VWSR S3: Virtual World Series by Renault (F3.5)

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Name and Surname: Matt Sentell
Round Number: 8
Reason: It's complicated, but the short version is I can no longer use headphones (tinnitus), my cockpit is in our office, and my wife is studying hardcore all weekend for a certification test on Tuesday so I can't use speakers either. I had fully intended to race this last event but if any of you are familiar with tinnitus you know it isn't to be messed with. Not worth risking further hearing damage for a simrace, I'm afraid.
Matt, sorry to hear you are suffering.
I have a small amount of tinnitusand just in case it helps you I have been using earphones but also wearing a set of earplugs which takes the grunt of the noise away. I have engine pretty quiet.
Hope to race with you soon.
 
I went on the server for a quick check and it said 0 drivers. But there were about 6. Then I figured "I dont know any of these guys!"
Then the penny dropped it was AI dutifully rubbering in the track.
doh......
 
Name and Surname: Matt Sentell
Round Number: 8
Reason: It's complicated, but the short version is I can no longer use headphones (tinnitus), my cockpit is in our office, and my wife is studying hardcore all weekend for a certification test on Tuesday so I can't use speakers either. I had fully intended to race this last event but if any of you are familiar with tinnitus you know it isn't to be messed with. Not worth risking further hearing damage for a simrace, I'm afraid.
I had a tinnitus myself, but luckily got rid of it within two weeks. Take carr and take it easy, so it doesnt stay long.
 
Wow what a race!
First of thanks for to everybody pretty small grid and thanks for the restart to warm up to allow me to join.

I was just finishing watching F1 and didn't do any extra practice since yesterday where I did some laps with Dino on the server.

I had a small run in the URD EGT Mod today and after 10 Laps I already lost concentration. It was 35°C/95°F where my PC stands.
On the formation lap I realised due to the quick join I didn't have any drinking ready:confused:

Had to start from last place (7th) as I missed qualy.
I knew from my test, that I had a poor top speed, so I needed a quick start. The grid boxes are really close together at Sebring, therefore I decided to point my car towards the middle a bit and try not to get a brilliant get away of the line, so I could avoid slower starting cars.
From experience I know I am pretty good getting the initial start right in these cars.

What followed as amazing. Initial launch was not brilliant as planned, I got in the middle of the track and the second phase of my start must have been absolutely brilliant. I was up into P4 challanging April for P3 and took the place around the outside through T1. That was just unreal :roflmao:

Problem was with driving the EGT Mod I was a bit on the GT braking points and April challanged me into the hairpin, which I could defend.

On the start Simon jumped Dino, which was good, because they were loosing time battleing and I was able to close in.

T1 was especially difficult with dirty air and I was a lot better on the brakes into the hairpin, but with all the dirty air even Dino, who was faster than me couldn't overtake Simon.

I was close all the time, but no move was possible and then Simon ran wide. I lined up myself to follow through together with Dino and then they both touched. I just could avoid it by slamming the brakes and locking up all 4 tyres.

Then I had a 3,5 second lead, which wasn't going to last. I was watching the clock and still 25 minutes to go I was so thursty already and it was really damn hot.

I focused on getting all my exits right and testing my braking limits a bit in case Dino gets a move on. One time we were side-by-side on start/finish, but I could just maintain position through T1.

Finally my first win in the last VWSR race. I know Dino was faster, but in the end I just drove to defend. I think I wouldn't have survived 5 more minutes of that heat and pressure.

Thanks again for the great racing today!!!
A shame we didn't have a reverse grid, but on the otherhand I was happy to cool down a bit and get a drink:cool:
 
Well, that was frustrating. :(

Thought I was doing okay until about 12 minutes in, I had some sort of control malfunction. All pedals jammed on full (saw in the pedal overlay plugin), steering jammed on full left lock, and after a second of spinning wildly out of control, rF2 crashed. Race over.

