Geoff Crammond Tribute Race


We are going back in time! For gamers who were around in the 90s, this was the decade where racing games started to straddle the game/sim world.

For many, Geoff Crammond - Microprose Formula One Grand Prix was the pinnacle of racing at home. The first iteration of this game was released on Atari and Amiga in 1991, with the DOS version coming out a few months later in 1992. Do you still remember the legendary tunes from the intro in the video above?

The game was designed by Geoff Crammond and whilst it is a simulation of Formula One, it was not officially licensed. The driver names were fictional, but the liveries and driver helmets were a very close representation of the 1991 F1 season.

Experience the 90s online​

This Friday, we are inviting our premium members to take part in our Geoff Crammond Tribute Race at Jerez in Automobilista 2 (click here to register for the event) where we will be racing the exact same type of cars as in the original game.

Williams FW14​

For this special event we have chosen the Formula Classic Gen 3 Model 2, which is based on 1991 Williams FW14 V10 Formula One car. This model has 707 horsepower from a 3.5L V10, with no ABS or traction control. Despite the car having no assists and being incredibly quick, it is an intuitive car to drive and so as long as you remember to short shift out of slow corners you should be fine!

Here is a lap around Jerez to get your adrenaline pumping:
About author
Damian Reed
PC geek, gamer, content creator, and passionate sim racer.
I live life a 1/4 mile at a time, it takes me ages to get anywhere!

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Echo. The A-Z and <-> keys on my keyboard were completely eroded after many seasons of 100% distance races.
By coincidence, I'm typing from the same keys I played f1gp back in the day (but on a different mx board). Luckily it was a cherry keyboard (a huge g81-1000, from my father's 386 desktop) with abs doubleshot keys. For this reason, labels are still crisp as new despite the abs shine, so I've been borrowing them for very long.

I always enjoyed the accel+space to shift up, or no accel (or brake) + space to downshift. It was a pretty nifty feature most racing games on keyboard missed, so the same key could be used for both shifting up/down.

(I played a few full races in local mp (hot-seat mode), but it was also the first "LAN" experience I ever had. F1gp supported a basic null-modem serial cable to link PCs w/out network cards)
 
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I played that a lot on my Amiga 600. That and Grand Prix 2. GP1 ran with something like 10FPS, because the 600 was sloooow, but GP2 on low resolution ran really well.
I think it was locked to around 25fps, but the game would massively slow down when dealing with more complex parts of tracks.
 
"The driver names were fictional, but the liveries and driver helmets were a very close representation of the 1991 F1 season"

So many memories from the battles between 14-years-old-me against Robert Davies and Carlos Sanchez. Luigi Rivelli performance was a bit disappointing for a driver in a car from the Puma team.
 
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I think it was locked to around 25fps, but the game would massively slow down when dealing with more complex parts of tracks.
It was, yes, but 25FPS was for the grown up Amigas. The A600 was basically a redesigned A500, with the same processor and memory, but a newer Kickstart version that refused to play a lot of older Amiga games :D

So basically this is how GP1 ran for me:

I did however record the title music (along with a few others) onto a music cassette so I could listen to it on my Walkman on my way to school :)
 

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Damian Reed
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