Start of the season
Last Wednesday we had our first race of the 2013-2014 season at my home track. Every other week is race night and usually we are with 3-6 drivers, it depends. The great thing about it is that actually all of the drivers are regular visitors, some for a year now, but some for more than 8 years, which means we have an experienced group of digital racers and also know the features of RCS.Every year we try to make it a racing season where it doesn’t matter if you miss a race. This comes down to creative awarding of points and is always a challenge to have a fair winner at the end of the season. Races vary from endurance to GP, sprint races and rally challenges. This keeps it interesting and makes you use all types of cars. At the moment points, races etc are in excel, but of course our goal is to get that in RCS64, using the info from these race nights. Step 1 is preparing RCS for this, and is actually happening now since we released version 87, which should be the last release with current dashboards and pit stop handling.For the first race only 3 drivers showed up, but that is still enough to have a very entertaining night.
This is how we did It;Class: TOURING3 drivers
3 Touring cars (find 3 cars that are close in performance)
3 races of 50 laps, every driver races each car.
Before every race 5 min qualify, no practice.

Cars:
Mercedes DTM SCX
BMW WTCC Scalextric
Seat Leon Scalextric

No mag, silicone tyres.

We choose to use tyre wear and damage, so no fuel burn and no weather influences.
We wanted to have at least 1 pit stop to change for tyres.

Some settings:
Manual track call (BR+LC)

Tyre wear HARD: 4% – 1 set

Tyre wear SOFT : 6% – 2 sets

Tyre change time : 5 secs

Brake delays as default

Repair time full damage : 10 secs

Available damage points: 3, Pole position = 1 extra damage point. (4)

The racing:

From my own point of view: fantastic. (2 victories, 1 2nd place  )

Race 1 was very close, all the same tyre strategy, start on HARD, so pitstops for Softs were all around same lap. You knew you had to do at least 30 laps on hard. I won the race because 1 car got damage and needed repair, than you are lost in a short race. But the main reason was that my pit stop time was about 7 seconds, and of number 2 11 seconds. That 4 seconds made the crucial difference to gain victory.

Race 2 I came in second, the BMW was just too fast and made no mistakes. One of the other drivers choose to start on SOFT to stay out pitstop mayhem and get out of sync, but it did not help him.

The third race I won because the number 2 car started on soft tyres, and choose softs again at his pit stop, which meant he had to do an extra pit stop. Trying to compensate he made some mistakes, which resulted in a pit stop for repair.

Looking back at this race night I can only say that this was just great and really brings the spirit of a 1:1 race to your track.
Hope this helps enjoying RCS as much as we do.

Marcel

The DTM SpiritIn preparation of the event planner we are working on a rally mode and race weekends. As a fan of touring car competitions and having enjoyed DTM’s first race this season I wanted to see what needs to be done in RCS to capture the DTM spirit and translate it to digital slot cars. I have studied the official DTM rules and tried to find a work around for this race evening to come as close as possible to the real thing

We had 4 drivers this evening. In official DTM you have 22 cars and 4 qualifying sessions. Since we are limited to 6 cars in RCS we will make this 2 qualifying session. 1 timed session, and 1 shoot out (1 lap) of the fastest 2 cars to determine grid positions.

This means lap limited qualify (shoot out) will have to be back in RCS. It was in, but we changed it to timed qualification because that is more common. So in future we will have both 
What we did as an extra reward for the pole position is give that driver 1 damage point extra, so he can crash 1 time more before he needs repair.

Main Page settings;

Fuel usage/fuel load simulation : on

Damage : on, repair time 10 sec.

Stop and go: 10 seconds

Auto track call: 2 sec

Pit pro: on

Weather : of

Tyre wear: on

DTM now has a new rule that you have to use 1 set of option tyres, and have 2 pitstops as a minimum.
We calculated tyre wear % for hard and soft (2% soft, 1 % hard) to be able to drive 200 laps and use all 3 sets of tyres.

Real DTM distance is about 160 km. Translated to my track (19 m.) and scale that would mean 265 laps, but seeing how late it was we shortened that to 200 laps.
1 mistake I made was I forget to calculate with fuel burn factor the estimated laps with a set tank size. This will be in in a future release, so rcs helps you calculate tank sizes and estimated laps. (there is already a very nice chapter in the manual about this how to calculate this manually)
Result was that we needed more than 2 stops, because we needed more fuel than new tyres. Lesson learned.

