.2 reliability at this particular moment. Phale could be among them, or could not be, I didn’t check the excel sheets this morning, and I cant recall
This is true. I assumed that most people would prefer to run damage free, though it seems I was mistaken with this.
The crux of that calculation is how long the course actually is. On simulation times alone, I’d expect to see times of about 1:50-1:53ish on Mid-Ohio, which is 110s. 1% of time there is greater than 1s, which is quite a lot!
The rally stage is going to be even worse, I’m probably going to be around 7% penalty by then, which, over 25km with doubletime for offroad, is going to be huuuuuuge.
I’m also going to go out on a limb and say that nobody left in the running is on Gravel tyres.
Stage 4 results are announced and posted. And… wow 
Dry tarmac in the day makes a HELL of a difference, so does the battle mechanic.
oh LOL WOW I was completely wrong about that.
Totally misread the battle mechanic, too. That’ll be a lesson learnt, though certainly not one that’s easily applicable, I mean, how do you predict that kind of thing?
Question if it’s not too much trouble: had I not suffered the unexpected damage (and I expect this would apply for the others too), would it have made a difference?
If I cancel out all damage then you would go into a battle with airjordan and would push Deus and Matti off the top 4, with damage penalty hitting you in the next round, where you’d go against phale, which would probably see you through due to remainder of the drivability, and left you with a car that’s barely alive (I’m talking 60-70% time penalty due to damage) for the finals against… airjordan I guess…
This is now splitting hairs, but how would I end up with that much damage? I must have screwed up something on my spreadsheet, because I was supposed to remain damage free until the final stage (when I forgot to calculate the values haha).
At the end of each stage every point of damage under 50 is doubled and deducted, so each next challenge kills off the car quickly.
I’m sorry for hammering on this point, but I now definitely don’t think I understood the rules fully! So for future reference I’d like to make sure I’m on the same page 
Is what you said just then mentioned in the rules in this thread? I can only find this: