Challenging supercars in enemy territory!
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High Speed Ring is a circuit that defines Gran Turismo. It's the ultimate classic track. I'm still upset they brought back Route X over this track in GT Sport. What's a Gran Turismo game with no High Speed Ring?
Anyway, before I start rambling, let's get to the race. This may seem like an easy event at first, seeing as you're driving a full-blown race car against road cars, but stop to think for a bit: This is a very fast track, one where you never go lower than third gear, and these road cars you're up against were basically made to go really fast. This seems easy, but it's anything but.
Since, due to no-tune rules, you cannot just lower the downforce to make your car go faster, slipstreaming is key here. Overtaking at the final corner is literally the last thing you want to do, as you want to have a car in front of you on the main straight to give you that extra speed boost. Without slipstream, the GT-R can hit at most 260-ish km/h on the main straight. If you have a car in front of you to abuse the slipstream, however, you can hit upwards of 300 km/h, and that sometimes means saving over a second on your lap times.
The Bugatti Veyron could be a problem if it shows up, but the field I got had the McLaren F1 instead. Once you pass him, his rubberbanding kicks in and he will keep up with you. The GT-R has very powerful brakes and can brake really late, especially compared to the road cars the AI uses, so brake as late as you dare and try to get at least into 5th before you enter the tunnel on Lap 1. If you can grab the next car's slipstream into the main straight (a Ford GT, in my case), you can save yourself quite a bit of time.
I usually get to first place on Lap 4, but if you're in first as you get to the main straight, and it's not the last lap, it's best to let the car behind pass you so you can get a little bit of slipstream. It's not as good as having it for the whole straight, but it still saves time. You want to spend as much time on the slipstream of another car as possible here.
After a few runs, my best time was a
5:43.077. How fast you go here can sometimes depend on luck, since slipstream is so important, so I don't know if I can improve this time all that much.
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Next up...
I really think KTM should have stuck to making motorcycles...
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Back to Goodwood we go for the next stage of the Golf Festival.
And so, back to the narrow roads that mean one mistake can end your day. If Hungaroring is Monaco without the barriers, Goodwood is Macau without the barriers.
And so, just a few runs in, I struggle to even make it past Turn 4, and I realize that I really,
really hate this car. It's so unstable and hard to control that it makes the Renault Alpine from the last round feel like a Formula 1 car in terms of grip!
Turn 1 seems easier if I quickly downshift to third gear before tapping the brakes and turning in, letting the car scrub off speed as needed. Turn 2 is just a lift-off, as it is with most cars. But then, after the flat-out section past Turn 3, we get to Turn 4.
And I lost count of how many times I flew off into the grass here. You want to get through here at 100 km/h, faster if possible, but if the car skids even a little, it's game over. Trying to catch the slide on a pad will just send you into the grass, and doing nothing will make you hit the inside wall. It's a dead end.
On the lucky times I made it past that part, I either crashed on Turns 5 and 6, or slammed into the wall coming out of Turn 7 - Which didn't disqualify me, but ruined the run. Only
once did I make it to the end, with a time of
0:48.699, and I said "screw it, I'm done with this piece of junk".
By the end of this round, I'll probably never want to even see a KTM X-Bow ever again.
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I did CHIC and Sniper's Rifle as well, but I'll need another post to get those in, so you'll have to wait a bit. Right now, it's lunch time for me.
for Tinkerbell which runs amazing at Laguna Seca with the " armadillo " ford.
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