Open Letter to Sim Developers - Why the Lack of Touring Cars in Sim Racing?

[Richard Dastardly]

I watched it from 1989 - 2000 (ish). I remember it being quite clean in the earlier days, but towards the end of my interest I seem to remember almost every race being a complete farce, with drivers either showing way too much aggression, or way too little skill. When cars were getting punted of every race, I lost interest and stopped watching it

Coinciding with the rise of Jason Plato then...

 

[Fat-Alfie]

Hmm.... could be...

 

[Richard Dastardly]

I want this, frankly. I don't think we'll ever get it though.

Oh Mike Smith, you always had to do something.

One thing about the 80s & 90s was there wasn't really any low-cost low-tier GT racing ( or in the case of much of the 80s, any at all ). Group B never really took off for circuit racing - bit of a cost overlap with group C2 anyway - and the 90s tried to fill the hole left by Group C - even BPR was full of top-end road car conversions. That left quite a gap for touring cars to fill as race versions of less expensive road cars - that would be a busy bracket these days.

Looking at 400bhp for that year's Sierras ( maybe Rouse had a bit more, heh ) - ended up way over 500bhp before they were replaced, almost up to the power of GT3 car. Class B was full of BMW M3s, same as GT4 is full of M4s now. Group A was a truly global formula too.

 

[Fat-Alfie]

That would be so much fun, I have to admit

Murray - "See how the back end steps out on him?!"

And that's what's wrong with current touring cars for me. No one ever says "See how the front end washes out?!"

 

[Richard Dastardly]

That would be so much fun, I have to admit

Murray - "See how the back end steps out on him?!"

And that's what's wrong with current touring cars for me. No one ever says "See how the front end washes out?!"

The BTCC BMWs are RWD & it shows, but where do you find RWD road cars to convert these days, generally? I don't really get why touring cars are so small these days, leave the little cars for rallying.

Edit: 1988 was a hell of a year for touring cars...

Edit for below: Incidentally the 1988 Thruxton pole time ( Steve Soper ) was a 1:20, which shows how much aero they gained next decade given how much power the Cossies had.

 

[davoroni]

as far as speeds go the new BTCC (is it 2.0 turbos?) Matt Neal who can hustle a car drove his Honda this year to a 1:15.612 pole lap at Thruxton
but in 1998 Rydell in the Volvo did a 1:15.603 for pole as
Menu was sent to the back of the grid.(with a 1:15.xx missing a chicane) i looked it up on youtube BTCC 1998 Thruxton...
the speeds aren't too different, from Touring car today to SuperTourers
it is how they did it, and that the cars were different enough and sounded crazy cool

yes the current cars are little, the big family saloon/sedan style is much better for it.

 

[b)b]

Touring cars are there in sims if you are looking for it but what people really want is to drive a Ferrari 488 GT3 at Spa for the rest of their life. Meanwhile, I've been really enjoying the Honda Civic BTCC in rF2 or the SuperV8 in AMS and various touring cars in PC2.

 

[Richard Dastardly]

Touring cars are there in sims if you are looking for it but what people really want is to drive a Ferrari 488 GT3 at Spa for the rest of their life. Meanwhile, I've been really enjoying the Honda Civic BTCC in rF2 or the SuperV8 in AMS and various touring cars in PC2.

Touring cars are there the way other random cars are - the thing is there's no coherent *game*. There's a Civic in rF2 - great; where's the rest of the field? etc.

Interesting bit of TC history I forgot - the FIA ran a WTCC in 1987 only, and then Bernie tried to reorganise it into a silhouette series powered by ex-F1 turbo engines ( this seems to be a theme... cf Group C a couple of years later ). Oddly enough there weren't really any takers for it, other than a V10 Alfa 164. That made me start thinking about the state of DTM, how the FIA took that, turned it into the ITC - a very high tech series - & managed to get that shut down, and now we have a DTM that's a silhouette series that's about to be powered by, well, small capacity turbo engines.

 

[Haydan Jinnette]

Tracks need to be laser scanned these days and nobody wants to spend the money to laser scan all of the tracks in Australia...

Laser scanning ruined touring car games...

 

[Warren Dawes]

Tracks need to be laser scanned these days and nobody wants to spend the money to laser scan all of the tracks in Australia...

Laser scanning ruined touring car games...

I don't think laser scanning is essential.
The tracks I've seen in RRE are very good quality, and to my knowledge, they aren't laser scanned.
However, I'd sure like to see some RRE quality tracks in Australia, say to the quality of the Bathurst track.

 

[Will Mazeo]

Tracks need to be laser scanned these days and nobody wants to spend the money to laser scan all of the tracks in Australia...

Laser scanning ruined touring car games...

Disagree, it's a case lack of interest or too expensive licenses. You dont need laser scan to have good tracks. And there is a chance the main tracks in Australia have already been laser scanned anyway, you dont really need to make it yourself, some companies sell this data, sometimes this data is available for free

 

[Yetch]

TOCA Fantastic, TOCA 2 Marvelous and time consuming, at Divorcecon 1 proportions but the utter litter that appeared after that, TOCA Race Driver or whatever it was called, was so bad I nearly didn't sign those divorce papers. Went the same way with Colin McRae rally, turned into sorry, Dirt, utter tosh!
After doing a bit of Beta testing for F1 recently, I could defo see there was hope for it but having thought on it and deciding that Codemasters can't make their mind up whether to make a Sim or Arcade game, lets face it Rally, Dirt and F1 fall somewhere between and come up short imho. So after Dirt 4 I think my time with Codies is done, so here's hoping they pass the BTCC license over to S3, so one could get some proper Tin Top Turmoil going on. ONLY if all those lovely Brit tracks come with it though.