we all would root for the Sprite, just in Sprite of it
(ftr, i regret nothing 
)
Oh hell yeah
Is that a PT Cruiser in the screencap?
Haha yes. Also seeing a Mercury Mariner tearing up the track is awesome.
I used to see multiple pt cruisers a day, now I’m lucky if I see one a year
a non videogame thing I think about a lot is how rc pro am invented pt cruisers
Driving 85 has never been so exciting
So, so lucky…it was my mom’s car when I was in middle school. The sun roof was so luxurious.
The french econo-boxes make me go 
and 
at the same time.
And that Lancia Lybra + Fiat Marea Weekend are 
ford KA spotted! my favourite lil nugget.
found this beat up suzuki mightyboy while out inspection houses! the guy who owned it immediately offered to sell it to me for 2k lmao. if i were even slightly more financially stable i think i woulda said yes.
this one’s a Pajero Evo, the real deal
absolutely loving the Dakar/Racing-inspired vents and cladding, including the reardeck spoiler-thingy 
“The Supernova team are no strangers to rally games, however: The studio has several former employees of Milestone, Codemasters and Slightly Mad Studios on board, and we can already tell you this much: it shows in Assetto Corsa Rally.”
well, since i have vacation this week (and my original plan to do a short roadtrip to visit a friend of mine fell through) and have been spending some time to unlock parts in Sonic ×worlds, I also dusted off my G29, race-seat, discovered that FFB didn’t work anymore
Spoiler: thanks to Logitec’s weird gaming software bricking FFB with each new update
=> updated Le Mans Ultimate (LMU) — now that my PC has a worthy GPU (1080p60 + VSYNC, settings max’ed out), no excuses anymore.
Thus started to sit down with the 2025 Hypercar-classmates and started to bench them:
Sebring, 1h in private testing session, try to turn as many laps with the standard setup, and if it can be avoided, without any setup fiddling.
Alas, the chariots for my foolish gamblings & some thoughts:
Uno: Toyota GR010 in the classy throwback 1998 livery
I expected this to be a bit easier to drive, a 1’55.2xx (i.e. 8 seconds south of the best session time) was the best i could manage. That included many spins, multiple trips to the pits for bodywork repairs and not a single clean, fast and smooth lap — meaning dead last, 4 seconds off the slowest of ‘em all, ouch.
On the positive side, made me realize that even if i haven’t turned a clean lap in LMU ever, i wasn’t that far off, it is first and foremost job #1 to get used to the sim, to learn to read the visual+haptic feedback and hone the right reflexes to catch a car before it goes off the rails, while also learning to guesstimate where the front wheels are (exclusively playing w/ onboard pov gives you a good idea what the drivers experience IRL).
Number deux: Porsche 963: I knew that this would be a slightly better fit out of the gate (due to some benching already done on my nephews rig in Automobilista 2, against the Caddy V-Series LMDh - there the 963 felt more eager to rotate around the center-of-gravity than the Caddy … which has its pros&cons, especially on a bumpy track like Sebring ). Managed to do three laps more, and a 1’54.6xx (still 3.8 seconds behind the slowest competitor, but now only 7 seconds behind the first - getting there, slowlyyyy…). Also was the first time in this game where i had the mental capacity to check the State-of-Charge over the lap and discover that i was consuming more than generating, which is a bad thing when you start to get faster and faster (was reaching ~5% SoC left at the end of the backstraight, which would have meant that I’d have depleted that budget at the end of the start/finish straight, but by that time the session was over).
Number tres: Aston Martin Valkyrie LMH. If you never heard this car before, now you can:
(timestamped to min 3’20+)
and onboard
… well, a V12 at max traction control setting still can go sideways. A lot. 1’57.1xx was the best i could do, 10 seconds off the best, and a full six seconds behind the next contender … maybe another time.
So after giving all those a spin, back to the Toyota, and time to start to wrap my head around the regen/deploying-power settings.
Most important lession I learned: When the 
is full, your rear axle locks up out of the blue, that took a while until i figured that one out… and switched the regen/deploy button config on my G29 (since there are too many settings to fiddle with, have to oursource a number of them to the keyboard) — highly recommended to do that in case you want to turn in some competitive laptimes.
Thus started to wrap my head around the intrinsics of this system, 100kw deployment seems to be the default setting, can go up to 200kw max, 0kw min, in-/decreasing in ±20kw steps.
At 40kw, you more or less generate what you deploy, so that’s good for topping up before you go for a hot lap. At 200kw, you burn through ~50% of the capacity over a lap, so you need to be on your game to regen w/o throwing the car off the track. Didn’t manage to get a proper clean lap in, but improved to 1’52.7xx — that’s still 0.6 off the slowest competitor, and 5 seconds behind the fastest driver. Other changes included adapting tire pressures for more complicit handling, as well as dialing in the brake bias (~1.3% more to the front has been a good compromise), rest has been left stock/as-is.
Will be interesting to see whether/how much i will be able to improve tomorrow, and when you start to see a ceiling appearing/diminished returns…
will report back as it happens.