SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: NASCAR SimRacing

After you've built yourself a handful of setups for a particular track, you'll be able to put them to good use for now and in the future when you enter your first race at that track. That's because each session of a race (practice, Qualifying, Happy Hour, and Race) can have its own default set up assigned to it. But, getting there isn't made easy for you. For example, if you use the "basic" tab of the setup configuration GUI, you can adjust your car in basic concepts of acceleration vs. speed, oversteer vs. understeer, and "twitchiness" vs. stability. Despite the simple nature of these setup options, the Basic mode works well. But, if you decide to add some grill tape (something not addressed by the Basic mode), and then do some additional tweaking to the setup, your advanced changes will all be erased — while you're still in the setup GUI! This can be somewhat frustrating until you get used to the sequence you need to follow in order to not immediately erase your own changes. The bottom line is to not be afraid to use the "Save Setup As" function early and often as you build your setup library for each track and phase of a race.

Ultimately, our biggest relief about the setup function was also our biggest concern. In other racing sims, car setup is an art in itself. On the web, there are setup 'gurus' for various games that can configure a virtual racer that will shave a half second or more off your lap time (assuming you have the same driving style as the 'guru'). In NSR, that may be a thing of the past, as Chunx found that the Basic setup configurator let him quickly refine a setup that keep his tires in good shape and lowered his lap times to near-competitive levels in just a few minutes. In fact, building a competitive setup might be 'too easy' in NSR, something that won't properly 'simulate' this all important element of real NASCAR racing. On the other hand, the confusing and complex realm of chassis setup tweaking might have been such a turnoff for some gamers that they lost interest in the game, because you can't become truly competitive online without a good setup. So there are certainly good and bad elements to the relative simplicity of setting up your car in NSR.

Jens' Advanced Setup Garage

NSR offers an extensive garage area where you can develop and refine setups for each car and track. These options are located in the advanced setup menus.

One neat thing is that if you let the mouse hover over the adjustment controls for the right wheel, the corresponding area in a graphical representation of your car will light up. The changes you make are sadly not influencing these graphics. It would be very cool if you could see what changing the camber or toe did to your car.

If you are in a real garage often, you quickly learn to appreciate a well laid out and orderly garage, one that lets you do the task at hand with as little fuss as possible. Unfortunately this is not entirely the case in NSR's setup garage.

There are 4 tabs: Session Status, which is where you retrieve and save your setups as well as join the track, Basic Setup, Advanced Setup #1 and Advanced Setup #2.

While basic information regarding the track you are at and the setup that is currently loaded is displayed regardless of the tab you re currently working in, you have to return to the session status tab in order to save your newly developed setup. It would have been better (in Jens' opinion) for the saving and loading of setups to have been positioned in the part of the garage area that remains unchanged, no matter what tab is currently selected. As it is, each time you make a change, you'll have to go back to the main Garage tab to save your work.

As mentioned, the Basic Setup option features a couple of sliders where you very quickly can decide if you want an under- or oversteering car, a soft, forgiving setup or a harder and more twitchy suspension, and if you want to put the emphasis on speed or acceleration. It's very nice for making a quick setup, but if you desire a bit more influence on your setups, you go to he two Advanced Setup tabs where you can adjust a multitude of items in at finer level of calibration. The only thing that seems to be missing is bump rubbers, and it is a known fact that crew chiefs have these added to and removed from cars during races to cure minor handling problems.

In order to save a setup that you have developed in detail, first you'll have to ensure the correct setup was loaded to begin with. Then, when you have made the changes, click Save, and at this point you have to backspace in order to remove the asterisk that is automatically appended to the setup name. Then you type the new name, which can only contain 16 characters, click OK, and you then have to confirm that you want to overwrite any existing file with the same name by clicking OK.

If you rarely go into the garage you might think that this is not too bad and that we're slightly overreacting, but if you much time in the garage, you'd probably agree that there must be an easier and less tedious way, and that the mouse should be saved for traveling needlessly over the screen. In all honesty, a drop-down list and combined dialog box like we have seen it implemented in NASCAR Racing 2003 Season would be preferable.

Instead, NSR insists on constantly demanding your attention at several parts of the screen, forcing your eyes to shift focus all the time. Jens found it annoying and very tiring.

This confusing GUI is not limited to the setup portion of the game but is rather a general problem in all menus.

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