FH5, Series 54, Week 1

 Prefatory note.

This will be the first repeated series (15) that I haven’t previously recorded here. I had a look back through the entries and found that I started posting tales from FH5 with Series 17, although I may have made notes about Series 15 somewhere else. A notebook? If I remember correctly, we had to gift cars to unlock the Lamborghini Sián in the original series. Thankfully, we’re not having to do that again.

I started with the treasure hunt, which didn’t seem to work. Does the car have to be green? I wondered. I repainted it, but that seemed not to have any effect. After several attempts, the hunt was done and I went over to Playa Azul for the treasure. It was only later that I discovered that you had to drive 8km(/5 miles) first. How did anyone determine that since it’s not part of the clue?

The weekly was in the Isetta. 89kmh through an ST. I was going about 240kmh, but nothing happened. Oh, a stock Isetta. Fortunately, I have a second one which I was able to downgrade and took it through the ST at the end of the motorway because the road slopes down to it. I switched back to my specced-up Isetta for the rest, and did 2-star a DS first time. The game was having none of it.

Only one Eventlab this week, Fame and Fortune, but it was working. Basically, it’s a variation on Los Jardines. It’s the sort of circuit which needs practice, although I didn’t like the black mesh at the roundabout because, I thought, it made it difficult to judge where things were. Marks off for nighttime. The SWS was one-third good.

I is, of course, Rivals week. The stock Limo round Estadio was all right, but the gears were awful. I belted round Mulegé in the Urban Rebel, but had already done the PR stunts by then.

I started the PR stunts with the DS, forgetting the ST ahead of it. The trick was to start just beyond the road that loops round the hotel north of Mulegé. I had expected the car to understeer through the corner ahead of the ST, but even with aero set as low as possible, it was exceptionally grippy. Hence I did the ST several times because – what a surprise – the DS was a pain i’ th’ arse as usual because no matter how much I tried, I kept hitting some damned rock. Poor design choices, PGG. One rubbish SWS and one one-third excellent SWS.

I took a photo. I got … No idea, don’t care, wasn’t paying attention. Sexy nun in lingerie?

The HW PR stunt was, as I discovered, best done at maximum all the way, never mind the walls. I kept trying to take the curves properly and losing too much speed. The SWS gave me a Speedtail, which I gave away. Don’t need it or the money, and I never drive it.

The RA PR stunt was that damnable SZ in the north-east corner of the map. I had a false start, and then to my surprise, completed the task in my GTC4 Lusso. I think the answer is not to try blasting through the twisty bit because there’s nothing to be gained from it. It’s really all down to the final curve to the finish.

I did the Trial in a dirt-specced BMW 1M. Tapalpa was a last-to-2nd race and a team win. The player in 1st was in an M5, which was quite fast, but when we got to the dirt section, I started catching him. I was second on the human grid and won Teotihuacán. Team loss. The winner from the first round quit or had got disconnected, and the rest of my team got DNF’ed. That took us to Mulegé, where I was last on the grid. In spite of another player half spinning out at the start of the dirt section and blocking me, I managed to get into the lead and win again. Thankfully, the rest of my team managed to mostly stay ahead of the drivatars, but I was well ahead of everyone else by the end.

However, I had to do a seasonal to unlock another Backstage Pass. There’s nothing much to say about Toys under the Tree, which I did in the Lotus Exige Cup 430. Can’t say my driving was the best (pushing the car a bit too hard), but I’m not a fan of three-lap races. That’s something I’d like to see changed in FH6, but won’t be.

I was going to do the dirt seasonal, but I did the second daily of the week, which got me the final point I needed to get the Backstage Pass. However, when I saw that this race was B700 modern rally, I thanked the Forza gods that I’d dodged the game’s biggest cliché.

Horizon Tour

I took a gamble with S1-class AG dirt racing by joining the series in my S1 810 Fiat Abarth 131. Most of the time this works because everyone else is in the wrong sort of car, but on this occasion, they weren’t. Missed a checkpoint round Caldera and quit because I was driving like a complete arse.

FH6 release date

We’re now hearing the first half of next year. This may be because of the release date of GTA 6, or it may have been planned all along, or it may just be another rumour. I’m going to pretend that someone in Redmond realised that delaying FH6 till, say, autumn next year was probably going to try a lot of people’s patience.

It means that I’ll have to uninstall FH5 from this machine (it vacuums up a vast amount of space on my C:\ drive and, I expect, we’ll be forced to install FH6 on the C:\ drive as well), but I also expect that unlike the arrival of FH5 when I continued to play FH4 for some time afterwards, I probably shan’t return to Mexico. The game will be on my other Asus machine, which I currently use as the world’s most expensive music player.