Special NASCAR event in Gran Turismo 5 on August 29th

For the first time, a seasonal event has been announced in advance for Gran Turismo 5, with Polyphony Digital announcing a special ‘NASCAR-themed online race event’, which will take place on Monday, August 29th at roughly 8pm, PST.

Time to coincide with a period of scheduled maintenance, racers are being encouraged to take part with the promise of a unique prize in the shape of Jeff Gordon’s 2010 driving suit and helmet. Details of what the actual racing will consist of have yet to be confirmed, but it looks like season events could start becoming even more of an occasion in the future…

So are you planning to enter and maybe claim the race suit and helmet as your prize? Let us know, and come back and share how you got on!

NASCAR race offer for game fans

If you’re a fan of NASCAR, you might be interested in a deal through the GameStop Racing package. Basically, if you buy two tickets for the March 20 Jeff Burd 500 Presented by Food City, it’ll cost you $150, but you’ll get a $20 GameStop gift car for free. Alternatively, you’ll also get a $20 gift car if you buy four tickets for the March 19 Scotts EZ Seed 300.

Both races take place at Bristol Motor Speedway, which not coincidentally, is also featured on the cover of NASCAR 2011 The Game, which is released on March 29, 2011 for Xbox 360 and PS3, and then on April 12 for Wii.

“Bristol embodies everything that is cool about the sport and about our game. Our game is about pack racing, damage, excitement, everything Bristol is.” Ed Martin, Executive Vice President, Eutechnyx North America.

NASCAR 2011: The Game is being developed by Eutechnyx and published by Activision.

Nascar The Game 2011 – Full Season Developer Diary

NASCAR The Game 2011 – confirmed

The American NASCAR series has signed an exclusive multi-year and game deal with developers Eutechnyx, beginning with ‘NASCAR The Game 2011’ at the start of next year.

It’ll be the first NASCAR sim for two years, and will be created for the XBox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii. It follows the move of Ed Martin to Eutechnyx from Electronic Arts – and his last move at EA was to secure an exclusive deal with NASCAR which ran from 2003 to 2009. EA famously closed the Nascar 2009 servers in February 2010.

There’s already an official holding page and forum up, with the nascarthegame.com site currently featuring a countdown clock. The ESPN site already has an interview up with Ed Martin, including details of 16-player online racing, and an intention to build an online community.

Single player includes the usual Sprint Cup career mode, a paint kit to custom your car, and money-making elements including helping out your sponsors and drafting your opponents. At the risk of over-exciting ORD’s own Tom Bowker, there’s also going to be two-player splitscreen racing.

It also includes 22 tracks, and the AI of the drivers is claimed to be modelled on that of their real life character.

“While NASCAR has enjoyed a rich history in video games, we really wanted to take the next generation of NASCAR games to a new level,” said Blake Davidson, Managing Director of Licensed Products at NASCAR.  “By partnering directly with Eutechnyx, the leading driving game developer in the business, to create NASCAR The Game 2011, we are convinced NASCAR fans and gamers alike will be blown away by the result.  With Activision as the publishing partner, we have the perfect combination to set the bar for all future NASCAR titles.”

If you’re thinking this is a U.S. only game, remember EuTechnyx are actually headquartered in the UK (Although they have U.S offices), and besides being immensely popular in the States, races are apparently broadcast in 150 countries and in 20 languages.

The world premiere of the first official NASCAR The Game 2011 trailer will be on Sunday October 3rd during the NASCAR raceday on SPEED, and the game itself is set for a February 2011 launch.

iRacing hosts charity Brickyard 400 tomorrow

More than a thousand iRacing gamers are expected to take part in the 2010 iRacing World Tour race tomorrow, July 24th, which will raise money for Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG organisation.

It begins at 8.30pm ET, and racers will contribute five cents for every one of the 160 scheduled laps – friends and family are being encouraged to donate to support the drivers taking part.

The race will see the Impala SS (Sprint Cup Car/COT) used to lap the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, with the race winners getting $10 of iRacing credits. Top fundraisers will also win prizes for their efforts.

