SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: GTR: FIA GT Racing

The visual damage is not impressive. Panels and hoods fly off, and an occasional wheel. But that's it. If you're looking for a sheet metal demo derby, look elsewhere because that is not what GTR offers.

Setups

As illustrated elsewhere, you can tune and setup everything that can be tuned and set up on the real cars, and as you will see later, with the MoTec software you can analyze every detail of your car's behavior.

Sadly there are no tool tips in the setup menus so the inexperienced will either have to experiment with the many options or download some of the many setups that are available directly from the in-game interface.

To help with making your own setups, a "race engineer's handbook" has been made available by SimBin, but this option puts the monkey on the shoulder of the user to find and download this document, and the monkey ought not to be with the user in the first place. Just to prove my point I can report to you that I can't for the life of me remember where to get it.

The in-game interface will give you access to a wealth of setups that have been uploaded by other GTR drivers and this is a very good feature. Help is also available from 10Tacle's GTR site. One idea I would have liked to see developed a bit more in terms of setting up your car and working in the garage is the incorporation of the showroom screen: The Showroom screen lets you have a look of a 3D render of the chosen car. You cannot turn it to expose the bottom of the car, or a true top-down look. It gives you the basic stats for the car displayed.

The thing is, it is primarily a display and it really doesn't do anything terribly useful. I think it would have been ultra cool if it had been possible to access the setups menus from this garage-like environment, perhaps even featuring clickable items like brake setup, anti roll bars, springs and suspension adjustments. This would have gone towards help fighting the feeling of being very alone in a cold and sterile GTR-World.

MoTec

The MoTec utility as previously mentioned is a real treat for sim racers with a mechanical bent or persuasion. This is study-sim hardcore! MoTec is used by professional racing teams so you can't get any closer to realism than that. Unfortunately a Motec manual is not included with the game. Not even as an option at an extra price. If you want to learn more about how to use this very handy util you can visit the game's support web site here, go to the Motec forum where there are lots of tips and discussions. Of course you could always enlist for a course at www.motec.com!

I really would have loved to death a fine spiral-bound manual though. I'm a sucker for printed documentation.

Let's take a look at some of the options in Motec, and I readily admit I don't understand 90% of it, a proper manual surely would have been nice to have.

(Note to self: check damper, bump, rebound settings in MoTec, to ensure best grip from tires!)

TrackIR3

TrackIR3 is very well implemented in and works perfectly with GTR. Let us hope that TrackIR3 will become a standard for any new motorsport sim and game. You can read my test results and opinions of TrackIR3 here.

Are We Alone?

What I miss , is some life in the pit area. I realize that we can't have all our wishes fulfilled and still have a playable game, and that trade-offs between including more features and achieving good performance had to be in the cards.

System resources have been spent (wisely) on fidelity in the physics and driving model department, as well as having accurate car models on the track, and the AI routines. Unfortunately this means that you are entirely alone in your pit area, even the guy that stood in front of you in F1 Challenge to wave you out of the pits is not there. The pit-crew is also absent, when you pit for fresh tires and fuel.

The downside to this is that the simulation feels a bit cold, technical and to me at least, less immersive. Touches like a team that send you out of the pit and receives you upon pitstops do add to the overall sense of being there, perhaps even more than we realize.

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