Frustration

I love Gran Turismo. I have done since I lived in Chicago Avenue in Gillingham. My landlord borrowed a PlayStation from his brother and it had Gran Turismo. He and I would play this game and slowly over time I have gotten more and more into this particular game. I’ve owned every version.

The last few versions have had online gaming and I have a love hate relationship with the online version. Gran Turismo Sport has a vibrant online gaming community and I suspect there are people who race online all the time. I don’t get to see them often because my qualifying times aren’t that great.

Online racing is frustrating at times because I could get knocked off at a corner (or straight) and then I am pretty much in last place. The person who did the knocking will probably get a time penalty but my race is pretty much over. Also, there are times when I get knocked or hit into but then I receive the time penalty. This is what happened in the following clip. I was on the outside of the last corner of the Blue Moon Speedway when a black car rammed the car on the outside of him, then that second car rammed into me and I got a 1 second penalty. On a fast track like this 1s is a disaster and I can only pray for the whole front pack to take each other out to get any decent level of points.

In this clip my car is the dirty orange looking colour. I was racing closely with 9th place “YOUR-INFERIOR”, spelling please, I gave him room in the penultimate corner and then feathered the throttle going into the last corner. You will see 11th place “Golf_RalleyG60” come up the inside too fast and “lean” on “YOUR-INFERIOR” causing them to drift outwards and smack into me. In the second view you can see things from ” Golf_RalleyG60″‘s point of view with a reverse look to see me get my penalty.

Sometimes the racing is really good and there’s an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement as people race. Sometimes the race is full of assholes.

It’s Still A Win

Here’s a win. Me racing my Porsche around Brands Hatch. Started in 5th and ended in first. I was pretty happy. This also means I don’t have the child rapist cabal that is the catholic church as my last communication.

Long Gearing

I recently finished all of the Gran Turismo Sport races that exist in Campaign mode. It’s taken quite a while but I am done. It was a little sad to finish but now it means that to get my fix I’ll need to start using the online racing mode a bit more. I’ve not enjoyed this in the past as some drivers out there are dicks. However, my recent experiences show that if you pick the longer / harder races you tend to get people who are quite good at racing and it seems to work quite well. I won my second race ever recently and it was a good feeling but I forgot to save the replay and I was gutted about that.

I did however recently complete a race and made a decent run of it to gain about seven places. Only a couple of these were overtakes, the rest was gaining places when other driver ran wide! I was racing in my Porsche which I like but for this race the gearing is set quite low so I only use about four gears and many of the corners are done in low revs, which is good for reducing over steer and makes getting the torque on a little easier.

Yes, that’s my gloriously bright and shiny green Porsche. It probably has an advert for this website on it!

Current Gran Turismo Sport profile

Race Face

Gran Turismo Sport recently updated and added the Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium to the roster of tracks. I’m looking forward to some of the originals coming back such as:

  • High Speed Ring
  • Grand Valley Speedway
  • Autumn Ring
  • Trial Mountain
  • Deep Forest Raceway

All of these circuits were great fun and hopefully they’ll appear. I’d even play them in low-definition just to have the opportunity to race those corners again.

I was shaky at Spa at first, but I’m getting the hang of the circuit and I think I’ll keep improving bit by bit. I’ve played a few time trials using my favourite cars and then I uploaded the saved video to my YouTube channel.

The following is in my shiny Porsche.

Here are the times I’ve got for Spa so far along with my “branded” cars.

Nissan GT-R
Nissan GT-R
Porsche Cayman GT4
Porsche Cayman GT4

I’ve been to Spa twice. My first time was in October 2003 about a month after I bought my third motorbike, called Steph. There were/are rules about naming of motorcycles which may or may not have been explained in these communications. Here’s a photograph of Steph loaded up in full touring gear on the Eurotunnel train heading under the channel.

Steph on the Eurotunnel train
Steph on the Eurotunnel train

And here’s photographic proof of her at Spa.

Steph at Spa
Steph at Spa

An Avatar

I’ll probably mess around and update this one soon, but this is my current Gran Turismo driver:

Kertz
Kertz

I think you can just see two decals for this website as advertising. Pretty poor placement by me and perhaps I should change the colour.

Racing The Mountain

I raced a race the other night and I really enjoyed it. The car was a lovely little Renault Megane Sport and the track was Mount Panorama in Australia. The circuit is amazing and I’d love to see some real racing there one day. The car performed well and was remarkably balanced for that circuit, the braking was sharp and there wasn’t much under-steer, I didn’t notice any over-steer. I sent the video to YouTube and you can watch it below:

I like the way the red rims on the wheels make it look like I’ve got proper glowing brakes. A reason for publishing this video was to bump a band video down my list a little, it wasn’t a good performance.

Lighting

First communication for the new year of 2019 is a couple of pictures from Gran Turismo photographic mode. The first is my Chevvy over-steering around the penultimate bend on the Sainte-Croix Circuit. You can see a list of circuits here.

Chevrolet
Chevrolet

This second picture is of my two favourite cars on GT Sport. Both have a really good balanced feel and I’ve raced over 500 miles in the Porsche.

Porsche and Mazda
Porsche and Mazda

Another Go

I don’t think this will last long. I’m having another go with the PSVR. It’s a virtual reality set for the Playstation. The last time I used one I felt sick almost immediately and got cold sweats. I expect the same to happen again, but this time I have a plan. I am going to keep working at it and try and overcome the sickness.

The other night I set it up and then tried a few of the simpler, slower, non-moving experiences and I coped quite well with that. As I felt good I went on to have a go at driving in Gran Turismo. I did a couple of laps of an oval in a slow car and felt OK. I then managed a few more laps in the same car around Brands Hatch GP circuit. By that point I was tired and starting to get very slight cold sweats. I stopped.

I reckon, that with time and sensible use I might be able to play it enough to be happy with the financial costs. It will take time.

The principle reason that made me get a PSVR again is that I should be able to hook it into the PC and get the flight sim working in VR. This will be an amazing improvement to the sim. This should be reasonably simple so I am going to wait for a time when I have a whole day uninterrupted to do this. I find that setting things up on the PC either take twenty minutes or four hours. There isn’t really an in-between.

Sub 540 Seconds

I’ve been trying to keep my hand-in with the Nurburgring racing circuit. I’ve been trying to race it a couple of times a week. Most tracks don’t take that long to get back in the swing of things, but given that this one is 14km or so long it takes an age to get used to it. While racing my lovely Porsche around I noticed that my times for the 24 Hour circuit were getting close to nine minutes and so I’ve been playing with the aim of beating that.

Here’s the proof I finally did:

Under 9 Minutes
Under 9 Minutes

Look for the fastest lap time in purple in the bottom right hand corner. I’m quite happy.

This is the gorgeous beast that I achieved that time in:

My Baby
My Baby