[Donnchadh MacGarry]

The Sprint Race Car championship using Automobilista 2 begins this weekend, on Saturday the 10th of July at 18:00 GMT. 
SRS news post announcing the new AMS2 championship: https://www.simracingsystem.com/showthre...?tid=11114

Each event in the championship composes of a 12 minute qualifying session and a 20 minute race.

Note: Make sure not to leave the server at the end of the race, as the warning on the SRS AMS2 app says https://www.simracingsystem.com/showthread.php?tid=8838 .
Wait until the session times out and you get automatically disconnected from the server, which can take a couple of minutes. If you disconnect before the server session ends, then your race information won't be recorded and so you won't get any championship points since it will look like you didn't partake. As far as I know with AMS2, the first person that joins the lobby is considered the host and they are able to end the server session after a race to shorten this wait, but I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you are absolutely sure of what you are doing and the wait isn't that long anyway.


Car
I find the Sprint Race car to be a nice fun car to drive as it can allow for good side by side driving, and it is suitable to drivers of all skill levels. As I said in the news post, I find it has an awesome metallic clang sound when it goes up the gears which I find incredibly saitsfying. It is quite an unusual car for a tintop as the driver's seat position is in the middle, so no LHD vs RHD arguments and which is the wrong side arguments with this car   . If you want to read more background information about this car, check out this page on the Cars of AMS2 Unofficial Fansite https://ams2cars.info/brazilian-series/sr-16/ .


Tracks
The tracks in the championship are as follows:
Week 1) Jacarepagua Historic 2005 short
Week 2) Oultan park International
Week 3) Velopark 2017
Week 4) Guapore
Week 5) Donington National
Week 6) Cascavel

I think these tracks will hopefully suit the car quite well and are pretty fun in my opinion. I really enjoy the Brazilian tracks unique to AMS2, if you've never tried Cascavel before then its one I highly recommend testing out, its a short but highly entertaining circuit due to its elevation changes. Its also awesome to be able to race Oultan Park on SRS too, I'm looking forward to that one.


Real Time Weather
The championship will use realtime weather thanks to an API SRS uses, so that could add some possible variety to the conditions throughout the championship. Checking in on the local weather forecast for the tracks each week might be a good idea. The car has slick tyres and all weather tyres, so you might have a tricky decision to make


Setups
This championship uses open setup too. I don't really have time to look at setups, so I might go for default and adjust fuel or just download one from the Time Trial leaderboard. If don't know how to do that, just add a person's ghost that used a setup in the Time Trial mode, load up the session and you should be able to see an icon beside their name that will allow you download and save their setup. Be careful though, sometimes people design a setup that is unusable outside of time trial mode where the engine might die after a few seconds due to very aggressive settings (no engine damage in TT mode), so be sure to test it outside of TT mode where damage is on. You probably won't come across a setup like that with these cars I reckon, but it has happened to me with F1 cars and it took me a bit longer than I'd like to admit to figure out what was wrong (I though me game was bugged for a while   ).

Steelcast27 has a great youtube channel that gives a huge amount of information on setups if that is your thing. He has a great playlist for the general way to make a setup in AMS2 and what to look for, its full of great information and tips. He also has a playlist where he makes a setup for a car, and with luck the Sprint Race car was the first one in that playlist (although it was for a track not in this championship).
Steelcast27 Basic setup Guide Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...0Gt1nONnMp
Steelcast Sprint Race car setup at Cascais: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqcw2p1k...u0_eNzdonQ


Try it Out and Spread the Word
I intend on participating and streaming these races each week (and then the SRS F1 70s championship with AC afterwards, I'll post a link to the stream this weekend in a later post). I may not be able to attend week 4's race on July 31st as I might be doing a 10hr ACC endurance race that day (although our team is currently only on the reserve list and I could always tactically arrange my stint sessions in such a way I don't miss out on the SRS race). 

If you in anyway interested in trying out AMS2 again or for the first time, then I highly recommend giving this championship a go. The game has come on leaps and bounds over the past couple of months, especially after the 1.2 patch a few weeks ago which really fixed some of the issues it used to have (youtubers like Billy Strange thought it was a major improvement that made begin to really enjoy the game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5Vps9BC_ms ). What's more it is a great looking game but isn't anywhere as taxing on the computer as ACC is, even though graphically to me they are pretty much on par with each other. If you can run PC2 then you can run AMS2 easily.

