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So sad to read this. I have a lots of great memories of racing with Andy. He was always very friendly and as a racer never gave up.

Hi Sean. It's an i7 4790, r9-280 3GB and 8GB ram. It took some reading before making a decision; I had not followed the market for years. I do not want to overclock, so the mobo is just basic H97, but the CPU should be fine without overclocking. The GPU according to some review should beat the GTX770 but at only 189â,¬ was ~80â,¬ cheaper.

Hi there

Just placed an order for a new computer. The old one had apparently died during summer storms. So are you more with Assetto Corsa nowadays that with LFS? I guess I'll acquire the AS as soon as the new PC is running. The downside still being the rest of my life, but I guess at least occasional racing should be possible.

Romus

The track is here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Paratiisintie/@64.1865288,24.8324179,966m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x46811909631295a3:0xdd7855e428031d09

It's about 750m long track and our lap times were from 36 to 47 seconds. It was a team building day with my colleagues, organized by a colleague who has owned a car like that himself and have been driving a few seasons in the 90's.

I was surprised how the actual racing was so similar to what we do with LFS. When I was chasing the car in front of me the mindset was exactly the same as with LFS: trying to get good break points to achieve higher speed to the next straight, being very close behind to make the driver in front nervous, being careful not to collide.. All that came automatically. Only the noise, heat, vibrations and probably the danger factors were something new. Still then main thing about racing I thing is what we already have in place in simracing. Perhaps because of my simracing experience I was the only driver to overtake others in the race.

So we had 15 drivers and 10 best after the qualifiers progressed to finals. We had two qualifying sessions with one lap practise and two timed laps. After the first quali we changed cars so that no one would drive the same car in the second quali. The qualifying result was calculated by combining the timed laps from both qualis, so it was not about driving one fast lap, but to be consistent over the four timed laps. The fastest three drivers got a place in the A final, positions from 4 to 6 secured a place in B final and positions 7 to 10 went into C final. The winner of the C final progressed to B final and the winner of the B final progressed to A final. We had a podium after the A final with medals and champange that was shaked well by the event organizers. Great fun!

Hi folks

Last Friday I had an opportunity to try my skills in real racing. Cars are Volvo 343s. Nice experience but I was not very successful. In the first quali the car did not output much power so I had the worst time out of 15 racers. In the second attempt the car worked fine and I was 3rd quickest. In the race I failed to get the 2nd gear in in the start so I trailed some 50m to 100m at the first corner. However I managed to take over two racers and finished 2nd. It would be a long story to tell everything, but it was great!

And for your information: I can only use WLAN for now for this PC, so let's see how well it works when I join. Hopefully I'm not causing any problems, but if you think I'm the one causing the trouble please let me know. My connection is ADSL 24Mbit downstream and using the Speedtest.net this sim PC is getting in 14Mbps in average. Ping time seems to be around 60 to 100 for many of the servers..

Thanks Ant. There's a lot of stuff to try out. I read through many of the posts and then tried some stuff, but it did not help. Then now, as I started the computer today, it started normally for the first time (after having been collecting dust for the past ~2 years). I think I'll just leave it on, never turn it off, or just accept that the startup process is a bit awkward. Or ultimately I could buy a new mobo, cpu and some memory. I've understood that LFS uses just one core of the CPU, so i3 + mobo and 2gb of memory for ~250â,¬ would be a simple upgrade path for me. I need this PC for LFS only..

I've had the PC up just idling in Windows for a week now, and no problems. But every time I power it off and then on again it fails to pass the bios post (screen does not turn on, no error beeps, looks like as if the PC was dead). I need to toggle a small bios cmos reset switch on the motherboard to make the PC start properly again. Then the bios will tell me about the CMOS checksum error and I need to press F2 to load bios defaults to continue. That works and the PC starts normally and Windows starts loading. I have bough a new BIOS battery, because I thought the empty battery might be causing this, but the issue remains. Any ideas on what could be causing the problem? Bad mobo? Why does it not keep the factory settings that it works with after I've used the reset switch?

Yesterday I spent a few hours to install the cockpit and today I took the first full lap in Aston for ages. There is some instability with the PC, have gotten two blue screens, but otherwise everything works. My first lap was 3:19 and I saw from Airio stats that your are doing some 3:01 - 3:04 times. It's going to be great to start improving lap by lap and to try to reach your times!

The PC also has some problems to boot. It does not always even go through the BIOS POST. I have 2x1GB of RAM installed. If I take the other RAM off it seems to work better.. The mobo is Asus P5E with E6400 CPU. It's got WinXP installed on it, but I might buy an SSD drive and install Win8 or Win7 instead. I've gotten used to the speed of the SSD drives already so the old style mechanic HDD feels sooo slow..

So see you on track! I might join you tonight or then some day later the week. Mon-Tue I'm travelling, so then it's not possible..

Hi Aqu and everyone else there! You bought a wheel and are back to racing! It must be great.

I've been thinking of racing quite frequently, but have not had a real chance for at least two years. Now this year I might finally be able to build my cockpit again. The past three years I've spent most of my spare time on renovating the old house we bought three and half years ago. The biggest projects are now done and I might be able to find some time for hobbies as well.

Well I've not spend all of my time on home improvements: I'm now a father of three and the youngest one is just two months old The oldest one is already 8 and sure he would like a real racing cockpit as well. He's already an enthusiastic Need For Speed player with his Wii U.

You got me inspire Aqu, I'll make it a target to have the cockpit installed in February! I just can't dedicate on being a frequent visitor, but sure I'll have to try..

Bob, are you back to racing? How is everyone else doing?

Just wanted to say hello to all of you. Summer home improvement projects are completed now and what is left is final touches to the Sauna building, but those will be done here and there during the winter. Sounds like it allows me to spend time with racing. This week combo is certainly not the worst possible. Westhill is always a challenge.

Here's a picture attached, shows what I've been doing. The rain water system was the main improvement, no unwanted water in the basement anymore.. Then the Sauna chimney of course. There's a crack in the original chimney, shows in the picture. That's why it had to be taken down. I had some experts looking at it, but the cost for reparation would have been ~2000â,¬ - 3000â,¬ so I decided to hammer it down first and then try building a new one my self. Bricks and stuff cost about 1200â,¬ so making it myself would be cheaper I thought.. Cheaper it was but not too easy for the beginner..

There's a beer label in the picture, that must be quite an old, that I found among the wood chips that act as insulation. The Sauna was originally built some 60 years ago and the brewery was closed down 1979. The style of the label looks like it could be from 50's or what do you say? The guys building the sauna had not forgotten the refreshments! Then some pictures of the chimney project and how it came. Finally there's the sauna stove in place warming up for the first time. Once the 260kg of stones are hot it gives lovely steam to sauna even if there would be -30c outside!

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Hello Brian and welcome!

It's been like this for the past two weeks. Around -20 to -25 during daytime and -30 to -35 during nights.
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Really a nice combo. The first 30 minutes were very enjoyable. Then I got tired, made a few big mistakes and finally spectated. Good fun.

(I'm sitting in a business meeting while writing this. I'd like to open the video link, but I don't really dare to start lolling in the middle of the meeting =)

I don't really have any ideas for a new format, but I don't have anything against us trying something new either. I've been working hard in my new position and learning stuff, so I've not had time nor energy to participate much lately, but I'll be back..