Ah it's been a fruitful and fun few days. After slogging through racing the Red Bull cars, I needed extra cash to get the Super Formula car and get into that last Cafe ticket. On the way though, I've had a bit of fun with three cars in particular - the Porsche Cayman, the R34 Nissan and the BMW M3 - engine swapping all three. Holy moly that Cayman is a beast with 1199HP - it's drivable, but one needs to add a bunch a extra bits to make this weapon stop! So much fun.... thought I'd try it at Sardegna in the 15 lap race, but the fuel economy is terrible. 2 laps and it wants to refill - that's probably a bit crappy for that race :-)
The R34 Nissan and the BMW are heaps of fun to drive. Took them around the Le Mans 24 hour circuit in the 30 minute 700PP race. The R34 monstered everyone else - especially on RM tyres. I was also lucky enough to get a race on this track with only threatening rain. Stopped once for fuel and powered onwards. Loved it. The race in the BMW 03 was a different story. Same track, same race and it pissed down - swapped to IM tyres after the second lap and probably should have gone to heavy wets - it was really wet! It was probably the 6th lap before I managed to get under 5 minutes - and no-one else was quicker. Crazy wet. Love this car too - make sure you stick front, side and rear spoilers on it - otherwise it floats along a bit and doesn't bite into the corners very well with plenty of power understeer (eww!). Turn the fuel management down on both cars to get plenty of laps in, although this race usually has rain in the second or third laptop so change tyres and top up then. The race in the R34 was notable that there was no rain, so I smashed around the track in great time! Expect 7 laps on this race. Usually I take the Aston Martin Group 3 car with a little bit of detuning on this race. It's $550K to win and an interesting race to run.
The final race I took on was the 15 lapper at Sardegna in the Porsche 917 "Living Legend". Had to slightly back the ECU off to get under the 800PP (back to 97 or 98%) and then off we went. Set the fuel management to 6 (so leanest possible), turned up the traction control a bit, and then short shifted a bunch - getting 8 laps out of this thing and doing the race on a single fuel stop. Didn't love this car all that much to drive, it was flighty in corners and the nose lifted up a bit here and there under too much power making it hard to really rip through corners. Ordinarily I take a tuned down Nissan GT500 (I think) on this track - the Group 2 one if you're looking. There's a great method to tune it down online somewhere - I'll have to dig it up and link to it. It's a ripper anyway. This is also the car I like to drive in the 60 minute race at Spa.
You can't do engine swaps until Level 50, but once you can it's a lot of fun. I'm aiming to do a few more cars over time. Enjoy!
