9.- GRAND PRIX DE SPA FRANCORCHAMPS

[Neil Gault]

What happened to the warm up last night? or the race briefing? it seems to have fallen by the wayside also. Yes i know you decided to scrap the warm up session in favour of an extended qual (yet you still have it in the race announcement) but last night we did even get the extended qual with the result some of us nearly missed the race, as it was Johannes had to start with his qual setup because when he returned to his PC the race countdown was at 0 and he was only just able to join us.

 

[Johannes Norberg]

Yes.. of course I want to know what happened.. I can surely say that it ruined my race!

I left my PC with 13 minutes to race session to guide my dad by phone to the live broadcast website, and when I returned to my gaming PC the timer was @ 00:00 in race session.. Obviously I had to hit the race button as fast as I could which meant that I had to start the race with a dry qual setup

Isn´t it written in the RULES that qual+warmup should be 30 min ??


And it became even more frustrating when I realised that I could have been fighting with Roland and Rami about the top positions if everything has been started correctly.

Anyway.. the race became very exciting in another way.. it was fun to chase from behind and the Ultima felt like i glove last night. My feeling for the car was excellent and I felt I could push very hard without loosing consistency. And when I was up to 4th (which I DIDN´T thought was possible after my pitstop at lap1) I was actually very pleased with my performance..

The fuel incident at the finish was a bit uneccesary though.. :/ I saw with 5 laps to go that it would be tight. But I thought that when the timer was down to zero, my race was over when I crossed the S/F-line, and therefore I didn´t made a short pitstop to fill up a couple of liters. But obviously the LEADER had to cross the S/F-line before anyone can finish.. so I ended up with an empty fuel tank at the last lap.. :frown: In any case I had loosed the 4th place to Robin.. but I think an extra short stop only would have put me down to 5th. Which had been better than 7th..

With some distance to the race... I´m actually quite pleased with my performance. I can´t blame myself for the start since I don´t belive it was my mistake.. and I proved to myself that I could keep up with race pace of the top guys, and once again.. that a wet track is my speciality But it was very difficult to use any other line then the raceline which sent my off track numerous of times when I had to defend myself during the fight with Robin.

A good thing.. there was no lag at all last night which made it easy to race with small margins.. Thumbs up!

 

[Gaëtan Legastelois]

Bad night for me.
Choosing the wrong tire for the qualification, luckily it is re-started.
Bad choice for the second: p, I qualified 20th. Really disappointed.


Race: 14th
I remain cautious given the weather condition, yet I am surprised in the raidillion. I burst a tire and falls gently to the booth, I leave far 18th.
I slowly but surely and the views of my time I can even envisage to a 12th place. Only when the track dries it happens it that thing that I do not understand. The rain tires gets very hot, I put on slicks, their temperature is not bad. But area of the track are very slippery but there changes up to each lap?? I am surprised at the end of 20min and returned again to pit for repair. I climb back to finish just behind Loffler was in big trouble on the final laps.


I found a way to make the wrong choice every time, dirty rain


Grats to podium.

 

[Ries Notenboom]

As Johannes just made the race....I just missed it as did another guy.

30 min of qual in favor of 20 min qual and 10 min warmup. Already a odd way to deal with it as a warmup is always a nice moment to check all settings, do a quick briefing make sure everything and everyone is ok and take a leak or get a last drink in.

So last night I set a qually time which was crap due to spin in T1, same as on Donny I tend to mess up qualyl laps lol , nevertheless still 12th or something. Race pace would have been good for high finish seeing the results. That is if I would have not made to many mistakes offcourse

BUUUUUUT I never got a chance to test it as the organizers decided to move to the Race session on short notice while the 30 min did NOT pass yet. Think you can imagine I was pretty pissed of returning to my PC to see the warmup lap JUST started. Last race minidump so all work for nothing....and same again on Spa cause of **** managment.
Bit of a schoolboy error decision to move to next session if you ask me, as with so many other problems the STC league doesn't look anything but proffesional to me.
Good thing we got a awesome driver field and great teams in it to make up for it.

Out.

