SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: NASCAR SimRacing

NASCAR SimRacing - Part 3
SimHQ presents a week-long series on one of the most important simulations ever produced for the Motorsports genre. In Part 3 we look at Telemetry, Chassis Setup and Multiplayer.

by Chunx and Jens "McGonigle" Lindblad

Introduction

We're off and running again! With our look at the basic physics and damage models for NASCAR SimRacing fresh in our minds, today we'll investigate the game's Garage features and see how we can optimize our car's setup to maximize its performance at the track. Then we'll take you into online multiplayer racing as our evaluation continues of this important new title.

Telemetry

The Telemetry program for NSR is a stand-alone executable that is commanded to run in the background when selected via the driving session GUI. When you select Telemetry, you'll often think you've just caused a computer lockup, but it just takes a long time to load, then often stays beneath the race screen until you hit Alt Tab. Jens suspects that loading times are directly proportionate to the length of the session you are loading. It is probably best to load the Telemetry program at the start of a session and then let it stay resident in background in the hope that it will "catch" all the lap information which it might not otherwise do.

Once you've loaded the telemetry software, you have access to a wealth of detailed technical information. You have the traction-circle, which tells you how many g's your car is pulling in the turns; your tire-temperatures and tire wear; the chassis slip-angle; suspension-movements and lots of other very relevant and informative information. One thing I noted was that when you check the tire temperatures you are given tips for tweaking your setup. If the temperatures are too high you can reduce camber and / or lower the tire pressure. You can also compare laps and zoom in on the track from a helicopter overview in the telemetry software and very accurately check your racing line.

Annoyingly, sometimes the telemetry program fails to record all of your laps (a glitch also common to F1C), leaving you guessing as to your performance for much of a driving session — especially if your fastest laps were lost in translation. Telemetry also can't show you laps from other track periods in the same driving session unless it's already running, so if you run a test session of laps, then go to the garage and tweak the setup, then go back on the track, don't forget to load Telemetry and save your earlier lap times if you want to do any comparison between sessions. Otherwise all previous laps will be lost unless you specifically saved them. A simple running list of lap times would be handy, but it's not provided in NSR.

When you do save a lap time, your data is stored as a 125 KB ".lap" file in a folder named "NASCAR SimRacing-Telemetry", located in your "My Documents" folder. It seems strange that EA didn't decide to keep the lap times in the main NSR directory, yet there it is in My Documents. One nice aspect of saved telemetry laps is that you can electronically share them amongst your racing buds so you can directly compare driving lines and techniques, which can assist in increasing your learning curve for fast driving.

We noted that if you do not specifically select and save one or more laps while viewing the telemetry read-out immediately after the drive they are lost. To give an example of this; say you have just run 50 laps at Dover. You open the telemetry package and select and save laps 2, 5, 7 and 15. These laps will now be stored, but data for all other laps will no longer be available to you after you have quit the telemetry session. It stands to reason that with the cost and time associated with testing and the desire to maximize the benefits of such testing, real NASCAR teams would want to have all telemetry data stored and ready for further analysis at any given time, even after leaving the racetrack.

If you need help understanding the different measurements offered just click on the "Help" button and a 7 page document opens in you word-processor, explaining the ins-and-outs of the telemetry package. While functional, one can't help thinking about how slick it would be if the documentation and help part was integrated in to the actual telemetry package itself. It would be slicker yet, if the whole telemetry package had been seamlessly integrated into NSR's game code. As is, it feels clumsy and like it was "bolted on" at the last minute. With all the powerful info provided by this telemetry program, it's unfortunate that EA has made no effort to remove the annoying and basic flaws in its operation over the many years its been around.

Chassis Setup

The setup "Garage" offers both a Basic tab and two Advanced tabs to allow racers to tweak their car's suspension, aero and drive train to meet the needs of each track. And you'll need to get familiar with how to set up your car, because the stock setups that ship with the game are either "undrivable" or so pitifully tight and slow that you won't be able to race with them. In fact they're so bad, if you drive them by mistake you might think there's something wrong with your wheel. Luckily, for those of us that are setup-challenged, the BASIC page works well to tweak a car from a baseline set — especially for a hack like Chunx. And that's a good thing, since the default setups in NSR are very weak, (We have mentioned that point a bit later on).

For those not familiar with EA / ISI's F1 series, the Basic Setup page uses the three horizontal sliders to make (you guessed it) basic adjustments to a car's performance characteristics that are translated by the game engine into specific chassis adjustments. Sort of like you telling the game that "you want the car to be looser" and the game then making its own changes to the chassis in an effort to meet your needs. If Chunx were a real race car driver, this is about how he'd interact with his crew chief, and then hope the crew chief could work his magic on the suspension.

Using the Basic function, Chunx began to find that by selecting the provided Qual setup and sliding the bars a certain way (+8% Accel/Grip, +22% Oversteer and +40% Twitchy) and adjusting the grill tape, he was able to find a good starting point for further tweaking of his race setup at any speedway track he chose to race at. After that, it was a few feedback loops of driving, followed by tweaking, followed by more driving, until he settled on a setup that was competitive and stable to drive. But it was obvious to Chunx that while he could make his car quick, there wasn't any way that setting up a car with the Basic tab features would yield a truly fast and competitive race car for online racing.

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