I'm wondering if for Daytona it's not going to be so simple. What if the Supra is becoming the Meta because it's got the lowest drag. Will it still be best in the slipstream when drag isn't so critical, quite likely most other cars will keep up with the pack no problem. The question then could be which gives the best slingshot finish for the sprint to the line?
I agree. Now that the Suzuki is gone, it could make a lot of cars competitive. Whatever the meta ends up being, there are going to be at least a handful of cars that can keep up in slipstream. That wasn't the situation when the Suzuki was in the race. It was just going to leave everything in the dust.
More to the point, how the hell do we test any of these theories and pick the right car? Guess we don't, unless you're in the Asia Pacific region, we can watch the early streams instead.
There's the million dollar question -- or the 20,000 Cr. one, as payouts go for online races.
I've only done a little bit of testing on this so far, but the few cars I did look at seemed pretty close to their BoP equivalents. I'm guessing the changes have been mainly to the downforce settings, but of course there's no way to know for sure. You might be able to get a decent approximation by doing Gr.3 BoP custom races. That's what I'm planning to do, anyways.
Enough about next week's Nations Cup race, though. What's going on with this week's Manu Cup at Catalunya?
I see that GT Engine has posted the Lap time - DR correlations chart for this round:
https://gt-engine.com/gt7/races/race-stats/lap-time-dr/23-24-ex1/lap-time-dr-23-24-ex1-rd5.html. Happy to see that my best lap (1:42.951) is sitting above the line for my DR.
I had my suspension tune and strategy (16H) figured out last week, since the SSRX race required no preparation. I've been spending most of my prep time this week doing custom races against the AI.
Can I just say how nice it is to be getting a decent payout on these since the upgrade came out? It may not be the million-credit payout from the rubber-band trick at Daytona, but it sure is better than the ~38K it used to be.
I really wish Sophy was available at this track and for custom races, though. I feel like I've figured out the quirks of the regular AI drivers now. I know some lines to get around them, but I don't know how helpful that is going to be against real human drivers. I have my doubts. Oh well, it is what it is.