Never drove on this track before this TT, so decided to try learning it from scratch in a Z4 race car.
Took me about an hour to get down to Silver medal times in the Z4, and to have the track halfway memorized. (Was completing probably about 1 lap for every dozen that I went flying off the track and up up awayyyy into the stratosphere babyyyy, hahaha. Good thing the game doesn't simulate bone bruising and internal organ damage during these "learning phases"
)
Then bought a 2J, and was pretty stunned by how much dramatically faster and better it was compared to the Z4. I mean, I knew it would be a huge, night and day type of difference, but even so, pretty crazy to experience it first hand like that, for the first time (normally I avoid the higher PP TT's, but got too antsy waiting around, since I didn't really do last months' TT's other than the final day, so, decided to finally give the 2J a go).
Dropped my time dramatically right off the bat. Had it completely stock other than adding 200 kg ballast, and power-limiting it to 600pp. But, I noticed it was understeering quite a bit (albeit it was still a ton faster than the Z4 even in its nearly bone-stock understeering form), so, I made a really basic tweak of the raising the front ride height a tiny bit, and loosening the front spring rate a tiny bit and tightening the rear suspension a tiny bit. That seemed to make it understeer a less and pretty close to neutral-balanced. Also lowered the Top Speed setting on the transmission from 200-something down to 170-something I think. Anyway, those tweaks seemed to make another big difference and quickly got a Gold on the very next lap, and then down into 1:06.x after a few more laps.
Arms acting up now so probably gonna leave it at that for a while, but from what I could tell from this first session, I can see I definitely have a 1:03 in me pretty easy, since I was on 1:03 pace up till near the end of the lap before flying through the cones in that 2nd to last sharp turn, lol. Hopefully once I get another session or two in, to learn the track even better, and use some really solid tune on the 2J, rather than having a mostly stock setup, I'll be able to get below the 1 minute mark. I guess that'll be my informal goal for this TT, to go sub-1:00.00. Not gonna try to shoot for a top-250 finish on this one I don't think, or I'll probably end up hating the game. I think I should only shoot for a top-250 or higher on a track that I have a real love and passion for, since on those ones, I feel happy and excited about putting in sessions, whereas on this track, the thought of putting in lots of sessions just makes me frown and shudder, lol.
Oh well, was still fun to get a feel for the 2J finally. Weird car, but pretty cool. Crazy to think that that was an actual race car at one point back in the day. People in the 1970's probably thought it was an alien UFO when they first saw it