Australian Rally

Did the first three stages on Saturday, thought of doing the whole rally, but decided to call it a day when on stage 3 I lost 40 seconds. Again on stage 3, it's my nemesis it seems. Did the rest of the stages this morning, without practicing. No point in practice anything when I lost 40 s on single stage.

Stage 1 - New Bobs:
Decent stage time, had some close calls that had my heart rate go up a bit.

Stage 2 - Greenhills:
All was excellent till the last meters of the stage. Gone off and lost around 4 seconds. Not good.

Stage 3 - Mineshaft:
Hit one tree, lost about 5-6 s there, in 1/3 of the stage. Then, couple of corners later I hit a tree again, with front left corner again, and the car stopped that way that I can not go forward, but if I go backwards it will fall off the cliff and roll. Since I hate calling for help, I still tried to reverse without falling off, but it wasn't possible. Fell off, slow roll, and call for help. Ta-da! 40 seconds down the drain.

Stage 4 - East-West:
Not much to report here, had some knowledge of this grueling stage, but zero practice, at least I stayed on the road.

Stage 5 - NewBobs II:
It was going nicely till the last third of the stage, when entering 90° turn I killed some people without even going off the road. Really frustrating. On that wave of frustration, I rolled it once before the end of the stage. Ta-da! 30 seconds down the drain! Love it when that happens.

Stage 6 - East-West II:
Nothing to report. Was expecting slower stage time than I clocked.

Thanks Tim for accelerating the time. ;)

Congrats Darren and David, and also all the finishers.

Congrats to winners.

I have the doubtful honour of being the last one of the finishers. This was my first try on Richard Burns, no practise at all with this game before, in spite of having had it for over half a year, but as this are some "test events" I decided to give it a go for the rest of the series. I hope I do better next one.

BTW, I still think there's some issue with my 6th stage, as it appears I run this rally with a Peugeot 206 but that was a practise session on a thursday night GMT (much before rally really started), as all the other stages I made on a Toyota Corolla on saturday evening GMT. I'll have to take that into account and won't go online in practise sessions, I'll practise offline and just go online for the real stuff.

Oh, I almost forgot... what a jump in Mineshaft !!!

Regards.

Stages 1 and 2 went well, lost at least 20 seconds on each of the remaining stages. I'll get it right one day....

Grats Darren!

At the start of the week I couldn't do a third of a stage without dropping off a cliff, so I practiced quite alot for this one. There are so many places where the co-driver just doesn't give a warning early enough or clearly enough to prepare you for what is approaching. Once I had managed to remember where the danger bits were it became much more fun and my times dropped. I had more time this weekend with no F1 race so I waited until Sunday and was amazed at some of the times on Greenhills and Mineshaft. I had to go and practice Greenhills some more because my PB was over 10 secs off the pace set by Enis. I knocked off some time in practice and then did a PB when I ran it online. That was a big stage for me, it meant I didn't have to push too hard on the East West stages, so I could concentrate on just keeping it on the road. Really pleased to get the win, this game gets better and better. The next couple of rounds are going to be even tougher I expect.
I think we might need 3 or 4 days for the Japanese Rally, that is gonna be brutal!

Well I only practiced on Sunday for this one so I made few mistakes but still managed to be first on East-West stage so I learned my lesson for good now-for RBR you need 3x as much practice as anything else.

Lookin forward to hit some French tarmac.

I had a blast. i ran all the stages with default setup, only got the game on wednesday an considering this was a fun run i figured what the heck. actually ended up with better times in some stages than i thought i would. i agree the Japanese Rally is going to be tough.

Congrats to Darren on yet another fast and consistent drive.

I was out of town for 10 days (getting home Saturday night) so only got to complete the stages once or twice before going online. Wouldn't you know, the very first stage I drove (E-W 2) I made a small mistake and slid down a cliff and having to call for help. Bummer because I was driving conservatively.

The rest of the rally went very similar, one significant mistake each stage resulting in time penalties anywhere from 5 - 20 seconds. I was disappointed since this is one of my favorite rallies. East-West is sooo much fun when you find a rhythm!

Needless to say I was shocked to see I ended in second place. Obviously I wasn't the only one who had problems.

I was never able to come to grips with RBR on tarmac, so I don't expect much for next weekend, but at least i will have time this week to get some practice in :)

I just noticed that on the results page you can expand the "stages" section to see the individual stage times - nice!

Is the live scoring page still viewable anywhere?

http://scoring.race2play.com/rbr/display.php?event=2194&session=1&rally=6

A top twenty is actually good for me considereing that was the first time for me on that course. I just never got around to practicing at all so I guess I did OK. My co-pilot does pretty well for the most part except for the hairpins which he calls out as I`m blowing by them. 30 meters is not enough heads up for a 15 mph turn when you are doing 100 or so. I don`t even know what the hell he is saying but I figured out it means hairpin or really tight turn. It sounds like " cabe right 30 ", too late, you just passed it. What the hell is "cabe" ?