With thousands of racers expected, the event will be split into 34-car grids, all of which will run simultaneously, and you can view the top 34-car race in a live web broadcast. And in the meantime, you can always visit the LIVESTRONG site to find out more about their work to improve the lives of people affected by cancer. There’s more information on the event and how to pledge on the iRacing website.

Grand Plans for Gran Turismo

The fifth in the Gran Turismo series is late. The game is so delayed in fact, that many fans have stopped caring about it’s release and have moved on to other activities such as raising families, learning to speak backwards and teaching monkeys to ride motorbikes.

Gran Turismo 5 at GamesCom on Flickr by Sergey Galyonkin (CC Licence)

However, their ears may prick up once again after the President of Sony Worldwide – Shuhei Yoshida – revealed in an official PlayStation blog that GT5 will not only feature “damage, night racing and weather”, but also… wait for it…  “stunt arenas”, “go-karting” and “creating and sharing your own track”.

First things first – it has a track editor! I love track editors! One of my first games was Accolade’s Grand Prix Circuit, in which I spent many an hour making tracks that did not fit together and were impossible to complete. What a satisfying feeling it was to create a half-built circuit and watch the whole F1 grid crash when they got to the bit where I had placed a tree in the middle of the track. It was rather like building a half-finished rollercoaster in Theme Park and watching your guests fly to their deaths… although obviously nobody died, they just cried and went for some chips… and then a drink because I had put so much salt in the chips. Anyway, I digress; the point is that no-one has made a proper track editor for a bloody long time. The track editor in ModNation Racers is great fun and very well designed, but MNR isn’t a proper racing game – GT5 will be, and a proper GT5 track editor could be worthy of standing as a game in it’s own right.

I was tempted to pass over the “stunt arenas” feature because I’m not that interested in the concept, but thinking about it, with the great physics engine that the Gran Turismo series is renowned for it is a very interesting prospect. All ‘stunt car’ games I have played to date have made me want to gouge my eyes out with my controller, but GT series creator Kazunori Yamauchi doesn’t do things by halves (hence the 18-month delay in this game coming out) and it might just be brilliant.

Now then, go-karting mode… many have tried, many have failed, and only Nintendo have ever truly succeeded. Yet it’s hard for budding racers to pretend they are a young Senna, Schumacher or Hamilton when they are racing on a track in outer space made from a rainbow when a green dinosaur is firing red shells at them. A proper karting simulation could be brilliant, ideal for a ‘pick up and play’ party and also for an introduction to a career mode that feels truly realistic. The game already has the Super GT licence. And the NASCAR licence. And the WRC Rally licence. Throw in the rumoured PlayStation Eye camera head-tracking feature, voice chat and the ability to race in teams/clans and this might not just be the best racing game ever made, but one of the best games ever made full-stop.

Best of all, Sony have confirmed that it will definitely be out this year (November 2^nd launch in America is already confirmed). President Yoshida, although obviously speaking in irritating highly-edited PR language, sums it up well: “This time around Gran Turismo is likely not just to be the definitive driving experience but a definitive gaming experience full stop”. I hope they pull this off. I pray they pull it off. And I’m already pulling myself off in anticipation.

Real World Racing Round-Up: Peugeot win at Sebring

Peugeot have won the ALMS Sebring Twelve Hours race for the first time with a 1-2 victory headed by the #7 Peugeot 908 HDi of Alexander Wurz, Marc Gene and Anthony Davidson. Second was the #8 car of Sebastien Bourdais, Nic Minassian, and Pedro Lamy. Third went to the Lola-Aston Martin of Adrian Fernandez, Harold Primat and Stefan Mucke.

Image by tripplej93 on Flickr, used under Creative Commons Licence.

The LMP2 class went to the Porsche Spyder of Greg Pickett, Klaus Graf and Sascha Maasen, which also finished in fourth overall. GT2 went to the Risi Competizione team of Jaime Melo, Gimmi Bruni and Pierre Kaffer. The LMPC class went to Scott Tucker, Christophe Bouchut and Mark Wilkins, whilst the GT class was won by Butch Leitzinger, Juan Gonzalez and Leh Keen.

The Corvette GT2 team will want to forget Sebring after an uncharacteristic error saw both cars collide with each other in the pitlane, ruling them out of contention for the win.

