So this week I was able to record all the cars and the video will go up tomorrow, at 6pm CEST.
I just noticed, however, that I made a mistake with the scoring last time. Take a look here, this is how I scored the cars (the column to the far right):
As you can see, I awarded 2nd place with 20 points instead of 22, 3rd place with 18 instead of 20, and so on. With this mistake corrected, the overall standings before the final race are as follows:
Stay tuned for the video tomorrow!
Alright, the season finale has concluded! If you missed the premiere, you can watch it here:
TCup remains undefeated and Minos takes 2nd with a strong performance, beating both the ISN and the Mara:
Overall, however, nothing changed. TCup wins, ahead of AndiD.
This also means Minos didn’t quite manage to catch Kenshiro overall, but the two were neck and neck throughout the season. AndiD was ahead of both of them most of the time, but fell behind on a few select tracks. Still, it was enough for him to secure 2nd place pretty comfortably.
All in all, I enjoyed this season even though it was kind of a tough one for me. Not only were some of the cars difficult to drive (although thankfully not so much in the final round), but also the format with recording the whole session of me trying my best for each individual car and then cutting and editing everything into the videos you saw took quite a lot of time and was pretty exhausting at times.
The next season is in planning, but it will likely take 2 weeks, maybe 3, before I announce the rules. There’s still some work to be done with finalizing the rules, getting all the numbers right, and a lot of testing to be done. And I also need a break after this one, I hope you don’t mind. But I’ll keep all of you up to date, make sure to join the discord if you haven’t yet, since I’m much more active there than here on the forums.
It took a bit longer than anticipated, but season 5 is here!
For this season, I will try out a new format, so please read the format changes carefully.
RULES:
General:
Every car must use a 1.0L Ford Ecoboost engine as the baseline. This means that all cars must use an engine with these base specifications:
Type: I3
Bore: 71.9mm
Stroke: 82.0mm
Cast iron block, aluminium head
Head: DOHC 4v, VVT on all cams, VVL
Engine Family Quality: +3 (because presumably, if you repurpose an eco engine for racing you’d probably strengthen it to make sure it lasts)
Here’s a screenshot to help you match the required specs more easily:
If your engine differs from this, the car will be disqualified.
Engine:
Intake/Exhaust sportiness may be adjusted
Position X, Y and Z up to +/- 10
Body:
Front/Rear ride height: up to +5
Chassis Track Width: up to +10
Submissions open: Saturday, 8th of July
Submissions close: Saturday, 15th of July, 6pm CEST
Only cars submitted via my discord will be accepted . To submit, drag and drop your car file (Automation car files only) into the “community-challenge-files” subchannel. You can name your car and engine however you like, there are no naming conventions. Only 1 submission per player is allowed, no resubmissions. So please make sure your car meets all the rules before submitting the car. The deadlines will be generous enough to allow for thorough testing as well as double-checking the rules are met, and there will be no need to rush your entry. Collaborative efforts are allowed, but as stated before only 1 car per player is allowed, so if you submit a car that you built together with a friend then you (or your friend) can’t submit another car in addition to that.
For this season, because I’m a rally enthusiast I want to bring a somewhat more authentic rally experience across this time around. The problem I had was that for a proper rally experience the individual tracks should be longer because real rally stages are long. There are some great, long and challenging rally-esque stages in BeamNG. However, with the number of entries growing every season, if we get 20 entries this time and let’s say I were to pick Italy Mixed Hillclimb which probably takes about 6 minutes in a fast car like this, that’s 120 minutes (2 hours) of pure run time, not including the loading times when switching between cars and not including all the failed attempts. I would burn myself out with the less competitive cars before I even get to the top cars that actually have a chance of winning. It would be a waste of everyone’s time. Hence, I decided to change the format this time.
FORMAT CHANGES FOR S5:
First, we will do a qualification round. Every submitted car will partake in the qualification round, which will go like this:
Main competition:
Qualification round tracks:
Main competition tracks: TBD (but these will be longer and much harder than the tracks in the qualification round)
[*] Some tracks that these cars will race on have moderate to large jumps. Since these are high-performance rally cars, they must be capable of handling those jumps. If I get a bad landing and break the suspension I’ll reset, of course. But if lifting before the jump, taking different lines over the jump etc. and everything within reason (aka without slowing down to a crawl) doesn’t help and the suspension still breaks every time I go over that jump, your car is eliminated because it can’t finish. So if this happens at Crandon, not only will it not finish Crandon, but it also won’t be raced at West Coast and it won’t be considered as a wildcard for the main competition. If it happens in the main comp, the car will be eliminated from the main comp. But in all likelihood, if your car is good enough to make it to the main comp then it’ll probably be fine with the jumps.
With all of this being said, enjoy building! 
This is the first time I’ve seen a requirement for a spec engine since CSC57, with the intent on keeping everyone on a level playing field - this time, however, we aren’t limited to a single combination of chassis options (as had been the case for CSR57).
Fun! Just finished engineering!
How fast should my car be going it has a 0-100 kmh time of 3.5 seconds and max speed of 200 mph is that fast?
The challenge just started. I’m sure you’re not finished with engineering and tuning yet, so take your time and maybe come back to it tomorrow and do some more testing. You’ve got 3 weeks after all. It’s not about who submits first. By the way, small tip: top speed doesn’t really matter on a rally car, since you’ll never encounter a long enough straight to reach 200mph.
Well I don’t really know how to tune a rally car so I just tried to make the sportiness stat go up hahaa
Submissions are now open until next Saturday, 15th July, at 6pm CEST. Please use the community-challenge-files subchannel on my discord server (link under Submissions in the rules post) to enter your car
Hey are interiors required
I don’t think they will be required, but anyone who wants to make them can do so.
No. Interiors are not required, and you won’t get any bonus points if you make one
The Xenia R2’s big brother, run in the same works livery.
Can it emulate the R2’s success? Probably not, I had to sort of speedrun this and am still clueless about placing aero stuff
Alright everyone, submissions are closed! I’ll get to making this season’s Top Trump cards tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll have the first race ready by next Saturday. But I’ll keep you up to date
Alrighty everyone, the cards are done and it’s technically still Saturday! Here’s my own car first:
Notice the Engine Layout, I figured since it’s not mandated this time and there is some variety with these entries, it would be interesting to know. F-L stands for Front Longitudinal, F-T is Front Transverse, M-L is Mid Longitudinal and M-T is Mid Transverse.
Additionally, because tyre choice was also left up to the individual player so I figured this would also be very interesting info, especially the different compounds used which can indicate the racing strategy as some perform better on asphalt, others are better on dirt.
With the formalities out of the way, meet the contenders! Here in alphabetical order:
Wow these car cards are cool! I just realised I forgot to make the windows opaque whoopsie -.- I’m excited to see Tom’s excellent driving skills with these all these new cars!
As mentioned in the rules post, this time the cars will be shown head-to-head in randomized pairings during the qualification round. Here are the pairings:
But remember, to make it through the qualifying round the actual time counts, not who wins the head-to-head. So it’s possible that both or neither of the cars in one pairing qualify
Here’s some outtakes from tomorrow’s race that you won’t get to see in the video 
Quali Race 1 Outtakes - YouTube
Race 1 is about to premiere! You can watch it here: THRS Season 5 - Qualification Race 1 - YouTube
Of course, if you see this post later, the link will still work like a normal youtube video but without the “live chat” aspect of a premiere
Edit:
And of course, here are the results:
