2020 Virtual 24 Hours of Le Mans (Live Stream)

[Paul Jeffrey]

Welcome to the central discussion thread for the first ever official 24 Hours of Le Mans - virtual edition.

This weekend marks an historic moment for the genre of sim racing, as the WEC, Automobile Club de l'Ouest and Motorsport Games are set to host what could well turn out to be the largest organised virtual race in history - the Le Mans 24 Hours Virtual.

Held as an officially sanctioned event in place of what would have been the real Le Mans 24 Hours this weekend, the race features an incredible selection of official teams, manufacturers and drivers. Two Formula 1 World Champions, three Indy 500 victors and seven outright Le Mans 24 Hour winners join together with some of the finest rFactor 2 sim racers racing side by side with their real world contemporaries .

Held at the beautiful Le Mans circuit in rFactor 2, and making use of the LMP2 and GTE content within the simulation, the race is set to become a high watermark for the increasingly popular esport movement we are experiencing at present.

You can catch all the action live here:

 

[bgil66]

So I had the WEC feed on the TV through my ROKU(YT), the Broadbent, Porsche, Thiim feed on my laptop and enjoyed it. I do wish Fisichella Team Strong had a stream and also I didn't see Rubens once. But the production was great, loved it when Alan had Tom, Dindo and Dr U on. Was great seeing Pirro again interviewed by the hot girl( In about the first 6 hours I fired up my own Rf2 LeMans race for 50 laps and had a ball

 

[MarcG]

I thought that was incredibly impressive, everything from the Production to the Commentary to the Racing was superb and another great light on our Hobby.

Sure the Red Flags are a sour point, but then Red Flags happen in real life for all manner of reasons and there were only 2 of them, had it been anything more than 5+ then it would've been disastrous. I know Marcel & Co will strive for perfection though so you can bet they will go through all the Data & Feedback with a fine tooth comb once they've had some sleep themselves! If anything it made it more life like in a way and lets not forget that massive long Green Running stint in between the two Reds, that was incredible in itself.

Other issues are harder to track down, the Alonso Penalty was a lack of knowledge on the Officials Part, had they known the effect of the Penalty they would've served it after his Pit Stop (this of course can be improved upon in game though). Drivers get upset when their Gearbox fails or Engine blows up in Real Life, so to see Lando & Max chuck their toys just goes to show how much it means for them to compete & win. Other bugs & issues looked to be a mix of RF2 and User, when you've got 200 participants in 37 Countries all around the World running on all manner of different PC Setups there's gonna be issues unfortunately.

745,037 views on the Official YouTube Channel with 12,000+ Thumbs Up and a paltry 359 Thumbs Down, that's bloody impressive! With other Streams you could be looking at over 1m Views
As seen in Discord when the racing was Green the chat was exciting, lots of people interested in the racing, then when the Reds happened so out came the Trolls to feed off failure - quite pathetic really - funny to see them go back to their caves when the Green flag was shown. I think it says more about those individuals than the game itself when they need something to go wrong to harvest Glee from, remember folks - Constructive Criticism = Good, Ranting like a Troll = Boring. Needless to say though they are in a minority, a vocal one but a minority, we all want RF2 to succeed and S397 are clearly heading in the right direction - this Event would simply not of happened 4 years on RF2 I can tell you that much!

If anything this Pandemic has shed a massive light on Sim Racing in general, whilst the Real World slowly begins to get back to normal and Real Racing resumes (my Beloved Aussie Brutes are back in 2 weeks...thank the Lord!) lets not forget the efforts most Sim Devs have gone to bring high quality racing to us, be that iRacing, Studio397, Sector3 & Others - if it wasn't for them we would not be here - be thankful for what we've got and look forward to the future, it's gonna be great for all of us

 

[Kenny Paton]

lets not forget the efforts most Sim Devs have gone to bring high quality racing to us, be that iRacing, Studio397, Sector3 & Others - if it wasn't for them we would not be here - be thankful for what we've got and look forward to the future, it's gonna be great for all of us

Well said sir.

 

[Cote Dazur]

Great race, great coverage, this probably did more for SIM racing than all that has been done before that historic event.
We are entering a new era of sim racing, no one will ever dare say ever again we are just playing video games without demonstrating total ignorance of what SIM racing had become.
We have came a long way and the future is bright for our hobby.

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

Other issues are harder to track down, the Alonso Penalty was a lack of knowledge on the Officials Part, had they known the effect of the Penalty they would've served it after his Pit Stop (this of course can be improved upon in game though).

Not having had much penalties in race sessions during the years of rF2, I'm not sure, but I think you are able to choose not to serve a penalty in a stop. However, you'd need to be aware of the "no penalty&stop at the same time" thing to even consider it.

 

[wajdi]

Lando Norris verdict rfactor2 vs Iraging.

landonorris - Lando Verdict : Rfactor 2 Vs iRacing - Twitch

Watch landonorris's clip titled "Lando Verdict : Rfactor 2 Vs iRacing"

m.twitch.tv

 

[AyrtJ97]

After seeing this race, I think I need to start playing online seriously after 10. I'm slow AF, but at least take part on a championship or something like that anyways

 

[thepharcyde]

After seeing this race, I think I need to start playing online seriously after 10. I'm slow AF, but at least take part on a championship or something like that anyways

You can race me, I'm slow too

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

After seeing this race, I think I need to start playing online seriously after 10. I'm slow AF, but at least take part on a championship or something like that anyways

That's the great thing with club events here at RD, you are almost certain to find someone you can fight with

 

[davehenrie]

Im wondering if we see any rain,that'll spice things up a bit. Great racing so far.

Was the actual race weather in real life dry all 24hrs? I wonder if they were going to mimic the local weather. So if Le Sarthe was dry, Virtual Le Sarthe would be dry as well. Just my guess.

 

[Davy Jones]

I've owned rF2 for about a year but I have yet to install it - partly because I've been made aware that it needs a certain amount of TLC to work nicely and I haven't had the mental bandwidth to do it yet. But despite the many horror stories it clearly has a large and loyal band of supporters so I'm still planning to give it a go "soon"

Question: I've been reminded by this thread (and the events in the race) that rF2 races can be restarted if you have a server crash. Is rF2 the only sim which is capable of that? (Seems like a must-have for an endurance race.)

This might help in getting you started....

 

[domhnall]

Was the actual race weather in real life dry all 24hrs? I wonder if they were going to mimic the local weather. So if Le Sarthe was dry, Virtual Le Sarthe would be dry as well. Just my guess.

I had thought this was the intention. However I saw a post on the iracing forums suggesting that they ditched the weather as wet weather had caused various issues during testing. Not sure if this is true. However I did google "Le Mans" weather yesterday, and it said there were showers in the area. There didn't seem to a cloud in the sky during the race however.

Overall I though the event was fantastic and really enjoyed it. Will probably be the only time we see an event like this with so many real life drivers taking part sadly.

 

[Andrew Harper]

I surprised myself with this broadcast.

Most of the e-sports races that have been shown I tend to dip in and out of, not really watching all of it; but in this case the broadcast was so amazing and the quality of racing so good that I watched about two thirds of it (sorry I needed some sleep!)

Huge congratulations to WEC/S397 and the huge group of people who took part. I don't think we'll ever see such a huge effort for a sim race ever again.

Nice touches like the formation start from the pit wall, the slowing down lap (rather then everyone crashing into one another) all made for a great "show".

....and to see one car pushing another in the pit lane so they could refuel was just classic Le Mans, even if it's virtual.

I had to switch the chat off on YouTube, the constant bickering about iRacing vs Rfactor 2 was just getting really insane after a while. Also every other message seemed to about how amazing Verstappen or Alonso was; it was just becoming very tiresome, lol. Just enjoy the racing and stop moaning about everything.

I noticed that Graham Goodwin was laying into people on Twitter, as some were mentioning that it was't really fair that the likes of Alonso got their laps back, etc. I thought any minute now he'll say it's "only a game" and the whole sim racing community will declare war on him. haha.

With regards to technical issues (and forgive me if this has already been mentioned). The first server restart was not an actual server failure. It was because there were so many people on the server (drivers, teammates, team personal, broadcast team, and so on) that the drivers started to have issues joining. So they had to try and reduce the numbers, and I think they restarted the server as a precaution. Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that was what I heard.

The second restart, I didn't hear of any issues, so like above I'm wondering if it was purely a precautionary measure but the little voice in my head was maybe it was also a way of getting back into the race all the people that had maybe crashed, disconnected, etc. To keep the field as complete as possible. Because in both server restarts, teams rejoined.

However the restarts were perfectly executed, and that's the important thing. With such a huge range of people joining from everywhere in the world, it's amazing it even runs at all.

Congrats to all the teams and drivers who finished, a great race. Brilliant that the winners get LM24 trophies.

 

[Andrew Harper]

I had thought this was the intention. However I saw a post on the iracing forums suggesting that they ditched the weather as wet weather had caused various issues during testing. Not sure if this is true. However I did google "Le Mans" weather yesterday, and it said there were showers in the area. There didn't seem to a cloud in the sky during the race however.

Yes in fairness I think this might be the case. If it was a simple weather based system (on or off type rain) it may have been ok, but the weather simulation in RF2 is quite complex and it also puts extra strain on peoples setups, so with the huge field as well they probably decided not to risk it.

 

[Nomat16]

There was a cloud cover in the morning though. Didn’t lead to a drizzle but it looked a bit ominous at times. Really impressed by the whole organization and all the drivers. Was great professional racing!

 

[Andrew Harper]

Question: I've been reminded by this thread (and the events in the race) that rF2 races can be restarted if you have a server crash. Is rF2 the only sim which is capable of that? (Seems like a must-have for an endurance race.)

I'm not sure if it's something unique to RF2. On most sims though if you have to restart the server you have to either start everything again (and then calculate everything on aggregate) or in some cases I think you can manually enter where everyone is at the time the server crashed.

However something S397 introduced in the last update is pretty clever.

"Especially for long races, we have now implemented a way to resume a race on the same or a different server in case of networking problems. At the end of every lap, the current standings and order are backed up and these script files can be run on a new server to resume the race after all drivers have rejoined. We’ll explain this system in more detail in the upcoming weeks."

I'm assuming that was what they used.

 

[Travis]

Lando Norris verdict rfactor2 vs Iraging.

landonorris - Lando Verdict : Rfactor 2 Vs iRacing - Twitch

Watch landonorris's clip titled "Lando Verdict : Rfactor 2 Vs iRacing"

m.twitch.tv

Despite his petulant behaviour on his stream during the 24 hour race, what Lando states in the clip is what every other professional driver has stated when comparing rF2 to iR.

rF2 - Physics and driving enjoyment
iRacing - Online racing and ease of use/set-up

Congrats to S397, ACO and the drivers for the excellent 24 hour event. The final hour was fantastic.

Hopefully S397 can iron out the bugs which many of us predicted would occur and perhaps next time we get changeable weather.

 

[ianthem]

Despite his petulant behaviour on his stream during the 24 hour race, what Lando states in the clip is what every other professional driver has stated when comparing rF2 to iR.

rF2 - Physics and driving enjoyment
Online racing and ease of use - iRacing

Congrats to S397, ACO and the drivers for the excellent 24 hour event. The final hour was fantastic.

Hopefully S397 can iron out the bugs which many of us predicted would occur and perhaps next time we get changeable weather.

That's a pretty encouraging review, it's much easier to make the interface and online element better than to fix a physics engine.

 

[Trebor901]

That's a pretty encouraging review, it's much easier to make the interface and online element better than to fix a physics engine.

That is the issue iRacing has. Its still too much like Nascar Racing 2003 season because the team behind it is what used to be Papyrus. The similarities are still there after all the years its been around aswell as the flaws that NR2003 had.

For pro drivers though to say that rF2 is ahead on the driving enjoyment and physics is massive. It gives the s397 guys a good starting point to make this sim great.

 

[avenger82]

Oh yeah, the official thing can do that lol they have been doing it this year in Assetto Corsa for example. Unlicensed and some are even using ripped content like SRW Daytona


This. There is no reason to promote manufacturers that kicked your championship out of their programs.
Some dumb people even asked them to do this in iRacing because of the LMP1H there. lol
[/QUOTE

Every single race I’ve been in with rF2 has had issues.
iRacing has not had issues for more than a year now with their main events. And, you can’t exactly compare rF2 trying to run one measly endurance, (probably the biggest event of their life) with a 50 car field to iRacing that have hundreds of teams with thousands of drivers in 13+ splits... all at the same time. Sorry, that’s just unreasonable to try and compare.

but 13+ splits means its handled by 13+ different servers at the same time. So with thousands of drivers how many are handled per server? How many driver swaps?