^ Do you need my shipping address for all of that?
So I've dug around in GT6 and gotten fairly familiar with how the online operates now, it's not drastically different and most of the functions seem to operate correctly (but not all). I still want to experiment more with the qualifying features and the pit stop/tire change features to see how exactly they work and make sure there aren't any oddities.
I've done qualifying a few times, it seems to work brilliantly and is pretty much idiot proof. A downside is that if someone joins the room after qualifying has begun there's no way for them to join qualifying or the race. We'd have to stop/restart qualifying. One other slight negative is that when you start qualifying/race it resets the room to whatever time the room was originally set for. With time change I liked start the practice session at mid-day and let the time progress naturally, then start the race at evening time and let it change to darkness, made it feel like we actually spent a day at the track. Now, if it is dusk at the end of practice it will suddenly switch back to early afternoon when qualifying/race is started. Not a big deal, I can work around it by resetting the time to the desired hour right before we start qualifying. I've not had a chance to experience mandatory pitstops/tire changes yet.
I have some ideas floating around my head about what I want to do for organized racing but haven't settled on anything yet. A couple of my ideas are already being done (Rocket car, no-tuning GT300) so I'll put those on the back burner for now and do them at a later time when there's less competition. There are many tasty cars for us to play with though, it shouldn't be a problem finding something good but I'd like to start off with a bang and have something that makes people say "oh yeah, I want to race that!!".
I think to start off I just want to do a big spot race. I want to see what the January update brings for the community features before kicking off something big, but I don't want to wait that long to start racing! Seeing as the 24 Hours of Daytona is happening next month and we have time change at Daytona now, that seems like a logical/popular place to start. I quite enjoy the new BMW race cars (base model and two liveried versions, all identical) and seeing as they're "Le Mans spec" cars they seem like a good choice to use for a spec one-make spot race. The car is good on SS tires and actually it's not bad on RH either. RH seems to be a bit less grippy and more lively than in GT5. I'm thinking a 1.24 hour race would be appropriate (1 hour and 14 minutes) with full time change (possibly weather change?) and mandatory pitstops. I'm not trying to recreate the Rolex 24, just "inspired by" and using a one-make non-tuned car. I think we could do qualifying, short heat race and feature race with reverse grid, it's not very true to the real race but would make the hour+ feature a little more entertaining for everyone.
Thoughts on the spot race and ideas for a series or club? What do you guys want to see that isn't being done yet? I am willing to do a points series again but that will happen after the community update (really hoping it has a feature for tracking results/points). For now I'd like to get a few organized races under my belt so we have opportunities to find any little bugs or quirks in the online racing (GT5 had a lot of these but GT6 seems to be fairly well sorted so far). Oh, and should we keep the ORCA name or start with something fresh for GT6?
I look forward to your input.
Oh, and since there seems to be a booze theme.........the guy on the left is doing it right!
Ha ha ha! Love it! 
Once I get them I plan on doing a lot of driving though!
For the moment, I've got a little bit of grindin' to do. See y'all soon!
