My name is Gabriel from Argentina, but around most forums my username is just pai. I cannot call myself a member of GP2 community, because truth be told, I played this game a lot in the 90s as a kid but just with a keyboard, struggling to disable aids or challenge its AI at higher difficulties. When I finally got myself a wheel in 2006, there were newer sims and GP2 was getting harder to run on contemporary systems, but back then I thought that the new games were better at every front. Reality and experience showed me it was not that way, and after 18 years of racing online, I found myself wanting to step down and focus on offline racing, where Grand Prix games are still king. As my hardware is a bit complex (several USB devices working separately), it has always been tough to make it work with older games...until hatcher with the x86GP2 came that is. It opened a new world for me, and as it became better release after release, I said to myself: "maybe it's time to achieve that childhood dream and race it at full difficulty, on a full scale championship, with a proper wheel and pedals, like you dreamed 3 decades ago".
Nowadays my rig works with VR for present day sims, and the position of the monitor does not suit itself well for simracing titles, and that was holding me back from tackling it...until some problems with the Meta Link pushed me in the direction of Virtual Desktop. Just linking through it with the PC, some adjustments on screen position on the headset, and voilá! I can race Grand Prix 2 on a Virtual Reality environment. Yes, it's 2D, but being rendered on big scale in front of my eyes in a way that the whole picture barely fits on the FoV and I have to move the head a bit when doing longer corners to aim at them...it increases inmersion tenfold! It's more like racing with a big projector surrounded by darkness, so there is little interrupting the experience, and it's comfortable enough for me; I can do 2 to 3 hour stints using the headset strapped on my head, it's a Meta Quest 2 with a BoboVR interface which makes it much more comfy than the vanilla one, plus a little fan that can be easily turned on if it gets heated.
Throughout the years I raced online I got somewhat competitive (not close to an alien though), and when racing GP2 at just ACE level without editing a thing I started to get a feeling that I could overpower the AI, so instead of doing that, I decided to punish myself for all those afternoons where I just enabled invulnerability and started racing backwards and putting every rival out of the race. So I setup a bigger challenge, based on all I could read at grandprix2.de forums. I got the GP2 Edit, and after several sessions of tweaking and trialling things, I arrived to the following:
Set Power to Team dependant.
Set Grip Factor to 250.
Set Car Weight (both player and rivals) to 596 kg.
Increased the grip spread of the field. While Simteks and Pacifics are slower, Schumacher and Hill are now faster, the latter at about 16600 of grip units.
Tweaked reliabilities too, some teams have better, others worse values than vanilla game.
Tweaked power values of the field based on the data I could find. IIRC the Benetton has less power and Ferrari has more power than vanilla game. So it makes Schumacher nearly unbeatable on a twisty circuit, but leaves him trying to hang on with Williams and Ferrari at faster circuits.
Picked for myself the #29 Sauber. So instead of a past-his-prime Andrea De Cesaris, the field gets a past-his-prime Gabriel, hopelessly trying to hang on with Frentzen!
Nowadays I don't get much time during the week at the sim, but that's another beauty of GP2: you can save it anytime you want. It took me some days, but at one session at a time I could complete the first weekend at Interlagos. More or less this is how it went...
Qualified P22, 3.4s off Schumacher's pole. He set a 14.3, I did a 17.7. Frentzen was P10 with a 15.7, 2 seconds faster. Damn! At least I (barely) outqualified the Lotuses and Simteks.
Warmup looked good, I was setting a pace that was going between 19.6 and 20.1 for several laps with 30 laps of fuel onboard (the amount I planned to start with, going for a 2 stop strategy). I observed in the past that compared to AI I tend to get less tyre wear and my laptimes drop much less, so I was confident.
Race...the good thing, I finished, P19. The bad thing, it could have been a P17 but two mistakes made me lose positions towards the Lotuses. I was 3 laps down. The confusing thing: I was almost two seconds slower on average pace. I kept tweaking the setup bit by bit and IMO, it felt better on the race than anytime before. But the best laptime I could muster was a 21.0. Lap record was by Schumacher with a 16.7, he was also on a two stop strategy. I know that grip and power can have random variations (I have that on at GP2Edit), but I was baffled at the difference, and frankly the car did not feel bad and it's not like I was not pushing at the same level (hence my two stupid mistakes). But it felt confusing. Maybe it's just GP2 mechanics I'm not familiar with that I need to learn. Part of the reason why I'm here!
If someone has the time, I'm uploading the GP2 Edit file I'm using for this experience. You can give it a look and tell me what do you think, and if I messed up something badly, please let me know.
Kind regards,
Gabriel.
