FH5, Series 25, Week 4

This week’s theme was impossibly fast drivatars. I started with the weekly in the Renault Mégane and did Mulegé as the circuit race. I’ve done Mulegé lots of times with the drivatars on their usual level of difficulty without any problems. Usually without any problems. But no, one of the drivatars was an absolute missile. I lowered the difficulty setting to Dribbling Idiot, which gave me the expected advantage; but what did I see behind me? One of the drivatars pulling away from the rest of the pack.

The Eventlab tiles were working. I think that’s a whole month without a glitch (in spite of all the other problems with the game). ’Scuse me while I check for flying pigs. Stadium Supercross was an unfun, unbalanced novelty circuit. It was another one where you pick a vehicle you like and then find you should’ve picked one of the Extreme E cars instead.

I ended up in a close battle with a drivatar in the improbably fast, impossibly grippy FE BMW X5 in White Sands. I chose my Ferrari F40 Competizione, but should perhaps have opted for the Brabham. This was another race in ludicrously overpowered cars on the worst possible surface. All this for an emote. Scream!

At least we had Atlantes de Tula Road Circuit, which was a proper custom race on tarmac. This gets my vote. The SWS was one-third all right.

This week’s PR stunt car was the 2008 Dodge Viper SRT10 ACR which is decently grippy and just the thing for a bunch of speed zones. The SWS from La Sílica was two-thirds excellent. Mountain Pass was a matter of maintaining speed, but the SWS was only one-third good. Río Fuerte got me a rubbish SWS.

I’m sure we’ve had to take a photo with the monarch butterflies in the game on a previous occasion. It was nighttime and I took a snap beside the trailblazer gate. Couldn’t see any butterflies, but the game could. What excellent night vision it has.

I ended up in my B700 Mini Countryman doing road racing for Horizon Tour. The car is specced for dirt racing and was manageable, but another player had an X-Raid which they struggled to handle. Got three 3rd places. Job done.

Trail Happy was one of those seasonals with a category of cars that means nothing unless you’re an autistic fact vacuum cleaner. It meant that the available pool of vehicles was mostly off-roaders apart from the Nissan Safari and the Porsche 959 Rally Raid. I thought about the latter, but went for the Trailcat even though this was a dirt racing series. Once again, at least one of the drivatars showed an incomparable level of skill in each race. The reward for all this torment was the VW Type 2. Why? I did get a good wheel spin out of the last race.

For Rearing to Go (RWD, B700) the only game in town was my 1965 Mustang, although I suspect the game wanted you to use the new BMW i4 (don’t; at least stock, it’s a slow, ponderous barge). The drivatars were a bunch of pests apart from the Stadium Circuit. I had no control issues with the car in spite of the tyres probably being stock. The reward was the 2018 BMW M5, which is a car I don’t mind getting as a reward.

The Trial was Street Scene races (oh feck), but the BMW M3 GTR was a sound choice and I seemed to be on a sound team. We knocked this out in two and I got another 2018 Porsche 911 GT2 RS, which is also a car I don’t mind getting as a reward.

We had to use the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VI for the HW PR stunt. After a trial run, I immediately guessed that this was meant to be a max. engine build. Job done.

The HW seasonal, There goes my hero, was A800 SUVs. Predictably, I chose the Porsche Macan in the inevitably schizophrenic races. Should I road spec the car? Dirt spec it? Rally tyres instead of off-road tyres? Who knows? I stuck with the build I had. Two late 1sts in the first two races, but the third, which is about as close as the HW Theme Park gets to off-road racing, was a better experience. The reward was a Unimog. Excuse me while I have a few private moments of not caring about this.

(Aside: why on earth are these things called Sports Utility Heroes in the game? Is it some sort of copyright issue?)

It was the Lancer Evo VI again for the PR stunt in Sierra Nueva which I managed to one shot for a rubbish SWS.

And finally, the final RA seasonal – Track Ready, which was S1 900 track toys on the least race-ready tracks. I picked my Cayman GT4. I won the first two races, although the process was painful, and in the third race, came second to an HW Mustang that was forever out of reach. As I’ve said before, I loathe the stop-start nature of the races in Sierra Nueva. A good circuit has a mixture of faster parts and more technical sections (obviously not the awful COTA which I was racing on yesterday in FM7), but all technical sections can be tedious and tiresome.

The live stream about Series 26 will be revealed tomorrow, but I see that in the teaser, it says that the most requested car is coming to the game. We all know what that is. Why, children? We have a nice Nissan Sentra in the game, but you lot want yet another ghastly old banger. I have low expectations for the next series if this is based off of some community vote.