Meanwhile in the NASCAR Nationwide Series, Justin Allgaier took the win over Penske team-mate Brad Keselowski at the Bristol Motor Speedway.

Aside from that it’s been a quiet week. On two wheels, Casey Stoner has topped the final night of MotoGP testing on the Ducati. Sebastien Charpentier has parted company with the Triumph BE1 racing team after just one round of the championship, and Makoto Tamada wil make a surprise return at the second round for Reitwagen BMW after sponsorship problems for the Pro Ride Honda team forced him the miss the first race of the season.

NASCAR season gets underway – both real and virtual

As former NASCAR champion and now broadcaster Daryl Waltrip is famous for saying at the start of every race.  “Boogity, boogity, boogity!  Let’s go racin boys!”

Finally, the season is upon us, both simulation league racing, and real racing for 2010.  Anticipation to competitively race Forza3 has never been higher; every IFCA event is at or near their 100 driver limit for the first time. Membership has dramatically increased as well. Though there has been some grumblings that the IFCA should open up series events to more than 100 drivers per event, the reasoning for not doing so is the 100 limit friends list of XBL.  It takes a great deal of communication and coordination to orchestrate a good series event, –even when you can have everyone on a list, it’s a problem.  Because of the limited event space, many clubs and teams have resorted to signing up groups just to secure a spot, even if someone in their group might not be able to race. Something the IFCA frowns on.

This sudden rise in popularity to simulation race can be directly linked back to the new FM3 multiplayer match-making hopper system.  It seems that the Forza community is resolute in their rejection of the new system, as being “too limited,” and “inflexible.”  It lacks the freedom of choice and variety of the old system, effectively driving people away from it, and in some cases away from the game altogether.  This exodus away from the once popular public lobby multiplayer system, has resulted in a mass migration of drivers to seek out league racing more then ever before.  League racing offers many of the same fun aspects that were lost in FM3 public lobbies, most notably a fair and level playing field.

Public lobbies have always been known for their lack of clean and fair racing in the past, but because of single host control, freedom of choice, freedom of association, and variety racing, dirty racing could be kept to a minimum, and policed by those in the room.  The new multiplayer system has none of these natural game-play checks and balances.

The new “hopper” system was designed to be more automated, taking the decision making out of the hands of the public and streamlining the experience so that more races could occur per hour raced, than less.  It was probably erroneously thought by “Turn10” that by nullifying the single host freedom and power to manage a public lobby would also help reduce single host abuses.  Something that did occur but was no where near the epidemic problems created without a single host controlled lobby.

In the old system if you didn’t like the host and his way of managing a lobby you could always move on to a new one, and quickly find the kind of racing you were looking for.  You might even be able to negotiate certain concerns or options to the host and make suggestions for changes before leaving the lobby, if you wanted to.

The current lack of social interaction, along with being unable to freely associate with those who might like the same types of racing conditions, has all but eliminated the regular chance to constantly meet new people of a like-mind.  Instead, you are randomly thrown in a lobby and relying on chance that it’s full of people that like to race the way you do.

One more problem to reduce your odds of meeting new people like yourself is that people don’t use microphones as much anymore.  In FM2 with the single host control, you better have your mic on so that people could talk to you and you to them, –so that cleaner racing without crashing could happen, or you got the, “boot!”  Today, the power of the “boot” is gone, and people have no incentive to use a mic if they don’t have to.  This has resulted in silent rooms of more crashing, dirty driving, and less socializing.  All the sorts of things I’m sure T10 was trying to avoid in the first place.

Replacing the power and lead authority of an FM2 style single host in public lobbies, is mob rule democracy.  Everyone in the room has a single vote to pass on a track, and/or kick someone out on a whim.  Not surprisingly teams or gangs of people are now able to fully disrupt a room as long as they have the votes to do it.

It is for these anti-social behavioral reasons that people have fled the new public lobby multiplayer system, and moved towards the safer more controlled racing environment of organized league play.   People are looking to have fun, respect, and clean racing.  None of which can be easily found in the new random multiplayer hoppers.

With so many new to league play, it’s probably a good idea to highlight a few things for their benefit.  Understand that league racers are at the pinnacle of the sport of simulation racing. This isn’t to suggest that all league racers are extremely fast, only that they are extremely serious about having good clean racing.

