Wow. This. Is. Amazing. It's been almost a week now, and the top 25 hasn't changed. Is everyone stuck like me?
Or is everybody at the 630 PP seasonal?
I was wondering the same thing. I was checking the leaderboard every so often the past week or so, and noticed there's been barely any new times/shuffling in the top of the rankings.
Looks like just after you posted that, though, two new guys surpassed trl_immortal, and pushed the top time all the way into the 30.4's. So, maybe now that the deadline is finally starting to approach, the action is gonna pick back up a little.
Personally, I don't have a wheel set up right now, and have just been doing the occasional short session on my DS3 controller. I can't even use the right joystick, since my right hand is all screwed up, so I just use the x-button for the gas and the left joystick for steering, and leave it on automatic, too.
Managed to get down to a 32.05, and then a few laps later a 32.02, so I'm in 580-590ish place right now with that.
I've managed to get a half car length ahead of the ghosts of some of the top guys on the top 10 leaderboard around the first turn going into the 2nd sharp turn, but they always overtake me on that one, since I have Active Steering set on strong, and the only way I can keep up with them past the 2nd sharp corner is if I turn it off (but then I usually end up swinging the back of my car out eventually on one of the later corners at some point, so a much lower percentage of my runs make it clean to the finish without any big screwups. I might try compromising down to putting it on "mild" if I make another run at it tomorrow or something, and see how fast I can go on that setting.
I exited the first corner on the 32.02 run almost half a second slower than I've taken it on numerous other laps, so, I know at the bare minimum, just on that alone, I have a 31.6-31.5 in me, but I also have gone a few tenths faster on the middle section and the end section, so, if I was at my current best on all 3 sectors, in theory I think I have a 31.1-31.0 in me, on a perfect run, if I don't improve on any sectors but just put all my best ones together on a single run.
To go any faster than that, though, I'd either have to start using the right-joystick for the gas instead of the x-button, so that I could take active steering all the way off, and lower traction control a little more, by being able to feather the gas, so I could exit the 2nd turn a little sooner and at a higher speed, and ditto for the 2nd to last turn, since those are the two spots I consistently give up the most time to the ghosts of the top 10 guys. Or, I'd have to get a wheel.
But, I think if I got a wheel, I'd get too obsessed with it, and play it all day long until my carpal tunnel-ish thing in my hands got a million times worse, so I'll probably just settle for trying to finish in the top-250 finish, but not try to do anything more hardcore than that.
As for the first corner, I never saw the run where Doodle cut it hard, so I dunno what that looked like/what you are specifically referring to, but I've noticed that staying way inside much earlier in the turn, and braking in kind of two or three hard button-presses a little late into the approach, seems to nose the car in around the lip really nicely for some reason, and that was always the line I (sometimes almost accidentally) used in the runs where I got my car to be visibly ahead of the ghost-cars of the guys in the Top 10, in the rare times I beat them around the first curve. It doesn't work nearly as well when I take active steering off tho. With it turned off, I have to basically "drift" the car in one long smooth sweep, rather than what it does when I use that line with it turned on "strong", where it does this kind of jerky lip-yank thing and actually take it a little faster that way. But then it takes the later curves a lot slower than with it turned off, for the most part, so, it has its pros and cons in that regard.
30.4 man...
