RD Le Mans Series Season 2 (rFactor)

[Magnus Dahlgren]

However to me it makes perfect sense, because Three Sixty Racing contested 5 races out of 5, whereas Simracing for Holland only raced 4 out of 5. Thus Three Sixty Racing has a total longer distance run.eace:

 

[Nicky De Fré]

Nice build up to the race.
Had beamer installed for the live stream.

Cause lSd Racing was getting disconnects with driverswapping after monza, Me and Davy were sharing PC for the first 4h and then we would sent it over to our thirth but not least driver in America Steven Publos, sadly we missed our fouth driver due PC issues.

After the first 4h hours evrything went fine, planning to give the steer over to Steven , Dave had a come togheter were he needed to go in to pit. Sadly Steven wasnt able to get in time on the serever, so on the last call i went back in the car.
We were defently not the fastest on the track, but still we were lapping consistent. Trying to stay out of mess, were going for a finish.
Then all of a sudden Rfactor just CTD....bummer.....
Dont really understand what cause it. Did plenty of test laps before the actual race, never had that issue before.
Steven wasnt even able to drive a stint here at LeMans.

Me and steven reinstalled everything, installed exactly the same files from the net to make shure that that wouldnt cause any issue.

Really dissapointing finishing only 1 race of 5.
Do think we made some chance here to get good result.
It was fun while it lastet.

Congrats to those how finished.

 

[Robin Verdegaal]

However to me it makes perfect sense, because Three Sixty Racing contested 5 races out of 5, whereas Simracing for Holland only raced 4 out of 5. Thus Three Sixty Racing has a total longer distance run.eace:

Of course it also means that they have lower average score

 

[Richard Blokker]

And the discussion continuous

 

[Yoeri Gijsen]

Before we jump into a discussion about rules and decision, let me say that decisions made by the staff stick. The method chosen to elect a champion will not be altered as a result of discussions here, however sour the outcome may be for some.

The first thing that needs to be said is that the rules do not cover the case where two drivers or teams tie. At least not beyond the point where the tie remains after the amount of wins and then lesser results have been compared. In case the rules do not suffice to cover the case, it is up to the staff to make a decision. This tie is such a case.

Championship points have been compared: tie. Wins have been compared: tie. Second places: tie. And so on. Both teams mirror each other in results, with the only difference being a DNF for 360 and the DNS for SFH. Either way, that's a 0-point result. To solve the tie the next step was to simply take the final race of the season, also the longest race of the season, and see who did best there. Such a criterium will always solve the tie (unless the teams finish side by side, or DNF at the exact same moment). Thus we got a winner.

To me that last method is the best. This is an endurance championship and therefore it makes sense to elect a champion by endurance skill. A single race result has much more to say about skill in endurance racing than a fastest lap or qualification result does. Therefore it's a good option. Surely there are other ways, but it can hardly be argued this is a legitimate one by reasons.

To be sure. The rules will of course be updated to prevent these ties in the future. Also a point distribution system will be considered in which longer races feature more championship points.

 

[Andras Kiraly]

I see the topic with the discussion over the lmp championship is closed (probably by mistake) so here some of my input:

Quote:
To solve the tie the next step was to simply take the final race of the season, also the longest race of the season, and see who did best there. Such a criterium will always solve the tie (unless the teams finish side by side, or DNF at the exact same moment). Thus we got a winner.
To me that last method is the best. This is an endurance championship and therefore it makes sense to elect a champion by endurance skill. A single race result has much more to say about skill in endurance racing than a fastest lap or qualification result does. Therefore it's a good option. Surely there are other ways, but it can hardly be argued this is a legitimate one by reasons.

The issue is, that this is not in any way communicated to the teams beforehand. You, cannot, in my opinion invent a rule that decides the championship after all the races are finished. I mean, with this method, there is no way to know if the "most race wins" method would have been applied.

I also like to point out that the other races also varied in length, but apperently this was not included in the decision.

 

[Richard Blokker]

Martin, I'm not sure either if it was you Fred was driving at the time.. but even if it was you there is no real reason to apologize, this can happen on any track, it is just a racing incident. Trust me no real harm was done.. we could still continue our race and finish the entire 12 hours.

Fred was driving at that moment, it was his second lap in the race

 

[Yoeri Gijsen]

RDLMS S2 - Review and Evaluation

Now that the last race has come to an end, the time has come to review and evaluate the season and collect information to shape the next. Please share your thoughts on what went right and what went wrong. Tell us what you think we should maintain for next season, what should be added and what should be dropped.