It is presumed that by entering a mature league you will be leaving behind any bad immature driving habits and are ready to explore the art and science of clean sim-racing at the highest level.  League racing is where you learn to appreciate a clean pass and greater sportsmanship.  A certain ‘give and take’ is expected in league racing between competitors which allows for the closest most thrilling racing you can have.

League veterans will tell you even they get butterflies before qualifying, and jitters on the first lap of a race.  The pressure is intense no matter where you are on the grid.  Whether you are in the “A” lobby, or the “J” lobby, the competitive juices will be on fire when the green flag drops.  Try to stay calm, keep your mind focused, stay out of trouble, and remember the race can’t be won on the first lap.

The IFCA NASCAR replication series kicks off this Friday.  This popular Stock Car series mirrors the actual NASCAR schedule which begins its season with the, “Daytona 500” this weekend.  2009 defending champion #999 “BOGAF” returns to try his hand with the new R3-Class Cup race cars.

Nearly 80 competitors have thrown their hat into the ring to chase the cup this year.  The cars are closer than ever in performance too, as the same car is used by every driver each race.  All 3 NASCAR makes will be used along with a restrictor plate version of each car during the year.

Qualifying is by Tuesday night midnight CST, and produces the closest qualifying times of any series.  The top 25 qualifiers are usually separated by no more than 0.4sec!  Like real NASCAR you have to be more than fast to win, you have to be smart with a little luck on your side too.

The field itself is full of past winners and series champions such as, #25 inviseco, #666 Wstewart1206, #428 GLR1FastRedneck, #53 F4H Gashi X, and #4 AAR GTDon, with a new group of highly talented rookies such as, #706 EZT Chuck, #180 TPR Lewis 8D, #424 RpM BreMbo,  #369 TweetyONI, #603 PpR JALOBO, #426 GLR b0x, and #535 VVV c0dak.  This is going to be good!

As for the real series the buzz was all about another rookie sensation, Danicka Patrick.  The IRL star showed the boys that she was well up to the task of driving these 3500lbs beast in her ARCA debut, finishing a respectable 6^th place.  This success has lead her to justify entering the Nationwide Series this weekend in her #7 Godaddy.com Chevrolet.

The big boys in the Cup series, –or should I say old guys, long time legend Mark Martin sits on pole for the first time at the Daytona 500.  Martin had a time of 47.783 seconds, translating to an average of 191.188 mph. It is something he said he has “watched … with envy of the guys who sit on the front row” for 26 years. Martin has had 48 career poles in NASCAR prior to this year. Though Martin has 40 career Sprint Cup wins, he has never won here. His best finish was second in 2007, a mere 0.020 seconds behind Kevin Harvick.
Earnhardt qualifying second, has a pair of wins at Daytona, but hasn’t won in his last 57 Sprint Cup starts.
There were some surprises among the faster qualifiers too. Bill Elliott had the fourth-best speed of the day in his Wood Brothers Ford. Elliott owns the Daytona qualifying record, likely never to be surpassed, of 42.783 seconds (210.364 mph), in the pre-restrictor plate era in 1987.  (For comparison the IFCA restrictor plate car which is an older Cup car runs sub 42.5s at about 200mph on the slightly shorter 2.44 mile Sunset Speedway.)

The 54-year-old Elliott is among 19 drivers who must qualify for the 500 on time, without the luxury of last year’s owner’s points. Either Elliott or Bobby Labonte could also make the field with a provisional as a past NASCAR champ.
Fifty four drivers qualified, with 43 spots available in the Daytona 500. Forty of those qualifiers surpassed last season’s pole-winning time, by Martin Truex Jr., of 47.872 seconds.

If you’ve never done it NASCAR style you owe it to yourself to give it a try while there are still about 20 slots open.  You won’t believe how hard it is to win a race like this, or how fun it is to try, if you don’t.

Our track tip of the day is for Sedona (Speedway).

A near clone of Homestead Miami Speedway, but with a twist!  A strange angle for turn 2 requires a high line entrance to shoot you to the bottom as you exit 2. No down force here, and stiff suspension is all you need.

See you at the races,

AAR GTDon