I got the idea from gtplanet.net but here's the basic jist of it. Every week I select a track and a car (with restrictions on power, tires, parts, etc..), and anyone who's interested can post their times, possibly with a pic for proof. Is anyone interested in this challenge? If so, I'll go first. The car is the Caterham 7 Fireblade, and the course is Laguna Seca.
Restrictions are:
Sports tires: medium
Weight: stock
Power: Under 190hp (no nitrous)
Suspension: any
Drivtrain mods: any

My time was: 1:36:84



For anyone better than me, I estimate there are about 3-5 seconds to shake out.

Some of your terms could be hard for people to comply with, such as the weight.

Basically, just don't do weight reduction or ballast.

It might be a good thing to enforce a standard area that the photo might include. Just to make sure pplz aren't changing the car's horsepower, why not include that full bar of info on the first pic instead of splitting it between that and the tuning screen?

There isn't really any prize so there's really no point in cheating. The only point of this challenge is to see how you compare with other players.

I saw this and I am a big GT4 fan... couldn't pass it up... didn't do your '3-5 second shave' but did pretty well, anyhow... especially for the first time ever driving this car.

1'34.357




It's usually not too hard to get a video of a run setup... if there is a dispute about a time.

I see what you're talking about, unfortunately, that bar displays the factory power.

gj Karl, so far my best time has only been 1:35, I think my original estimate of 3-5 was exaggerated but I think a mid to high 1:33 is possible.

I managed to get 1'33:988 one time... since then my times are consistently (when I don't jack up a turn, etc) in the high 1'34's, low 1'35's... w/o TCS/ASM, high 1'35's.

I thought some people may find this interesting:

Top Gear - NSX in GT4 vs Real Life

this was taken from BBC2's Top Gear... it's a segment where the host compares driving Laguna Seca in GT4 to driving it in real life. About 10 mins long... ~26MB

1:33.978

I think a 1:33.500 is possible because I made minor mistakes, maybe a 1:33.000 if someone drives it perfectly.

177HP
No TCS, no ASM
Stock suspension, racing breaks, racing exhaust, racing flywheel, carbon driveshaft, custom diff.



BTW, I beat Jeremy Clarksons time on Laguna Seca with the same setup as he had in 15 minutes... when I still sucked at Laguna Seca.

yeah, jeremy's time wasn't hard to beat, had it by 3 seconds on the 2nd lap... well now its off to try and beat that time before I go to bed, lol

Beat it once with a .940. I didn't believe it to be significant so I tried a few more laps:



after doing that time I can see a 1'33.500, but it's really hard for me to believe a 1'33.000, unless someone knows how to tune/setup a car really well.

and btw... it all starting coming together when I turned off driving aids, lol

Oh, it's on .

Yeah, now I'm starting to doubt a 1:33.000

and on that note... I shall check back tomorrow, as it is getting to the sleepy time. hehe

A "mushier" suspension seems to work well for this car since it has tiny suspension travel. The lap times also seems to benefit from longer gears, w/o tcs/asm The car wheels will just spin when geared short. I think fine tuning the gear ratios individually instead of using the auto setting can chop off maybe 5 hundreths of a second. On my fastest lap the car kept wanting to oversteer in alot of the corners. Finally, the final corner before the starting straight seems to have a lot of time hidden in it, same thing with the corner before the corner at the base of the hill to the corkscrew.