rF2: McLaren Senna GTR and Aston Martin GTE Released

[Paul Jeffrey]

Studio 397 have released the stunning McLaren Senna GTR and Aston Martin Vantage GTE for rFactor 2.

Available as standalone DLC content or part of the ‘Two Strong Pack’, both cars are available to purchase for the simulation with immediate effect.

Adding a brand new category to the sim, the McLaren Senna offers a first look at the upcoming new Hypercar specification of GT racing – a classification set to take over from the retiring LMP class at the head of the endurance racing landscape.

Officially unveiled as a limited production mid-engine sports car by McLaren Automotive back at the 2018 Geneva Motor Show, the Senna is earmarked by the famous racing team to take the McLaren name back to the top level of Le Mans competition from the 2020/21 season.

Packing a mighty 4.0l V8 twin-turbocharged engine, the Senna GTR is in its own right an impressive piece of motorsport engineering – however, the look into the future of endurance racing is perhaps what is most exciting about the car – giving sim racers our first view of what is set to come at the pinnacle of long distance endurance racing.

The other car in the pack similarly needs no introduction, with Studio 397 dropping the fourth instalment to the popular GTE category within the sim – adding the beautiful Aston Martin Vantage GTE to the title.

The Vantage joins the current GTE field of Porsche, Corvette and BMW within the sim, and inserts a fan favourite car into what is, for me at least, one of the best packs of virtual racing machines anywhere in sim racing.

Both cars are available now, and retails for 4.99 euro each, or around 6.99 euros for the two car ‘Two Strong Pack’.

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[thepharcyde]

Everyone talks about UI. What is so bad about it? I think more than new UI we need some kind of multiplayer system.

The two are interlinked, hence the importance.
Online racing outside of club racing is a ghost town and or full of AI.
Changing cars in the current UI guise by default resets all AI to match your car, kinda annoying i.e. if you select the new Aston GTE, you then have to then manually select all the other GTE cars. Creating classes, is overtly complicated for non-techies etc

 

[Miguel Muñiz]

Clearly you haven't been to iRacing very often.

Why pay DLC cars if you can't compete online with them? I do not say that it has the same competition system as iracing but at least that rfactor 2 has a competition system to be able to compete online with the DLC cars.

 

[Andy_J]

Sim Racing is my only guilty passion and as I do not play any other games I save my pennies for such occasions as this...and Nords when it arrives...more than happy with the cost, was expecting more to be honest, but very happy with my purchase plus helping to fund future content and development
Having a blast around Studio 397 fantastic LeMans track.

Great screen grabs. Can I ask what resolution you are playing at and what details your graphics are set on?

Thanks

 

[2stains]

Here is fun idea make a basic mod with all DLC , I add GT500 and URD Ford for good measure and the good courses you like
Important bit only select one skin for each vehicle I try not to duplicate car numbers



Now make a online room ( you don't have to change any settings as you not actually hosting)
Make it private / unannounced
My mod has 18 vehicles so you select 17ai
Boot room and join
Select your first car to drive
You should have 1 of each other model
Now test or hotlap come back to garage and swap cars without leaving room
and retain best laps for each you drive

Be nice if you could do that in any other sim

See its things like this that I and probably most have no idea how to do or even that it is possible! Maybe the new future UI will make it easy for anybody.

 

[PaulAM]

I also don't get the constant whining about the UI.
I can go through the UI and get a qualy/race setup with the car/track combo I want in about three minutes.
I then drive for 30 to 90 minutes.
What's the problem?
Someone in this thread even mentioned to go the way of AC's Content Manager!?
That's one piece of complicated software when you first use it. Many many options, and needs time to wade through everything to get your head around - that's because it's a ...... content manager as well as a front end.
I think most of the UI whiners don't really want to drive rF - they just want something shiny. Otherwise they would take the time to :
- pick a car
- pick a track
- go race.

 

[azqa]

I also don't get the constant whining about the UI.
I can go through the UI and get a qualy/race setup with the car/track combo I want in about three minutes.
I then drive for 30 to 90 minutes.
What's the problem?
Someone in this thread even mentioned to go the way of AC's Content Manager!?
That's one piece of complicated software when you first use it. Many many options, and needs time to wade through everything to get your head around - that's because it's a ...... content manager as well as a front end.
I think most of the UI whiners don't really want to drive rF - they just want something shiny. Otherwise they would take the time to :
- pick a car
- pick a track
- go race.