This is the second time in 2 days this has happened. Nothing's changed as I haven't updated any drivers in a few weeks, automatic updates are off in Windows, and rF2 hasn't updated in a few weeks either. So I've got no idea what's caused this to begin. Oh well. Time to frantically reinstall loads of things and hope it magically fixes. Hard to properly test problems that only come up after a few hours of use. :p

Farewell FR3.5 '10. It's been fun. :)
 
Thanks for racing guys. Nice to see some guys really commited to race this even though we had to make it a club-race style event in the end.

It was quite a fitting end to the driving with the 2010 car beeing the entire race in the no-downforce zone ^^ Not sure why I've even installed a front-wing on the car to be honest.
On 2 occasions when I wasn't directly behind someone,I almost took my self out of the race because I turned in too much at t1, surprised by all the sudden front-grip :D
Thank god the new cars have DRS ;)


Thanks for the organizing of the season that took place.
As a non Premium member, I don't want to write more the organization of this league though. I think everyone knows that this hasn't worked out at all.
Still had some good fun, see you all on the track at some point :)
 
Had a nice start and jumped to P1. I didnt had the illusion that i could of leaving Dino behind. So i started to get familiar with his pressure. The first laps everything worked great. In a moment where there pressure was not that high it happens. I missed one down shift, gone wide spun and hit Dino. Then i had a small battle with David but this problem was solved soon :cool:
Sadly i saw i could go the pace of Frederic. So i could be in the same position. But mistake get punished :)
And without April to race against it was only driving P3 home.

A little bit disappointing that only 7 appeared :(
 
Thanks all for racing. We saw two new drivers in Maceij and Rolf so also thanks for joining us.
It was for me not a bad race.
My quali time of 1:48 could have been better but not 2 sec better which is what April managed.
I dropped off the back of Aprils car gradually but stayed just a few seconds back and pulled a gap to Maceij and Rolf.

When Simon had his spin I passed and had P3 for a lap or two (felt like 10). Simon caught me and was a bit braver into the final turn and put one up the inside. The only way I could stay safe was to lift a little and turn in once I could see him. So good move there. 3 spins then cost me some time but was happy to be under no threat of being lapped.

Its been a challenging season for me. I was "very slow" but feel I have improved a lot and now am just "not that fast". Which is a big improvement.
I was many seconds off the pace in the opening rounds and always lapped.
Now I can keep sight of the leaders for many laps and stay within say 2/3 of a lap over 45 mins. Next goal is to be 1/3 lap or one sector from p1.

Its been great to race with such a high standard of drivers and I hope its not long before we are on the grid again in FR3.5.

I also want to thank the RD admins.
@Ian Franssen did a lot of work to get it up and running including skinning my car. I don't know what happened to Ian but thanks. I know it can get exhausting getting such a project up and its a largely thankless task. Suffice to say that several drivers stayed the course and enjoyed the fruits of your work.
@Marco Bijl stepped in and helped us out, so thanks Marco for doing that. I know it was disappointing that numbers dwindled.

Lets see if we can get a strong open wheeler club format going and spawn a durable league out of that.

Thanks and out.
 
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I was thinking quite a lot yesterday about how we could move on from here.
The attendance in the club races is pretty good at the moment.

I think a lot of drivers dropped, because open wheelers spread out the field quite a lot.
Gaps of more than 2 seconds a lap aren't rare in these cars and not everyone gets fun out of it driving around in P15 and nevet having a realistic chance to score a point.

I will post what I have on my mind later on.

Personally I think a well designed and easy to understand weight penalty system would be great to keep the attendance high and with DRS on the 2014 cars overtaking should be possible.
We could use up to 200 or 250 kg of weight penalty, which has a massive affect on these cars. The aim has to be to get closer racing.

I entered as a reserve driver and took over the entry from my teammate. I didnt prepare a lot for most of the rounds and often I was in the middle of nowhere. Not as quick as the front runners, but quicker than most of the rest.

