I did my first race of the 1/4 distance 1999 JGTC championship today...
It was a great race, but there's still a few kinks in the AI/rubberbanding to sort out... my nearest competitor, the Raybrig NSX of Kunimitsu Takahashi stopped for his only pit stop at the start of the final lap of the race, which ruined any chance of a close finish. Hisashi Wada in the JLOC Diablo took a shock 2nd place, plus Fastest Lap (an incredible 9 seconds faster than my PB), but the Lambo pitted FOUR times (in a 14 lap race)... it was ridiculously quick on the straights, but uses too much fuel - apparently.
Erik Comas was looking strong and we both passed each other for the lead at Degner, but Comas had to pit a second time after colliding with a back marker and damaging the front of his car. I had to check the replay, but I was quite glad to see that his second stop was a genuine incident and not some rubberbanding phoney stop.
Hideshi Matsuda in the Team Taisan Viper was also looking very strong and led the race for a while, but rather incredibly ran out of fuel on Lap 11 from the lead of the race, and ended up finishing in a lowly 8th place. He would likely not have won anyway as he had to stop twice for fuel.
One last ingredient that was missing from my plan to recreate the full season was the scoring, so I looked up the
Wikipedia entry for the 1999 JGTC season and figured out the scoring as 20, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1... however this led me to spot several arithmetical errors on the page, and so I've since updated the page with the proper points totals, meaning a swap in position for Darren Manning and Anders Olofsson. Cross-referencing with the official
SuperGT results archive and this great JGTC results resource
here showed that the Wiki page was indeed wrong, even getting the Championship winner, Erik Comas' results wrong...
Results:
* 2nd stop for damage repair
^ Ran out of fuel in P1 on lap 11
Race length: 14 laps; 31:25.325
Winning margin: +21.335
Lap record: T. Wada - JLOC Diablo 2:00.530; My PB: 2:09.428
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A few things to iron out for the next race: The JLOC Lambo and the Viper are too fast, so I'll detune them a bit - the Diablo finished 2nd even though it stopped FOUR TIMES.
There was some poor rubberbanding though - the NSX of Takahashi, which only needed to stop for fuel at the start of the last lap, did a ridiculously slow lap while in the lead of the race on Lap 8, clocking an incredible 2:35.xxx, the same as an average in-lap, but the car didn't pit. On review of the replay, the NSX was going quite slow but then inexplicably tucked in behind a GT300 back-marker until it lost the lead of the race... very strange. Without this extra time, Takahashi probably would have won the race, even with the last lap pit stop.
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edit: I just found out why the JLOC Diablo was so fast... I had tuned it to 700 PP not realising that was with Wet tyres equipped... meanwhile, back on RH tyres, it was 750 PP - racing against a field tuned to 700 PP...