I like the current UI.

But complaints are related to non-compliance with deadlines, non-compliance with commitments, incredibly high delays.

All this accompanied by very poor communication :

Communication in the wrong place, not transparent enough, really nil roadmap, etc.

 

[Alistair McKinley]

I had so much fun last night when I beat the Senna GTR over Imola (2018), overtaking the GTE and GT3 cars as if they were Fiat Pandas. That experience alone was/is well worth 7 EUR. What a magnificient piece of art, this McLaren Senna GTR.

 

[M D Gourley]

Great screen grabs. Can I ask what resolution you are playing at and what details your graphics are set on?

Thanks

Thanks for showing some interest....resolution 5760 x 1080 with an RTX 2070 and getting approx 49 - 77 FPS around S397 laser LeMans with 21 cars...more than happy with that and the cars feel fantastic on my TSXW Racer
The screenshots are composed in the full 5760 x1080 with no cropping or editing. rFactor 2 settings below.

My settings for LeMans screenshots in previous post and one below

 

[Marisa]

I also don't get the constant whining about the UI.
I can go through the UI and get a qualy/race setup with the car/track combo I want in about three minutes.
I then drive for 30 to 90 minutes.
What's the problem?
Someone in this thread even mentioned to go the way of AC's Content Manager!?
That's one piece of complicated software when you first use it. Many many options, and needs time to wade through everything to get your head around - that's because it's a ...... content manager as well as a front end.
I think most of the UI whiners don't really want to drive rF - they just want something shiny. Otherwise they would take the time to :
- pick a car
- pick a track
- go race.

The current way of listing content is a mess. There is no filtering, searching or grouping. All things Content Manager does extremely well. You can even tag and rate content, and save custom searches.
I guess rF2 UI is ok if you only have like 5 tracks and cars but I had about 100 cars and probably about 50 tracks. If at least they would be listed in a consistent way but no, you are at the mercy of the content creator to pick sensible names and not give it a stupid name and / or putting it in a stupidly named folder with only this one track or car in it. Best thing about the UI is how sometimes tracks with multible layouts get split up so you have 2 layouts of Zandy at the bottom, 1 ABOVE Watkins and another one god knows where.
So to summarize, current rF2 UI can't even list content in alphabetical order and there is no way to filter content so you can show only, let's say, GTE cars.

 

[Craig Dunkley]

Only driven the Senna so far and wow ..great car ..

MCLAREN SENNA GTR EVENT...

rFactor 2 Racing Club

 

[Gevatter]

The screenshots are composed in the full 5760 x1080 with no cropping or editing. rFactor 2 settings below.

rF2 looks very good on screenshots. The shaders for morning and evening hours works wonders. Is the DoF effect something the replay mode allows you to do or is that included in the 'Effects: Full' setting?

A small criticism I have is that while the price of a singe car is the same as previous releases, when bought in the "Two Strong" pack the price per car is slightly higher than the price per car in previous GT packs was.

 

[Ciccina2016]

are these cars fun to drive?
Has anyony tried a multi-class with the LMP2,GTE and GT3?

 

[John-Eric Saxén]

People are wanting to race other people, there will never be an ai that can offer the same racing, it's that simple, move with the times or get left behind

We have AI taking over in almost all aspects of our society. Your entire smartphone is one big AI machine, where AI decides which news to pick for you, how to improve your pictures, etc. AI bots are now trained to communicate with people and serve as assistants on all major websites. Oh and the most obvious one, autonomous vehicles, which is still work in progress, but one day will be reality. We are constantly surrounded by AI and these examples I gave are all much harder tasks than having an AI drive race cars on a (mostly) set track path.

I don't buy that race sims cannot develop immersive AI. At some point there will be an AI that drives just as well (or poorly) as a human. The fact that sim developers haven't bothered to improve AI much since days of Geoff Crammond doesn't mean it can't be done. If Crammond could program almost same level of AI running on a 100 MHz Pentium, then there is no technical reason why AI couldn't be awesome on today's machines.