I'd also like to use this oppertunity to give my thanks to the people that have work on RDLMS this season. Without them this would not have been the great series it is now.

First of all special thanks to Simrace.tv and Lutz Enger for allowing us to broadcast our races. Much strenght to Lutz as he is in the hospital right now with serious injuries. We hope you will be back in shape soon!

Special Thanks to Xosé Estrada and Dave Stephenson to setup the broadcasts and provide us with spectacular images.

Special thanks to Simon Smith, Joakim Skalstadt, Roy Magnes and Ryan Callan for taking on one or several of the races in the commentary booth. You made the long hours bearable. Thanks!

Special Thanks to Mtommi Tam for making the spotter guides that helped us to figure out who we were watching. Sorry I added you to the list quite late, Mtommi!

And special thanks to our technical team behind the scenes, who have prepared the tracks and skinpacks of this season: Damian Dainhumain, Matthias Meier, Matt Strand and Ryan Callan.

Finally, of course, thanks for all the teams and drivers for your dedication. It was good to have you. Hopefully we will you again in a later season.

 

[Richard Blokker]

Due to your decision on the P1 championship, more points when the race is longer. 12H racing, winner gets 30 points, 6H racing winner gets 15 points for all classes.

 

[Ben Crooks]

Thanks to all those involved in organising. I personally had a great time in the 2 races i competed in and will be back next year for some unfinished business with SNL guys

As for next season, i would love to see a proper 24hrs of le mans and maybe even some safety cars. A manually driven safety car is something i used in an LFS league i used to run a few years ago which is still running to this day.

Anyways, i also added a little treat from the night stages of le mans.

Hope you all enjoy and looking forward to le mans for real this weekend

 

[Ben Buitendijk]

Cant wait for S3

Again, sometimes tracks, updates, schedules, skinpacks etc could've been made released/known a bit earlier, but in the end it didn't cause any trouble, especially for the later races, but I guess thats the fatigue from a long season and it was way better than the previous one, so third is the charm, right? (or whatever the saying is....)

 

[Davy Lauwereys]

lSd Racing wants to thank the organisers and all the people behind the scenes for the massive undertaking this series must be, we run our own GTR2 leagues so we can only imagine what goes into making a series on this scale work! Top Job guys !

That beeing said, there is always room for improvement so i would like to share some of my thoughts.

1. The mod beeing used

Out of the 4 official races and 5 test races contested by lSd Racing we only managed 1 official finish at monza, all the other races, with the exception of le Mans test race where i blew up the engine, we had to retire due to the game messing up driverswaps or like during Le Mans by simply CTDing. This is a bitter pill to swallow obviously. Especially since during the monza race we did 8 or 9 online driverswaps without issue... we also noticed that during the monza race (using the mods v1.1 version) 25 orso teams managed a finish with the number of finishing teams dropping massively since the updates started rolling out. This is sgnificant enough to make me certain that mod itself is certainly adding to the already unstable state of the game with so many teams and people on a server.

Also, Nicky , who ran our teams RDLMS programme from race 2, has noted that following the different patch / install options offered by the mods team result in a difference of file sizes... that is just simply not acceptable when you are trying to get a 100+ drivers games synced. Hell, from experience we know it can sometimes be a pita trying to get 10+ people to get their games synced so they don't mismatch!. As it is, the Endurace mod is simply not optimised for online play the way it is imho. Their are to many files that need installing that have nothing to do with the RDLMS series but can still cause all sorts of mismatches and oddities.

I proppose, that when teams pick their cars and liveries, a full standalone mod is made for the series that ONLY includes the cars and skins used by the teams, so that the actual enduracers must not be installed, just a clean rfactor install and the RDLMS "carpack".
Not only will it dramaticly cut down on files that need downloading and the chances of stuff going wrong having to deal with the enduracers ridiculously update naming they have in place that can cause all sorts of confusion. Simpler is better when dealing with so many variables.

2. Race Control

It might be an idea to have a race control with one or two people who act as main stewards who have their own TS channel, who can deal out real time penalties like stop and go penalties. As again i was shunted off in my Corvette by an impatient Proto driver in what was clearly an avoidable contact (like in the testrace) 1 lap and half before my sheduled pit, leaving me with a flat tyres and scrambling to get our American pilot in the car who didn't have enough time, leading to my PC sharing pilot to jump in the car after wich the game CTDed 15 minutes later. Had our American pilot been able to take over, we might have been able to finish the race as our remaining PC sharing stints where significantly shorter then our current 4 hour stint.
Yes accidents happen during a race, but sometimes concequences must follow poor decision making.

