It also appears they have broken the "Test Drive" function where it no longer starts you on a flying lap, instead it starts you using the setting you have in the lobby "Rules" page, either standing start or rolling start with a countdown. Kinda minor, but also kind of annoying sometimes, depending on what it is you are doing.
Yeah I don't know what's up with the AI, everytime they do AI tweaks in these updates it's like they correct some behaviors only to make others worse. It makes me think that they will never nail the AI down to be nearly perfect. Are they better then when the game launched? Yes. But are they still making stupid mistakes? Also Yes. It's weird but depending on the division I'm still having some great racing against them 75 percent of the time.
Another AI update needs to correct the following for good which includes them veering off track at specific spots on certain tracks for no reason, scenarios where they dive bomb into each other and the player, add defensive driving for the AI so they are not always pushovers, and still need some fixing on faster AI passing slower cars.
The sort of "1 step forward, 2 steps backwards, and 1 and a half steps diagonally forward" thing is so on-brand for T10 though.
This last update made a change to private lobbies that wasn't mentioned in the patch notes, where now you don't need to manually change your driver group bucket to get into other classes, you can just select the available car you want and it will automatically put you in the right bucket, including when a race is currently underway so that you can check your tune/fuel/tires while the others are are finishing up. It's actually a great change and something that has been annoying for years...
...But they also broke the lobby settings, so now every single time you change anything in the lobby settings, the "Rules" tab resets to default "Club" settings... except they aren't
really Club settings. We tested it in one of our league qualifying lobbies where we run with collisions off, and it resets collisions and turns them back on, which is displayed properly under the rules tab. The damage on the rules tab will say "cosmetic only" like it should for Club settings, except you will still get full mechanical damage if you crash, and you still burn up fuel even though you shouldn't be able to, which I'm guessing is tied to this new glitch:
This really screws up any organized league that uses fuel/tires (since we are 8 titles into this series and
still can't run "fuel only" or "tires only" for some stupid reason) for strategy potential and doesn't want people to just cheese it. There really isn't a good way to police it, and the only thing you could do would be to "fix" it by upping the tire wear multiplier so much that it requires multiple stops for tires. Otherwise, people will just put hard/medium tires on and run out of fuel but keep going and never have to stop.
Adding a mandatory stop doesn't really police it either, as a caution before the "legit" pit window would still lead to people potentially cheesing it.
The issue with things like this too is the perception and paranoia with it. Leagues can tell their drivers "don't do that" and 99% of people will listen, which means for most kinda normal 20-ish person leagues no one will exploit it... But there are certain people who need to scapegoat their losses on something, and they often end up questioning/accusing others of exploiting things or being unfair or whatever, even when they don't know what they are talking about... Which leads to hurt feelings, unnecessary stewards inquiries, and other headaches.
Sorry for the wall of text rant, but as a series organizer this a big groan/facepalm combo, and yet another scramble to figure out a way to compensate for another T10 **** up and have to change rules mid-season... Like the time they broke half of the kerbs in FM7 for a few weeks, or the time they broke pit stops so your car no longer ghosted and it would lead to cars crashing and getting stuck in the pit lane in FM7, or the time they made it more common for cars to disappear when entering the pitlane and they would just be invisible for the rest of the race in FM7, and so on.
Did they make a feature that auto ends practice when specific conditions are met? I know this happened to me when practicing for the first race in the D-class Open tour. I ran one lap of Eagle Rock and then bam, back in the pits with the open to go to race enabled. I didn't even see what my lap time was, lol. It also seems like the fuel ratio isn't right either, as I had enough fuel to run the full race at Eagle Rock, but yet ended up running out of fuel as I came around the final corner.
How much extra fuel did you put in above the lap count?
The fuel estimation, while usually very conservative, is dynamic and adjusts to your driving. That includes live in the HUD while driving, in the pit stop refuel prediction when you select how much fuel to add, and in the "Fuel and Tires" menu between sessions. It's possible that when you only did 1 lap it didn't get an accurate reading. I've had the same thing happen to me once or twice, although usually it's the opposite and I end up with 2 or 3 extra laps worth at the end.