FH5, Series 41 and 42, preview

 Series 43 preview and the 2023 Porsche 911 Turbo S.

As I guessed yesterday, the post outline Series 41 was on the forums this morning, The post also covered Series 42 and teased Series 43.

The cars. A couple of estate cars. Not my favourite class, although there are one or two decent ones such as the Hammer Wagon. There ought to be one of those stupid phrases to go with estate cars saying, “Get orf moi laaand!” (Irate country sort.) The Nissan Z Nismo doesn’t really interest me. I find the Nissan Z to be a barge and not a worthy heir to its antecedents, and I suspect that, for example, the perks for both cars will be the same. It’s a pity they won’t bring back the Bentley FE from FH4 because that had racing pedigree. I don’t really see the point of adding some chunky luxury barge to the game. Bentley marketing? The BMW M5 CS does interest me. First new M5 since the 2018 model which in FH4 has the most wins of any car I’ve driven. And lastly, in Series 42, we have some ridiculous six-wheeled thing from DeBerti that looks like it’s about to gather dust in my garage. And this is the only new car in Series 42.

At least that bloody annoying Secret Santa thing won’t be returning, and with any luck it’ll never been seen outside of FH5. What were PGG thinking when someone came up with this as an idea?

On the other hand, you know that one of the races will be that dreadful Winter Wonderland Circuit.

Depending on what cars appear as rewards throughout January, I may not have much to do with the Festival playlist. As I said in the previous entry, I have four 2012 Nissan GT-Rs, and have just discovered that instead of having one Sesto Elemento (so I believed), I have three.

Series 43 might see some new, contemporary muscle cars. Or we’ll get dumped with more antique muscle cars from Obscure Banger Showrooms. I don’t like the sound of “midnight”, which suggests Street Scene (scream!) or “extended nights”, which serve no purpose in a game where you can set the time of day in races. It does, however, irritate me in free roam because I loathe driving round in the dark. If I wanted to do that, I’d switch my monitor off and drive in some random direction.

I also didn’t know that there was some screaming demand for a choice of intro screens. Why can’t we be spared the pointless, unskippable, impedimentary (if I write it, it’s a word; impedimental?) promo screens that you get when you launch the game? They’re a noisy nuisance, which is why I mute the game when I start it.

2023 Porsche 911 Turbo S

The 911 Turbo S was my favourite car in Most Wanted 2005 which, I felt, was more reliable for escaping from Pc Plod than the rest of the minuscule lineup of cars in the game. It was certainly better than the wobbly arsed Dodge Viper.

Fast forward to FH5 and we find the 2023 Turbo S in the game. It’s… all right. I left the engine alone and tried handling upgrades, widening the tyres, but leaving them stock along with the weight of the car. This was a mistake because the car kept sliding into corners. I switched to semi-slick tyres in the belief that the extra grip might save me. No. I then added [Added? –ed.] race weight reduction, which took the car to exactly S1 900 after which it more or less stopped sliding. The car wasn’t too bad, but as you might expect from AWD, there was some understeer, but nothing chronic. The Turbo S won’t appeal to the try-hards and the car exploiters, but it’s all right as a car to race once in a while against the drivatars.