SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone: Review - The Power and Glory for GTR2

Installing the mod requires a copy of GTR2 which then acts as the hosting engine for the mod. It also requires a copy of GT Legends which does not necessarily need to be installed on your system, but is used by the installer as a way of making sure that you do own a copy of GTL.

Those concerned with the copy-protection inherent in GT Legends need not worry. As development team member Aristotelis Vasilakos posted recently in the SimHQ Racing Simulations Forum:

"...you only need the CDROM or DVD of GTLegends. Not the game installed (so no Starforce installation)."

He continued explaining the impetus behind The Power and Glory mod...

"The idea is of course to take advantage of the improved GTR2 game engine but also to recreate the cars as they were once, in the 60's and 70's. You see GTLegends simulated the "modern" FIA Historics championship. Although still historics, those cars have various modifications and improvements like better tyres (even though they are "historic" too), rollbars with much more chassis stiffness, stiffer suspension (since the chassis can now handle it), better geometry on suspensions etc., etc..."

"We don't want all those improvements, we want the cars as they run back in the 60's, and that's what we are trying to do."

The installer will also check for the presence of the previously mentioned IROC demo, uninstall that, and then install the whole new package to your system so you won't have to worry about any manual maintenance chores at all. All this happens prior to installation.

The installer and mod will also offer to perform some tweaks to the forcefeed back settings, adding more of the "Live for Speed feel" to the steering and removing some of the infamous "canned" effects. It will back up your current settings for you to restore should you wish to do so. No more manually opening the .plr file or searching for the right files and lines of code.

And this is just the first examples of the thoughts, the thoroughness, and the expertise that went into making this mod.

Installer

With the mod comes a very nice and informative manual which you should definitely read as it gives some very valuable and interesting information about the cars, the tires, and how to get the most out of them.

One such handy piece of information relates to the wet weather tires. Due to limitations in the GTR2 engine, the garage screen will display various types of wet weather tires. In fact, all wets are identical, so it does not make any difference if you select intermediate, soft wet or hard wet. You get the same wet tires with all these selections.

You will also find that the tires available for each car are as exact and accurate renditions of the originals as is possible, Dunlop's "green and yellow spot tires" — as they were called back then to discern between different compounds — are modeled after the information that the historical experts were able to secure from various sources. The attention to detail is such that the modding team even went to collecting individual chassis' numbers, homologation papers and the history of the individual cars.

Ford Falcon and Friends

The cars included in the first release are:

Mini Cooper S
Fiat Abarth 1000C
Jaguar Mk II 3.4L, 3.8L and 4.2L
Ford Lotus Cortina
Ford Mustang
Ford Falcon Sprint
Alfa Romeo Gulia GTA, 1.3L and 1.6L
Lotus Elite
Jaguar E-Type
Porsche 911 RSR
The IROC Porsches

I knew from history that the International Race of Champions (IROC) indeed once was very international as the world's top drivers from Formula 1, USAC and sports- and Stock Cars competed in a short race series driving the same cars. From the mod's documentation I learned that the touring car racing was not entirely Euro-centric but that race meetings were held in the US and Australia as well. Perfect excuses for running the cars on some of the add-on tracks available from NoGrip Racing. You can of course just as readily run them on the tracks that were included in GTR2.

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