If you know of anyone else who might be interested in this championship too, then let them know about it and try and get them involved. You can also try out the other AMS2 championship with the GT3 cars on Saturdays 00:00 GMT too if you aren't asleep at that time (I generally am unfortunately). It would be cool to have a few AMS2 championships that have a nice attendance on SRS.

Hope to see you on track soon!

[Donnchadh MacGarry]

Sergio Mendez, aka Pollinflas, was trying out the Sprint Race can at Jacarepagua earlier today, you can check it out here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR8Voh-W8jQ&t=433s (he's too humble to promote himself   ).

[Lars Mars]

timing is bad. This is the hour I start with the pre-dinner drink

[Donnchadh MacGarry]

A few of us from MoonieGT's discord are going to do the Sprint Race car SRS event tomorrow. Every Saturday at about 11:45 UTC, that discord group do a few short races in an event that is called the Saturday Sendacular. We are going to use the Sprint Race cars tomorrow and one of the races will be at Jacarepagua 2005 short, as a bit of practice for the SRS race. If you would like to join in too and use it as some practice for the SRS race, then click the link below to join the discord. The races have a fun, clean, casual atmosphere and all skill levels are welcome.

MoonieGT discord: https://discord.gg/xkPTrnv

[Sergio Mendez]

Hahaha I was trying to race with the AI, some nice side-by-side! The car is very fun and some of the tracks are new to me, and that's even funnier. Thanks Donny!

[Donnchadh MacGarry]

If you aren't doing today's race but want to see what the Sprint Race cars are like, then you can check out my stream. I'll go live at about 17:30 UTC, about half an hour before the race starts. (I'll also be streaming the 70s F1 race afterwards)
I won't post the stream link here each week as that will probably be an annoying thing to do in the forms, but I'll throw in reminders in the SRS discord.

Stream Link: https://youtu.be/L5QEWFheWqg

[Jukka Drugg]

Is there anything we can do about not getting any points when disconnection happends? Little too much catch-up when you don´t even get point for last place when disconnection happends. Not much point to race on future races when you are 88-102 point behind everybody. If I would win all remaining races and someone finishes 2nd on all of them I would catch him 20 points and if that guy finnihes 6th on all races I would catch him 70 points which still is too little.

[simracingsystem]

It is possible when the driver is on the file (doesn't always happen)

result added.

[Donnchadh MacGarry]

Congrats to Sergio for winning the first race in quite dominant fashion, very impressive stuff. I had a look at the weather forecast for Oultan Park this weekend, and it looks to be sunny and hot, so its very unlikely there will be any sign of rain. I haven't got to practice the Sprint Race car there yet, so I have no advice on what might work. Hopefully it will be a good race, and again if you know of anyone interested in trying the race, try and bring them along.

For the last race, myself and two others were in a discord call on MoonieGT's discord for the race. However for this week, we agreed it might be a better idea to join the SRS discord AMS Server 1 voice channel instead for the race, so that anyone else involved in the race can join in too. So if you are doing the race and want to be in the voice call, don't be afraid to join in (as long as you aren't there to only troll of course). No worries if you'd rather not of course, you can still race as normal if you find that sort of thing distracting.

Hope to see you on track this Saturday.

[Donnchadh MacGarry]

So I had a major derp in last weeks race, where I ended up starting the race with qualifying fuel. What happened was that at the end of qualy, I changed my fuel to be race fuel. However, I hadn't left the setup menu before the qualy session timed out and went to the race session. This meant it did not save my adjustment of the fuel and returned it to the value I had in qualy. I didn't double check the fuel during the countdown in the race session unfortunately. I only found out I was under fueled once the race began and it wasn't until looking at the footage of my stream afterwards, until I realised what caused the issue. Congrats to Sergio on the 2nd win, I wasn't going to catch you even if I had the correct fuel.

Unfortunately I won't be able to race this week. My football team has a cup final this Saturday evening so I will be at that instead. Its a bit frustrating too as I seem to have pulled my groin this week, so I most likely won't be able to play in the game and will just be watching it, but that's life sometimes. The week afterwards I am meant to be in an endurance race, but I will try and organise myself to not be driving during the time this SRS race is on so that I can still do that.