 

[davehenrie]

are these cars fun to drive?
Has anyony tried a multi-class with the LMP2,GTE and GT3?

yes, quite simple really, choose GTE, GT3 and LMP2 in the opponent settings Then count up how many cars you have listed to set the number of AI.

 

[TylerDurden4321]

Like the Aston a lot, might be my favorite GTE now, especially after the recent changes done to them. And it sounds great as well.

The Senna...well, not so much. Not saying it's bad or anything, but doesn't really do much for me.

What I don't understand, though, is why all of the S397 GT3 and GTE cars are set by default with such heavy FFB with so much clipping. You have to dial every single car down to around 0.75 FFB multiplier to get rid of most of the clipping (which reminds me of ACC where the default FFB settings also clip a lot and are very heavy), and even lower if you want to get rid of it completely (which is kinda annoying, also because it seems it tends to get reset when the cars are updated, so you have to do it again). It is very obvious with this DLC pack in particular, since the Aston once again has its FFB set so high and you have to dial it down, while the Senna is very close to being perfect in this regard (I still lowered the multiplier a bit, but you wouldn't have to, unlike the GTE cars).

Have you set the "steering torque capability" in the controller.json to the Nm of your wheel? (jfyi personally, I usually add ~20% on top, which makes the bumps a bit less aggressive)

 

[tr1v1um]

This is why I think it would have been smarter for S397 and other sim developers to focus on a different portion of the market. You know what portion of the market is heavily neglected right now? The offline market. A market that if S397 developed their sim to tailor fit they would have the offline market jumping onboard. Instead everyone is trying to copy what iRacing has done and has fallen short in every instance.

That's not really true. If everyone would have copied iRacing, we would have nicely structured online racing events with a clear schedule and rating systems that make somewhat sense. And surpise surprise: none of this is the case. Most public online lobbies in racing sims are like call of duty mp servers with a bit of stats grinding. But none of the sims besides iRacing offers races every hour where people simply know that a practice session for a race will start based on a time table. Next to the fact that it's allways GT3, GT3 and GT3. Have I mentioned GT3? Stuff like that offers zero sense of progression and most people start with far too fast and complex cars, while they have no idea how basic weight transfere works. The first rookie races in iRacing are driven with the MX5 on smaller club circuits for a reason. You don't start with the GT3 stuff at Monza or Spa.

 

[Stevie_007]

Love the senna car

 

[Emery]

Is the DoF effect something the replay mode allows you to do or is that included in the 'Effects: Full' setting?

DoF effect happens with the non-cockpit cameras when you put Post Effects on Low or higher in the video setup (or is it Medium or higher?). Choices are None, Low, Medium, High, Ultra.

If you do your racing from the cockpit camera and never take screenshots, then there's little/no benefit to setting the Post Effects above Low because the cockpit camera doesn't use the higher levels even though the higher levels consume fps.

Edit: forgot to mention that, AFAIK, whoever creates the cam file controls the DoF effect. If third party tracks have no DoF effect, that's because they didn't put it in.

 

[Tar Heel]

That's not really true. If everyone would have copied iRacing, we would have nicely structured online racing events with a clear schedule and rating systems that make somewhat sense. And surpise surprise: none of this is the case. Most public online lobbies in racing sims are like call of duty mp servers with a bit of stats grinding. But none of the sims besides iRacing offers races every hour where people simply know that a practice session for a race will start based on a time table. Next to the fact that it's allways GT3, GT3 and GT3. Have I mentioned GT3? Stuff like that offers zero sense of progression and most people start with far too fast and complex cars, while they have no idea how basic weight transfere works. The first rookie races in iRacing are driven with the MX5 on smaller club circuits for a reason. You don't start with the GT3 stuff at Monza or Spa.

Read what I said again. I specifically said everyone is failing to replicate what iRacing has done.

"Instead everyone is trying to copy what iRacing has done and has fallen short in every instance."

 

[o Tiger Feet o]

GTE. Is it supposed to have Reverse gear?

Also the god damn mirrors in RF2, I'm unable to get them in any sort of sensible position. The 0/0 thing, I can only adjust the 2nd figure?

?