 

[Xosé Estrada]

We changed from quali to race when everybody set a time because we were in big delay and we did not wanted to make you finish at 24 hours.

Sorry if we weren't clear in that, I thought all the teams were told in TS, and I did on MSN to your team principal but he did not understood it or I did not managed to explan it so he realized what I meant. I was dealing with many things at same time at that moment and with a broacast running.

Cya!.

 

[Ries Notenboom]

Clearly not, just check my setup and went for a quick toilet visit. Came back while checking my watch to make sure I didn't take to long and found you lot moved on. Nowhere did you mention this can be done in the rules/regulations and no way for me I could have known as it was only mentioned in the ingame chat, teammates shouting on TS doesnt work neither since you I wasn't infront of the pc anyway.

Last week a minidump, mostlikely due to damaged extracted files but nones fault really, now this. Makes you wonder why to bother but we keep on going, despite all the technical difficulties and uber c rap luck I guess

 

[Johannes Norberg]

Bit of a schoolboy error decision to move to next session if you ask me, as with so many other problems the STC league doesn't look anything but proffesional to me.

Can only agree! When I entered this league I thought it was one of the best leagues out there with world-class drivers and live broadcast an so on.. a kind of team-world championship. Until yesterday I was dissapointed due to much lag..minidumps.. etc. in all of the races I´ve participated in, and yesterdays stupid move to skip warmup without informing everyone properly was just too much! You can´t blame it on that we were late and so on.. it was just a matter of 10-15 minutes! That´s so little that it makes no difference to anyone, but ruined so much for several drivers to skip it...

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

I think Xose will be very pleased to read those comments Johannes. It's really nice to hear when you put so much work in organizing a league and try to please everybody that you get attacked on the forum after wards,

Suggestion: try to be constructive as this leads to nowhere and instead of such posts you could give Xose credits for doing a lot of work.

 

[ufunacaoenn]

I dont want to complain or enything but on yesterdays race I was having ALOT of lagg compare to my runs in Hockenhiem and Donington Park. Was there a problem with the server?

I realy hope this small problems like minidumps and Lagg will be found quickly so during the Black Cup no one will need to complain about minidumps and lagg/screen freeze,

 

[Johannes Norberg]

Yeah.. there are many things with this league that is absolutely great! And sadly my recent posts hasn´t focused on that.. sorry. Generally I´m very positive and it takes a lot to make me complain. But those times I feel that it´s needed.. I have the right to open my mouth too..

Yesterday a mistake was made, and me and Ries just want to put in the lights.. to avoid that it happens again. For the best of all participants, both admins and drivers.

I understand that Xose put a lot of work in this.. but the truth is that even we behind the steering wheel put a lot of work in preparations before a race. I can´t really understand why it´s totally ok to complain against another driver that makes a mistake and maybe send you off track.. but you can´t say a word when admin make a mistake.

According to me feedback is always good.. even if it it´s negative.That usually make things better in the long run...

 

[Tom Ilsbroux]

We def have to get a info system so the drivers know what is happening. I was on TS with my guys and searched everywhere to find some info on as they had no clue what was going on, finally found some on the broadcast chat.

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

To clear things up: the server we were using was crap so we decided for players' sake to switch to backup server. That, however, turned out to be not in the condition we would have needed, why this was so remains to be analyzed. So we had to switch back to the original one, which was funnily a bit better now. Of course all of this is more than inconvenient, but with posters everywhere advertising a broadcast for 21.00 and with teams telling us in the LeMans thread that the broadcast is one of the major reasons they go for STC, we decided to stick as close to the schedule as possible. I absolutely agree that we should have paid more attention to making sure that all players had gotten the message. Sorry.

 

[Ries Notenboom]

No hard feelings in the end, just had to vent my thoughts about it which I reckon you will understand same as I understand your actions in regards of the broadcast.

Hoping you lot got enough time and motivation to keep trying to develop this series further with either race or rfactor in next season as it is still a highly respected league despite the issues passed season.

 

[Johan Pesula]

The Le Mans race thread is locked, so im askin for weather forecast here