[Russell Sobie]

Well, folks, we finally did it. We finished the Monza week for the Dallara F317.
I love Monza. It's the track that I learned how to drive cars in a simulation (as opposed to an arcade racing video game) back on Race '07. It has a little of everything. Two really long straights, a number of really fast corners, and probably the most infamous first turn in sim racing. With all of that said, I participated in four of the 32 Monza races for this series, and every one I was in (even the smallest that only had 12 drivers in it) had someone bump me, punt me, run me off the road, or otherwise bork up the chicane at turn 1... or at least right after the chicane. So I thought to myself, "Self... SimRacingSystem streams every Server1 race hosted. You should see just how many Monza races in this series actually had clean starts. I mean... it can't just be you!"
And so I did exactly that. I started looking at them yesterday when I had the idea, but only finished up in the last hour since the last of the Monza races finished up today. I skipped ahead to the start of the race, then watched as the grid drove (if you can call it that) through the chicane on the first lap.
Then I sorted the URLs for the different streams into two bookmark folders. "Pass" and "Fail". I had to come up with my own criteria here, since the camera being used in the SRS streams is based on some nebulous AI that never quite looks where you want it to, so here's the rules I went by:
In order for a race to "Pass", NONE of the following can be visible IN FRAME before the target of the camera starts accelerating out of the chicane:

• Any two cars collide.
  
• Any car facing backwards.
  
• 2 or more cars seen going off track (all 4 wheels)
  
• Any car seen airborne (not as rare as one might think)
  

So if none of those things are visible, the race got a passing grade. Should be easy right?

Sadly, out of 32 races I was able to find posted this month for DallaraF317 and Monza on simracingsystem's youtube channel... here are the results: 29 Fails, and only 3 Passes.

I won't bother to ask why this is. There's plenty of reasons I can come up with on my own (novice drivers, lack of practicing the car on the circuit, ignorance of the concertina effect, drivers from all over the globe with questionable connection quality, general apathy while driving make believe race cars, etc. etc. etc.). What I do want to ask is:

If we left Monza out of every SRS rotation for every series in the future... would it really be missed?

[Martin Smith]

It works fine in weekly series, not always, but often.

Which kind of points to a major reason in response to your question of why.

In the daily series, you get all the good drivers spread out through the week, more people join on a whim without practice, more people figure they only need 1 lucky break at the start, and they'll keep trying until they get it... it's just a recipe for disaster. I suspect all tracks are the same but Monza is the worst because of the high speed attained before turn 1, the low speed required for turn 1, and the fact that it's a chicane.

Autodrom Most, Nurburgring, Imola are milder versions of the same problem.

I would just banish Monza from any daily series in the future.

[Russell Sobie]

I agree... I think for weekly series it would probably be relatively safe. Relatively.

[Simon Meisinger]

Agree. I would never join a Monza race in a daily series or a series with cars that attracts people who think they're the next Schumacher.

It boggles my mind why this track is so popular in sim racing.

[Filip Stoyanovich]

Weekly calendars Monza is fine with me. Monza is not Monaco though to be left out of simracing just like that

[Ricardo Jantarada]

Monza with this car was super fun for me after a little break from SRS but i've never seen so many 360 Inward Heelflip's in a T1 before nor have i seen such a high overall incident average on any series. You literally see people cutting the first chicane at full speed just to crash head on with cars accelerating out of the corner, this just proves a lot of people come into the race with zero practice, even on server 1. Hopefully the cut penalties and incident average will place those guys on server 2 until they get some discipline.

[Simon Speth]

It was clearly all week that F3 races were way more attended than usually the last weeks. This was good since a lot of new competitive racers participated but also a lot of people who maybe just thought "Oh I know Monza, just floor it" and didn’t do a single practice start or whatsoever. Normally I report people who in my opinion do not behave properly but if I wanted to report all incidents during a monza race even for T1 it would take me more time than the whole race itself. I just gave up. Even drivers who I know that they can race clean seemed to do divebombs at the start and missing their braking points. At one point I even thought if it’s safer to do a 102 points win when starting from the back of the field lol.

The thing is: those people will not read the forums and they don’t care what you write in game in chat. I guess they only care when they get a week suspension or similar (When I started sim racing 10 years ago and wasn’t allowed to race for a week after a stupid crash I thought about it a lot and learned from it...)

Other ideas would be implementing special rules for these kind of races like flying start after T1, extra hard automatic penalties for contacts in first lap or T1 (1 day suspension) or some volunteers who review races and do penalties (I don’t like the idea of permanent bans that much but giving somebody a day off or giving warnings will do wonders I guess)

[Charles Macq]

Hi,

I've just seen this thread and I was wondering about a feature added to a public server where I raced sometimes (on Monza with GT3 I believe).
Basically if there was too much incidents involved in the first half of the track on the 1st lap, the race was purely restarted automatically (red flag in short) for up to three if I'm correct.
And trust me if it happens you only need one restart and most people starts to understand they have to break safely at turn 1.

I don't know if it can be introduced into SRS servers but for some deadly series it can be helpful for all the reasons you've mentioned.

[Simon Speth]

This feature sounds really interesting. But a drawback from this could also be that people try to brake even later at the next restart or they even go more risk at the first start as they know that its going to be restarted.
Also if no message is displayed why the restart happened or who caused the restart (like Player X had 5 incidents in first race half) this could not have the wished effect.
I dont know if its possible in assetto corsa but restart the race after too many incidents but disqualify player which has incidents over a limit (lets say 5). Then all the clean racers have a chance to survive lap 1 and the others can watch the race or start from pitlane (like jumpstart). This also goes in the direction of the automatic 3 day suspension for a race over 20 incidents

[Wilson B Santos]

Lol I ran a bunch and on all of them there were crashes on turn 1... Not only on the first lap