3. points

following the recent debates surrounding the points, why not works with double points in the longer races by whos leading at the half way mark like they do/or did in Belcar?
Say for the Le Mans race, after 6 hours award full points to the classification at that time like you would at the end of a race, and then again at the 12 hour mark ?

 

[Kyle Pearson]

Some thoughts:

S2 was a good beginning. A few suggestions to look into for S3:

* I don't think the current skin process worked well this season. I understand the reason for moving to standalone cars, but it seemed to introduce more problems than it was addressing. Simsync may be able to resolve some of them, but I would suggest going back to using pure skins for the next season if Simsync is not an option.

* I was not very fond of the start procedure changes. I would keep it simple by just having the GT1 leader drop back from the LMP's and just have everyone go as they cross the S/F on the 1st lap.

* Schedule - It would be nice if some of the larger endurance leagues could work together on race dates as there are several teams who run in multiple endurance leagues. It's not too much of an issue when they are the same mod, but when the mods differ, most drivers commit to one and not the other. I know it's not a priority for leagues to work together, but it would be nice.

* Planning - Planning seemed better in S2 and I know there were some changes in the middle of S2 to make it even better. It's getting close. I believe it's only lacking getting the track and skin packages being ready in a generous amount of time prior to the test races (and have the servers up and going).

* Race length - Probably not a popular thing, but I would limit the races with rFactor to no more than 8 hours (unless using the reconnect application). There is just too much attrition to make it worth it. Hopefully rFactor2 shows up later this year with improved online play and driver swaps which make it a non-issue.

 

[Fred Visser]

yes i was driving. I had a wtf moment on teamspeak. Gladly we could both continue our race

I lost about 8 km/h on the straights + acceleration was not that good any more, it almost felt like a ferrari haha.
Because we where in a fight for P3, and i got some hardware issues Richard took over sooner then we had planned.

I had a great race, and alot of fun on teamspeak. Thank you RD for this league. It has grown a lot and keeps getting better and better!

 

[Wayne Reed]

Here is my run down.

This season has been really good on track but I still think there is much that can be done.

Skin pack:
This should be done before the season starts and you should have to have the skin you start with. All this having a new skin every round is just silly and I think it the mismatch thing as many don't get the new one just 1 for the season is fine.

Tracks:
This is a big thing with most of us. There are ready way to late they should all be ready before the season starts not 2 nights before the test race.

I know you like to RD logos on them but we don.t need them its only the TV guys that need it on there pc. If you have to much work to do with them then ask there are lots of us that can mod tracks and have them ready.

As for the mod I cant really say any thing bad about its awesome but one thing that would be nice is better lights on the cars I made my own for this season and it was a really big help to have them.

One track I think is a must for the league is Spa was hoping it would have been put into season 2

Test racing:
I think there should be 2 for every round. This is because you have the first test race and say you find things wrong with it they then get fixed but we don't know how well they get fixed intill we do the race. If we had 2 test race even there only 1 hour long then if stuff has to be fixed then we can test in test race 2

As for how the points and things are done why not follow the real LMS season and that way we can have a way of sortting out at the end if its a tie. This would put les on you having to choose who should win and it would be in the rules from day one and if no one likes it then they don't have to sign up.

Driver swaps:

Right this has had a big thing all season with how it is done and as you know many of us feel it is a bit wrong.

If you are on the same pc and the race says 2 swaps they only have to wait 10 secs 2 times and can then change as much as they want with out waitting. Where as most of us have to wait 40 sec to do it with the driver on his own pc.

There are 2 ways you can sort this out and make it more fair.

The same pc guys could wait every time they swap.

or make the change to the mod so we on our own pc only have to wait the same time as them.

We worked out that in some race's we lost almost 40 sec just changing drivers.

Also the other really big thing is theer P! and P2 cars are way to force full when they come past and most of the time will not wait for a safe place to pace and it has taken way to many cars of track I thing every race we have been in we have been forced of track when they have done a silly pass.It really needs looking into.

Other then that all other stuff is super

 

[Marcel Offermans]

My suggestions for next season would be a combination of a couple of things that have already been mentioned here.

First of all, I would make sure that everybody is running with exactly the same rFactor installation. That means creating some tool that can keep a dedicated copy of rFactor synchronized with the server. It must be impossible to join the server if you're not running the exact same set of files. This will probably solve a lot of the mismatch problems we have been experiencing.

