First online race since GPL...

Since it's chit chat here, I simply have to share my experience ;-) I'm one of those guys who drove online during the GPL times but who became an "offline racer" with rFactor and rFactor2. Ok, the thread title is not 100% correct because I once tryed one or two online races with rF & rF2.

Anyway, I finally found a Lotus 49/classic Monza race with a handful of drivers. Finding myself on 3rd after the qualy, I made sure to watch my right side and my back to check out where the other drivers are on the grid. I also noticed that the guy in front of me probably has a bad ping (yellow arrow instead of green), thus I decided to make a careful start to not drive into his back. That worked pretty fine and after watching right again, I moved to the middle but I stayed behind the two cars in front of me (it didn't feel save to go through there). Unfortunately, the pilot behind me wasn't "that" carefully ;-) He probably hit my rear wheel and we both spun.

Never mind, I continued my race because I was quite sure some people in front of me will make mistakes. My goal simply was to do clean laps with no spin, no crash and that worked fine. So I was able to move up some positions. I also noticed that the 5 second slow down penalty rule is damn hard. When I wanted to pass a slow car on the straight before Parabolica, he probably wanted to move away, but to the "wrong" side. This means I had to move to the grass and I've received the penalty....not nice ;-) But this rule was discussed enough.

Too bad it only was a 5 lap race because I got in touch with the driver on 2nd in the end. My pace seemed faster than his.

So in the end...was it fun? Yes, it was, even though there were probably quite some "unexperienced" drivers there. I'll for sure give it a try again sooner or later (but I still hope for a solid offline/career mode as well) and I hope there will be more populated Lotus 49/Ferrari 312T servers in the future. The big difference to offline IMO is the "thrill" you have because you know, it's not just "ESC" and restart after a failure. You have to finish your race even though everything seems lost after the start. And you also know, making a failure may not just ruin your race but also the race of the other guy. I simply drive a lot more careful in an online race than in an offline race. It's more defensive in my case - and I simply wait for a mistake of the pilote in front of me.

Well, in a way it felt pretty good and I had some sort of "GPL feeling" again with the good old Lotus at Monza.