I have thought a system through already, which I will post later. It should allow for a pretty close field and give a lot more drivers a chance to win.

What are you guys thinking about that? I know the fastest driver should win, but we have big variance in laptime and I think it will be very helpful for a lot of drivers to race closer together with the top drivers.
 
Ok here a sum up of my thoughts:

I think there is no doubt, that for another season we should use the 2014 car and have to make sure we have tracks with DRS.
Following things I would like to improve:

1. Race format
I do like a two Race format, but what I didn't like was, that the Top 15 got reversed, which caused a mess in some races. I would prefer to reverse the Top 10.
Also Race 2 should be more of a sprint race. We got a lot less points in Race 2 this year, but it was a very long race.

My porposal:
Race 1: 40 minutes
Raee 2: 20 minutes

2. Points system
I would say the easiest would be to keep it very simple without any bonus points, which only cause headache for the organizers.

My proposal:
Use the F1 points system and give double points for Race 1 (double lenght). You could have them for Race 2, but then you need to fiddle around with half points.
Also I would suggest, that everyone can drop one Round, so you don't loose out in the championship fight due to personal commitments etc. If you don't post in the absence thread, the round won't be dropped.

Race 1: 50, 36, 30, 24, 20, 16, 12, 8, 4, 2
Race 2: 25, 18, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, 1

3. Track choice
This season the first round was at Fuji, which is a very slippery track and though to get right in open wheelers. I struggled myself a bit and can understand, that a lot of people jumped ship after Round 1.

Ms proposal:
The first track should be relatively grippy, easy to master and preferably should have a short lap, so the gaps don't look as big.

4. Attendance / weight penalty system
I think a big factor in open wheelers is, that they are not easy to drive fast and in the rF2 community the talent varies a lot more than in the real World Series by Renault. Therefore I think a weight penalty system would be a great thing, so we can get the field together a lot more. I personally dont think most of the quick guys wouldn't have a problem with it, because it is even a bigger challange for them and it will keep a lot more drivers in the hunt for the championships and race wins.
At the end of the day it will be still a big achievement to win a race even if you are a bit low on ballast.

I would propose the following system. I tried to keep it simple to understand with a few basic rules, which should cover all questions:

1. How will we start Round 1 (Race 1 and 2)?
At the beginning everybody will start with 0kg and there will be no weight adjustments during a Round, that would be hell for the organizers and overkill.

2. Which Race results will affect the penalty system?
The weight will be calculated based on championship standing and Race 1 only. Race 2 should be there for the glory of the good not super fast drivers, therefore results shouldn't be penalised with weight. Championship ballast will help to get weight into the fast cars right from the start. The ballast will be effective in every race and qualy.

3. Can I loose weight?
Yes, depending on the weight in the car and the finishing position weight might be reduced, but you won't loose ballast, if don't attend or if you don't finish Race 1. This should help attendance and reduce crashes.
E.g. you have some weight onboard, but don't have a lot of time to prepare the next Round, you are still better driving it. You could still score some points and if not you will loose weight and have a better chance for the next round. With that you will get rewarded in some way even if you are not well prepared.

4. How does the weight penalty system work?
I will say first, that I haven't tested it in detail and the weights could be a big high, but I still think it will work out pretty well. I only choosed multiplications of 10 to make live a bit easier.

Championship ballast:
After Round 1 and every following round the current Top 5 in the championship will get championship ballst.
That allows to get the field a lot closer immediately after Round 1 and will allow a lot of guys staying closer together in the points:

Position/weight:
1 / 50 kg
2 / 40 kg
3 / 30 kg
4 / 20 kg
5 / 10 kg
(6 / 0 kg)

Based on the result of Race 1 results cars will gain additional weight to what they already have onboard or the loose weight, if they have a lot onboard and didn't finish well.

