Occasional Tales

I went back to the Ginetta to see whether I could do anything sensible with it. I tried building it to the top of A class because, I believed (deluded boy), it’d be drivable. No, the back end still wanted to be the front end, and wet conditions made it worse. I rebuilt the car to be all handling, but left it RWD. Same again. The back end kept wanting to step out, and rain and wet roads made it hopeless to drive, with me sliding across corners into walls. The solution – imperfect but it works – was to stretch out 1st gear to four units on the graph and have the other gears at one unit each (7-speed gearbox). As I said, this is an imperfect solution. I also found myself still having to be very careful through the corners by being somewhat slow and taking a wide line to prevent the car from spinning. The other part of the solution was to set up races so that they were dry. Many of the stock races are currently wet, which makes the G10 a nightmare to drive competently. I assume from specif...

I got the update for FH5 this morning, but had to leave my laptop going because I needed to head off. [ Feel free to skip the next bit .] Came home at lunchtime. Thought it was a good idea to reboot the laptop. Restarted the xbox app. There was the new car pack listed on the FH5 page. Unusual. The new car packs normally appear in the game first and only get listed later in the xbox app. I tried to buy said car pack, but kept getting an error message. I ran the game and tried to buy the car pack, but was thwarted again. When I tried to do the daily, the inputs from my keyboard were all haywire because the machine had switched to Chinese without asking me first. I rebooted the laptop again, but still the language bar was in Chinese. That made me suspect there was an update for W11, and I was right. Got home, restarted the laptop, and… No, no car pack for you. Took a guess that I needed to run my VPN and was right. W11 seems be doing a Clippy. “I see you’re in a highly censorious dictator...

Unlike prominent YouTubers who are obliged to declaim how marvy [sic] splendid each new FH5 update is, I’m not constrained to keep PGG happy by making similar declarations. The past two series have been a shrug. The car packs have been a partial to complete shrug. Series 32, on the other hand, seems to mostly be heading back in the right direction. The series cars are repeat screenings. The Acceleration Car Pack cars are a bit above middling in my view, although I wonder whether the drivatars are going to massacre everyone in the Supervan 4 as they do in the Supervan 3. Nice to see Ginetta arrive in the game. The seasonal reward cars are mostly one good, one shrug, but that reflects my comparative indifference to off-road racing. Week 1, we get the Artura which as I suspected, is the new 570S (watch the car masteries and the stock tuning settings be the same as the 570S’s). In week 2, the 2020 Audi TT falls into the same category as the VW Golfs we’ve got over the past six months or s...