FH5, Series 17, Week 3
The dead and the departed.
The Eventlab event tiles were blank when I started the game, but came to life after I left my house. The rivals tiles had vanished again.
The weekly challenge went smoothly. I nailed the drift challenge in two runs having made a mess of the PR stunt earlier. Normally I do the weekly early on, but I’d completely forgotten about it until I checked the Festival playlist after all else was done.
The Eventlab events were quality pieces of work demonstrating just what can be done with this feature of the game. I managed to complete the touge road without hitting too many walls, but I thought the end was a bit annoying.
The PR stunts ended up being repeat-until-done. The drift zone was irritating because I actually got it first time, but slid wide and missed the checkpoint. I was in the wrong Hoonigan Mustang, but kept sliding all over the place. Perhaps the Hoonigan RS200 would’ve been a better choice. I just managed to one-shot the HW PR stunt in the Jesko.
The seasonal championships. Street Scene. Ugh! I don’t understand why anyone gets overexcited racing at night. I did the championship in my Honda S2000 CR which was ready to go, but it seems that the Honda Civic (recent model) was a better choice of car. In the first race, one of the drivatars (also in an S2000 CR) kept buggering off into the distance, and it took me about half a dozen attempts to win the race – barely. After that I fared a lot better, but it’s this sort of thing that puts me off the game. I shouldn’t get frustrated with the drivatars on highly skilled.
By the time I got to the dirt championship I’d unlocked the Mitsubishi Galant, which I decided to use for these races. I’d once used the Galant in Horizon 4 for a seasonal (or perhaps a weekly challenge) and found it to be a decent alternative to the Subaru Legacy. I didn’t have much PI to play with, which left the car with a weight distribution of 58% and stock tyres. Yes, I won the races, but the car understeered its way to victory. This was to prove useful for the HW seasonal.
I started with Horizon Tour because when I left my house, I could see other players on the map. (Aside: that didn’t last; by the time I was done I was constantly being disconnected.) But did Horizon Tour work first time? No. I selected the first race in good time and then suddenly found myself back in the map without warning. Instead, I ended up in a B700 retro rally race in the Renault 5 Turbo. Odd races because the results were the same in every race, with me coming second.
I continued the second theme in the Eliminator. I’m quite happy to survive to 30th or better and then get eliminated, but this time I not only eliminated four other players, but ended up in the final race. I was fourth to begin with, but got to second place. I could see the lead player was quite a way ahead of me and thus I wasn’t expecting to get close to a win. I also misjudged the distance to the finish line, thinking it was much farther away than it actually was until I realised that it was just ahead of me, and I was only slightly behind the player in first. I went barrelling down the hill, smacked into the winner, but missed the win by an absolute smidge. But even second was a decent result in a game mode that I don’t care about.
Some kind person had already posted a picture of the location of the stone lanterns for the picture at the airfield, and the cats weren’t too difficult to track down.
The HW seasonal championship sort of benefited from the races in the Galant. I opted for the Subaru STi (22B, I believe) which had the same 58% weight distribution to the front. I adjusted the rebound stiffness and damping, but in the first race, the car slowed noticeably the moment it went through the rivers on the course. For the second race (the one with bumps on the track), I adjusted the tyre pressures for road racing, and readjusted the rebound and bump stiffness, which worked. For the final race I lowered the tyre pressures to my usual rally spec because I knew there was going to be snow and ice, and again, the adjustments worked well.
Appendix
(This has been annoying me for some time.) At the end of the Eliminator, the announcer might say that you’ve joined the ranks of the eliminati. Er, no. The eliminati are those who have been eliminated. You are one of the eliminatores if you want to be properly Latin about it.
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