Top 3:
Gain: 40 kg
Limit: 200 kg (including championship ballast)
Reduction: 0 kg (you can only gain weight by finishing on the podium, but you can't gain more weight than the 200kg overall limit)

Top 5 (4th and 5th):
Gain: 30kg
Limit: 150 kg (including championship ballast)
Redution: 30 kg (if you are over the limit of 150kg you will loose weight e.g. you finished 4 with 160kg of total weight means your success ballast will be reduced by 30kg for the next round)

Top 10 (6th - 10th):
Gain: 20kg
Limit: 100 kg (including championship ballast)
Reduction: 30 kg (like before if you are over the limit)

Top 15 (11th - 15th):
Gain: 10kg
Limit: 50 kg (including championship ballast)
Reduction: 30kg (like before if you are over the limit)

Rest (16th - ...):
Gain: 0 kg
Limit: 0 kg
Reduction: 30 kg (like before if you are over the limit)

What do you think about the system? I think the main thing, that needs to be tested, if you even can drive a car with 200kg or if the top limit has to be reduced.

I did a calculation for the first Round presuming, that Race 1 result will still reflect the chmapionship standing.
That would give us the following penalties

Race 1 result (chmapionship standing) / weight / source of weight (championship ballast, success ballast)
1 / 90kg (50kg cb, 40kg sb)
2 / 80kg (40kg cb, 40kg sb)
3 / 70kg (30kg cb, 40kg sb)
4 / 50kg (20kg cb, 30kg sb)
5 / 40kg (10kg cb, 30kg sb)
6 / 20kg (only success ballast from here on)
7 / 20kg
8 / 20kg
9 / 20kg
10 / 20kg
11 / 10kg
12 / 10kg
13 / 10kg
14 / 10kg
15 / 10kg
16 / 0kg
17 / 0kg
18 / 0kg
19 / 0kg
20 / 0kg

You can see, that you can wait quite quickly after Round 1.
In case the championship leader finishes in the Top 3 for the next 3 races he will already be on 170kg (50kg cb, 120kg sb), but if he then finishes outside the Top 3 his success ballast will be reduced from 120kg to 90kg and if he looses the lead in the chmapionship as well this championship ballast will be redcued from 50kg to 40kg (2nd in the championship). So he gets from 170kg down to 130kg, which should keep him in the fight.


I tried to creat something, that will affect the series from the get go and keeps the top guys in the hunt by reducing weight nearly as quick as you can gain it.


/edit: just did a bit of testing with the 2014 car at Sebring. It is a lot faster than the old car.
I checked how much would 50kg affect the car. For me it seems to be around 1 second maybe a bit more. So we are talking about 0,250 seconds per 10 kg per Lap.

I will look at some results of this season and see how the weight would have changed the race.
I think in your mind you should cut all the above values in half, that should make for great racing.
 
