ACG DiRT Rally Club

[Avionic]

Had to do my run earlier in the week and when I was done, I was super frustrated by the number of mistakes I had made.
Had practiced and was able to get clean runs most of time but when putting the time in, it all started going wrong from stage 2.
I let the rear drift wide in a long slow turn and caught one of the well-hidden stones with my rear wheel and got a puncture. Wasn’t entirely sure on what buttons to press to fix it and decided to just keep going despite 5.5/8 sectors still remaining.

On stage 3 I was keen to make up time, but less than 2/8 in I again messed up – at least this time I had looked up the buttons to press and just took the 1 min penalty straight away instead of suffering through another stage on 3 wheels.

At that point I had kind of lost focus, so I then finished it all off with yet another puncture and 1 min penalty on stage 5 when I crashed before even completing first sector!

So a win after these 3 punctures is quite a surprise, guess we all had a bit of a demolition derby here!

Video with my glorious crashes with some, at times good driving sprinkled in between:

[ArcEye]

Good attempt everyone guess this stage was a more of a car killer than it initially felt.

Congratulations on the win Avionic

[Thaine]

Congratulations Avionic!

The USA rally is vicious imho. A lot of hidden rocks, plenty of hairpins and other terrain that will kill you. Not that the others rally's wont', but at least in Argentina you know you'll be toast with every mistake.

I didn't drive all week and only got a 2 or 3 practice stages in before doing the event. I checked the conditions and noticed that the second stage had wet surface without the chance to change tires before. So I was hoping to drive with a different set of tires from stage 1. Although this was not possible. That made me extra cautious in the second stage which cost me a lot of time. In general I was only pushing it about 80-90% through most of the stages.

I think in stage two or three I raced down a long straight into a crest, followed by a 4 right. I steered into the corner before the crest, took off jumped slightly sideways. Then I realized that I won't land and gain control before the corner. There were a couple of boulders on the outside of the corner. I slid sideways into the first one. that one catapulted me rolling into the second one. I landed on the second boulder with the roof, then made a hop again and another 180 roll just to land on my wheels again. That was almost comical. Only sustained minor body damage though.

During the night stage my flood lights flickered several times and I was afraid they'll give up. Have to have a word with the mechanics.

Sadly turn up wasn't that good this time.

[Thaine]

BTW: My hairpins were horrible. How do you approach them? I haven't figured them out yet.

[Konaber]

I had only one satisfying hairpin, and this was then the nose was pointing into the right direction a quick use of the handbrake to swing the rear directly into the exit position.

[Avionic]

BTW: My hairpins were horrible. How do you approach them? I haven't figured them out yet.

Without actually seeing your driving it is a bit tough to give advice, but classic problems include:

• Braking too late - Slightly too early and you can modulate and will lose 0.1 second. Slightly too late and you will wreck your corner by going too deep and easily lose 1+ second with much lower apex speed and poor exit.
• Not initiating rotation before using the handbrake - If you handbrake in a straight line and you are likely to just continue straight with diminished braking for a while, leading back to first point. Hand brake is for increasing yaw rate not initiating it from 0.
• Using too much handbrake - getting the car completely turned with just the handbrake, many end up losing way too much speed and exit will again suffer heavily
• Being too late in getting back on the throttle - i am normally on the throttle again before releasing handbrake. Gives another layer of control and prevents bogging down.

When the roads allow, I also like to do a bit of a Scandinavian flick to further help in swinging the rear around.

My hairpins aren't perfect but perhaps my video can give you some idea of how to improve. The overlay should help in understanding how i attack them. I go through 2 back to back hairpins at 2:37.

[Konaber]

For everyone not having the game yet:

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[Avionic]

Interesting that everyone ended up running the Lancer in Group A but i guess that it being a iconic car, having probably the most "controllable" handling, and being first on the list helped increase the odds. I think the Delta felt faster on a test run but i would constantly crash and quickly ended went for the Lancer.

Any thoughts on what class/location we should go for next?
I guess Argentina and New Zealand are the two only non-DLC locations that haven't been visited yet.
Still 2 FWD, 2 RWD, and 3 AWD non-DLC classes that haven't been tried yet so plenty of options there. Perhaps H3 to keep a RWD-FWD-AWD rotation going?

[Spitfire]

Argentina is a death rally XD, but I could be interesting with the RWD cars.
The idea for the rotation is nice. Hopefully no unforseen events will cause my DNS this time.

[Thaine]

I thought about Argentina next. Although my thought was to maybe use GRP A once more. I like them.