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Pole Position
Description
This is a unique format in which there is no wheel to wheel race. The format is patterned after the Indianapolis “Month of May”, which is very much about qualification. Indy's qualification process is unique in many ways. It covers a long period of time (4 days of qual itself if it does not rain, plus all the practice). A qualification run itself is not the best lap within a session, or even the best lap on a 1 lap attempt. It is the time (or average speed, or however you want to scale it) of 4 full laps. So it measures more than just a single flyer. It measures a longer window of consistency, in both the driver and the car (setup).
The intent of the pole position format is to capture some of that in a single GMWC event.
Schedule
- drivers meeting (~5 minutes at the start of the event)
- One big 3 hour long practice or qual session, at least as far as rFactor is concerned. However, much like our yellows, lucky dingos and dogs, and restarts, we will manually impose other gameplay upon this open session.
- An official qualification run is four contiguous laps. The posted time is the sum of all four laps. We may use mph or kph, since this normalizes performance per lap to the same space as the four lap total (you get a more intuitive handle as to how a single lap compares to the sum).
- To start an official run, you simply announce you are ready for a run to the marshal. All cars will be called off track and the run can begin. Everybody is then watching every official run, which adds to the environment. There should be plenty of ooohs and ahhhs for cool wrecks.
- A driver may abort a run before the end. If a driver finishes the fourth lap, the run is official, and one of the driver's attempts is used up. If the run is aborted, an attempt is not used up.
- A driver gets 3 attempts.
- The best run at the end of the full session wins. Note that this will differ slightly from Indy, in that at Indy if you start your run by the time the gun sounds, you can finish the run. rFactor will only let you finish if you start the last lap in time.
Settings
- damage is set to 100%
- Probably high fuel and tire multipliers to induce relevance of tire compounds.
- Semi-random oval aero package. The exact setting of the car will not be announced or released until event day. Drivers will have to sync on the day of the event.