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Some thoughts and feedback on @Frederic Schornstein
The weight penalties in my view would work very well. In fact I have seen and raced in a very successful series where we issued cars based on speed. The fastest guys got the slowest cars and then on top of that we would even stagger the grid over 3 groups with 20-30 sec gaps. The result was entertaining and close racing all race long. In the best of situations we would have all cars in the same sector on the final lap after a 1 hour race. What I would like to add to the concepts is the idea of more synergy between Club Races and league Races.
It was popular too with 12-16 drivers most races.
It was called Pro Am. We ran it on the same track as the upcoming league race. This created a synergy as we were all practicing there anyway. This meant each race we had a core of league drivers who were up for it. New guests were welcomed and many of them evolved into league drivers. The slower guys got to mix it with and defend from the faster guys learning as they did so. It was a more relaxed and friendly atmosphere with chatting (about the race!) welcomed.
So I would add:
Format:
I suggest we run the weight penalties in a Club format as pure fun and as a training and proving ground then the league race in equal cars.
The calendar might look like:
If fortnightly league races say on a Sunday Night:
3-4 weeks of Pro Am races as a build-up then….
Week 5 Sunday night Formula Renault 3.5 Spa Pro Am. Incl Weight handicapping system. 2 races of say 30 mins.
Week 6 Sunday night Formula Renault 3.5 SpaLeague races. 2 races 45 mins/40 mins.
Week 7 Sunday night Formula Renault 3.5 Monza Pro Am.
Week 8 Sunday night Formula Renault 3.5 Monza League races.
etc etc.
Maybe a 6 race season so 12 week commitment.
Track selection:
I concur that this is critical. Fuji was my nightmare! I got so scared about getting throttle oversteer post Fuji that my setups were bad for many weeks afterwards (diff lock mainly).
We need to get new blood racing in a new car so I reckon we need to do it on tracks that are well worn favourites, known and liked by drivers of all standards. That way the car and league is new but something is comfortable (track).
Other synergies:
We could consider within the fortnight at the upcoming track running.
-Other open wheeler car such as F1, F2. All good training and variety.
-An endurance race in saloons.
Such a calendar might look like.
Week 1.
Wed- Mid week WEC Meganes 1 hour race.: Spa.
Sunday- Pro Am FR3.5
Week 2
Wed-Mid week F1/F2 race Spa.
Sunday League FR3.5.
I know scheduling would need to be fleshed out and refined but I like the idea of a big bunch of drivers arriving at a track. Exploring it in various cars then de camping to another track to explore it for a fortnight. It also has the capacity to bring in new drivers who might arrive to drive car a) and be invited to come back on Sunday for the pro Am in the league cars.
Thanks
 
I thought about some build up options as well in the past days.
I would like to have something like pre season testing. It would be great to have sessions where a few fast drivers are there for support and also sharing setups with the other drivers.

For pure driving analysis we would need to figure out a very easy way for drivers to record and share their telemetry. For me telemetry is the best tool to analyze the performance diffrences between drivers.

Maybe we could do it in F1 style and choose only a single track for a few weeks with consistent conditions.
If you just jump in a leauge and have no preperation it is hard, because you most of the time barely know the car and every two weeks you have another event to prepare for. That way you will carry your mistakes over from the last race.

Testing on the same track can be a bit booring sometimes, but once you really mastered the car on one track, you just know how it should behave on other tracks etc.

I have started a conversation with Bram regarding this and I would get more involved organizing this. If you are interested you are more than welcome, because a key will be a good promotion.
 
Testing on the same track can be a bit booring sometimes, but once you really mastered the car on one track, you just know how it should behave on other tracks etc.

This is the way i normally learn to master a car. Most time spending on only one or to tracks. Depending on how good you now the track you will learn the behavior of the car quicker and you can do the testing quicker.

But before you should run a league in a car you need to be able to master it on a few track. Then its way easier to learn new tracks because you only need to learn the new track and not car and track.

My start of rF2 i spended a lot of time with the clios in croft and mills or with the fr35 in mills. My target was not the ultimate lap time. It was only consistency. Over time my race line improves, tire wear got controllable and my laps go faster and most important i made way less mistakes and gardening excursions :D.
 
This is the way i normally learn to master a car. Most time spending on only one or to tracks. Depending on how good you now the track you will learn the behavior of the car quicker and you can do the testing quicker.

But before you should run a league in a car you need to be able to master it on a few track. Then its way easier to learn new tracks because you only need to learn the new track and not car and track.

My start of rF2 i spended a lot of time with the clios in croft and mills or with the fr35 in mills. My target was not the ultimate lap time. It was only consistency. Over time my race line improves, tire wear got controllable and my laps go faster and most important i made way less mistakes and gardening excursions :D.
I tested the DW12 yesterday at COTA. Luckily there is no grass, because I was off so many times in S1. After 15 Laps I realised, that the setup in the DW12 isn't locked to symmetrical in the road configuration, that explained some of the weirdness I experienced :D
 
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