We used 4 scalextric/scx touring cars without magnet, of which I knew they were close. And so was the racing.
If you approach a race night like this, with the official DTM rules and set up in mind, somehow it feels more ‘real’ .

Everybody started on soft tyres. Afterwards I think It would have been a better choice to start on hard and use a different strategy than the rest, because the whole race my direct opponent was very close and had to pit around the same lap.Luckily, because we used damaged, at one point he had to repair his car and we got out of sync.

Race results is a work in progress but in my test version this works already to a certain degree. It gave some interesting data like fuel usage, which was very similar, but also that I had crashed 6 times (1 repair when set to 5), and number 2 14 times, which means 2 repairs. The main reason why I won, because lap times and strategy were very similar.

So the conclusion is that you can with a little fantasy already have a dtm race weekend, but with some additions in RCS this can be even better.
The biggest challenge will be to transfer tyre wear rates from qualify to race, and build in DRS, because that is new in DTM 

I managed to make it in 6 pitstops, the other drivers 7 or 8.You really have to think what to do with damage. A full repair costs 20 seconds, but if you repair after 1 or 2 crashes it is 8 seconds.In a 1 hour race I think the average track call / driver was 7. What made the difference for me was;- I noticed at my first stop for tyres I had 49% fuel left, so decided not to take fuel and do a short repair of 1 damage point. Other drivers choose to refuel every stop, and repair at 1 damage point left.- I was lucky that the rain started just before I needed to pit for new tyres

It was only the last 20 minutes I took the first position , andt hat was also about the time it started to rain. I choose to fill up the tank completely when I pitted for rain tyres and hope it kept raining. And it did.

What I learned from this race was that for me doing small repairs is better than full repair.
And to keep calm and let the victory come to me instead of chasing it 
With some experienced racers this kind of race nights are unforgettable.
And I learn a lot to improve software. Did my fastest lap in lap 250 when it was raining. This will never happen in real life so we need a solution to prevent this from happening. Yes, you have a massive brake delay in rain, but with this kind of races I always watch my tyres anyway and brake less, also under dry conditions. Have to think about this one, maybe limit max throttle during rain.

Thanks for reading again, will share more formats in the future.

Marcel,
Team RCS

Race Event: 1 hr Endurance
Track length : 19 m., 2 lane.
Double pitlane/Pit Pro8 people, 4 teams:

3x NSR Clio
1x NSR Abarth

Change driver every pit stop.
When you don’t drive, you marshall. So in this race we did not have to use auto track call, or manual call, and no damage.

Practice 10 min, qualify 10 min., race 60 min.
All cars tank size = 4000 (about 20 min. of racing)
Safe speed = 40

Main Page settings;

Burn fuel, fuel load similation on
refuel speed : 15
fuel warning: 25%

Pit Pro on, advanced light system.

Stop and go time : 10
Stop and go within : 3 laps

auto track call OFF
Manual call: BR+LC (after 2 seconds)

Open Pit Menu: LC

Damage: OFF

Tyre wear: ON
2% hard
4% soft
delays 0,1/0,2/0,3 seconds

Available sets Hard: 5
Available sets Soft : 5 (used Tyre set calculator and added 2 sets of Hard)

brake points : 1 (button brake)

Weather RANDOM 1-5

Start position by qualification result, all cars in same lane, 1,5 track piece between.

IMPORTANT SETTING: for the NSR cars on my home track, for the average user the full NSR power was too much, so we used a linear throttle profile 5063, which means the max power is reduced. Believe me, the NSR’s are still very fast with this setting but better to control for the average user, which improved the racing.

This race we had a new driver so it was very good to have marshalls 
My team member was the new driver, so winning was not possible. Still, we learned a lot and managed to get at least car #3 a little nervous.
The forecast did not show any rain, but you never know. Very funny to hear people discussing pit stop strategy and talking about the virtual weather 
This race had a clear winner, it was very close until 50% but after that it was clear who would win. Car #2 and #3 where close and at least one of them was hoping for rain, but It did not come.
The NSR’s performed very well, what a nice cars.

Next event will be GP, for that I will change tyre and fuel settings to adjust to lap limited racing rules.