Second of all, we need to run in practice to allow us to reconnect, using some tooling to keep track of the score, as this is probably the biggest issue in endurance racing and quite frankly, it can be solved, so I see no reason not to do that for the third season.

Finally, we really need live race control that can hand out sanctions. In general I very much like the sportsmanship within this competition, but we must ensure that our races stay clean and that violations are dealt with to prevent any escalation. I know this can be a monumental task, but I do feel it is necessary to keep up the quality of racing.

 

[Richard Blokker]

Second of all, we need to run in practice to allow us to reconnect, using some tooling to keep track of the score, as this is probably the biggest issue in endurance racing and quite frankly, it can be solved, so I see no reason not to do that for the third season.

True, but can you disable the temp cars then, so that you reload the real car immediately when you are on the track?

 

[Magnus Dahlgren]

First things first...(hehe didnt know it would be a wall of text, sorry!)

Over the this season the only thing I really have felt could be better is;

The decision making over important questions - Many times it has taken too long to get an exact answer over important questions regarding rules and the mod.

Files ready in time - Same here, taking too long and waiting into the bare minimum before the actual race with the correct skins/track files.

Mismatches - Many people complain over mismatches and I dont blame you (the organisers), I blame the drivers/teams. I feel that they are the ones who are responsible for having the correct files, however that is hard if we look back at the point made above this one.

Other then that I'm extremely happy and honored to have been able to participate in this series! Thank you all!

Now on to some points people have put in this thread...

* I don't think the current skin process worked well this season. I understand the reason for moving to standalone cars, but it seemed to introduce more problems than it was addressing. Simsync may be able to resolve some of them, but I would suggest going back to using pure skins for the next season if Simsync is not an option.

I really hope this doesnt happen! The main reason I enter a league is the ability to use my custom skins, if not then we could just be doing club-races if we where to use mods original skins.

Skin pack:
This should be done before the season starts and you should have to have the skin you start with. All this having a new skin every round is just silly and I think it the mismatch thing as many don't get the new one just 1 for the season is fine.

This is a better way to go, I admit I was one of those who updated for every track, in the end that was pretty unnecessary So everybody submits one skin before the season start, admins check if its 100% update if not then release it and everybody sticks with it. Unless of course a new team arrives.

Second of all, we need to run in practice to allow us to reconnect, using some tooling to keep track of the score, as this is probably the biggest issue in endurance racing and quite frankly, it can be solved, so I see no reason not to do that for the third season.

This is also something I wish not to happen. It will only confuse people more and make the total process even harder. If you disco'd because your internet crashed thats though but also life, and if you disco'd during driverswap you probably didnt do it the right way.

On driverswap-issue I feel that PC-sharing teams should not be allowed since they have a edge on the competition. Also if people complain that they lost connection during driverswap they should make sure that they did all the correct procedures, during the season ME Racing was able to do stops without any problems, except two times when we made some crucial errors in preparation for pitstops.

* Race length - Probably not a popular thing, but I would limit the races with rFactor to no more than 8 hours (unless using the reconnect application). There is just too much attrition to make it worth it. Hopefully rFactor2 shows up later this year with improved online play and driver swaps which make it a non-issue.

This season I think that the length on the races had a perfect balance, 6-12hrs is great! No problems whatsoever from my view!

One track I think is a must for the league is Spa was hoping it would have been put into season 2

Agree, Spa would have been way better than Daytona(xLMS-series doesnt even race there anymore).

Suggestions:
Schedule- To up the competition perhaps we could have more races? If we take this season for instance with its 5 races we could have had four sprint races in between at 2-3hrs and with half scoring.

Tracks- Suzuka would have been better than Fuji in my view for example. And as mentioned before Spa is better suited this type of cars than Daytona. My dream calendar(in order) would include: Sebring, Monza, Silverstone, Spa, Le Mans, Suzuka.

Mod- It's perfect in every way. Please stay with it!

 

[Kyle Pearson]

I really hope this doesnt happen! The main reason I enter a league is the ability to use my custom skins, if not then we could just be doing club-races if we where to use mods original skins.

You misunderstand. You would still have your own skin, it would just be an "extra" skin for the car rather than a stand-alone car without extra skins. This was the way S1 was done but it has it's drawbacks as well (i.e. pitbox assignments).

 

[Ryan Callan]

Suzuka would have been better than Fuji in my view for example.

Would have to disagree with you completely there. Think about how narrow and twisty Suzuka is, it is exactly the wrong kind of track for lapping GT cars.