How fast can our ICR2 cars go?
Have you ever wondered how fast your ICR2 car could go when you gave it a long enough straight piece of track and you would really floor it ? Well, maybe you haven't. I have though and I thought it was about time to do something about that.So, what to do ? Well, first of all I needed a track so I made myself an oval with straights of about 3 miles and two short corners to link those up. It looked a bit like this:
simple but effectiveThen I went to the track with my wings as low as possible and for the rest as much of a neutral setup that I could find. I made sure I had full boost at my disposal and only a couple of gallons of fuel in the tank and then I floored it. This gave me nice maximum speed of 242 mph. This could probably have been a bit faster but I'm rubbish at setups me, so I just left it at that and went on to somewhat more prestigious areas.
Nice,
but not nice enough.I had conducted my first experiment with neutral weather settings. I changed this so I had a tailwind of 30 mph [it won't go any higher than that in ICR2]. This improved my speed dramatically to a very decent 261 mph. Again, a better setup might add a couple of mph.
Now
that's more like it !So that's all nice and good on a flat track, but what could my car do when I raced it down a hill... or a mountain... So I went back to the drawing board and whipped up a track similar to the first one, but this time with a mountain in it. On my first time out on the track I reached a quite good 366 mph.
Hold on
to your pants...But this was my first try at the mountain and I was not sure I had found the right angle of the track yet. I wanted to top 400 mph to make this project worth the effort. So I started messing around with the track, making it steeper, longer, longer and steeper. At some points I went over the maximum that the game could take and very weird things started happening. Which is not so weird after all, this game was never meant to perform at these insanely high speeds. My highest speed got very close to 400, at one point I reached 393 mph.
You
can't even see the horizon!
When I started fiddling with the track more I only went slower so I returned to my best design up to that point, which was the 393 mph one. Then I realized I had one option left. I had forgotten all about my wind settings and to realign the wind with my new track layout. So I gave myself 30 mph tailwind and this finally moved me over the 400 mph barrier. To a quite staggering 406 mph to be precise.
Goal
achieved!
For all you metric guys out there, that's 650 kilometers per hour... And do you want to know the best thing ? I only blew about 50 engines doing this. Money well spent !
Stay tuned for more ICR2 experiments ! I have sent the test tracks to Sander because he was sure he could beat my speeds [uh-huh] so this story will probably be continued as well...
Update:
OK so Sander went quicker. 412 miles per hour... 659 kilometers per hour. Fine. Let him have it... I don't care... Grrrr !!!
Nice
going!Another update:
Racelike sent me a new record speed of 435 mph ! That's a huge increase over the previous record but is explained by the fact that he discovered that a full fuel tank gives a lot more more speed than an empty one. Which of course is supported by simple laws of physics. Mainly, I'm just thankful that Sander doesn't hold the record anymore...
Yet another update:
This is probably going to be the final update of the Speed Experiment. It seems that 435 mph [700 km/h] is the highest speed ICR2 can cope with. Several people have been able to replicate Racelike's achievement but nobody has been able to go one better. Blackcat has reached this speed:
Sander even edited the track.txt file to get 1000 mph tailwind but to no avail. The car just will not go faster. So, that's it. I think it's about time to start another experiment...
The end
Want to have a laugh and see what your car can do ?
Download the flat track and see if you can beat 261;
Download the mountain track and see if you can reach 435 as well [the .txt is set up so that you start directly before 'the big down hill'].
Both these tracks do not have AI [so only run in Preseason Testing !] and are graphically under par of course. Expect some weird effects on the mountain track as well. Please do not post these tracks anywhere, they are not meant for anything other then having a laugh.