Twelve drivers went to Italy last weekend for the season opener at Monza. It was a fantastic race and a memorable experience.

The FBMW cars are seen as the entry level open wheeler by many, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to master. Some of our drivers are yet less experienced and have to learn the characteristics and how to make it all work for them. Especially coming from Touring Cars, this is a whole new world. Our younger drivers are to be commended for their persistence.

Even if you have a knack for racing, it takes time and effort to perfect it. That’s exactly what racing is. The constant act of perfecting. Never give up. That is how you learn and get better, and better, and then you become an alien. Area 51 is really just an underground race track.

The veteran drivers on our crew had some great battles and put down some seriously nice times. Qualifying times dropped below the 2 minute mark, almost into the 1:58s. In the end, everyone could say they had 30 minutes of good old sim racing fun!

Next up is Estoril!

Formula BMW season opener tonight! GT Club season opener next Saturday! Life goes on.

Those who remember GTR2 may remember the lobby server going down when 10Tacle Studios handed over business. Eventually it came back up. Whatever is happening, we hope it won’t be down long.

For now, the GT season is postponed for one week. The FBMW season will be postponed as well if the lobby server is still down when race time comes around.

We are trying to get it working through Hamachi as a backup plan, but so far it’s only working for a few of us. Stay tuned!

SIMHOOKUP ANOUNCING FBMW AND GT CLUB SEASON

This weekend we are venturing into an area of racing that is new to our young and learning club. Saturday we kick off a series of 8 events with the GT Club cars. First up will be Brno. The format will 2 races per track, each of 12 laps. In the second race position 1-8 will be reversed. If you’re interested in joining, please hurry over to the sign  up thread on the forum!!

On Sunday we begin our first venture into the open wheeler classes. Starting with the Formula BMW cars at Monza, we will all be experiencing the responsiveness of these light and tight packages of power. If you’d like to join us, please head over to the sign up thread.

The drivers I have interviewed with say that we now need to push the dark clouds away, lick our wounds, and look forward to sunny new seasons!

So let’s do that! Our first GT season is coming up after a short break, and we are also drawing up a serious FBMW season. Stay tuned, because the fun continues!

High times at Zandvoort

Precision driving at Oschersleben

When you Alt-Tab out of RACE On when you have the XD utility installed, you will not be able to bring the game back up. It does not matter from where you do it (ie. menu, cockpit, car setup screen, etc). The game will either crash when you try to bring it back up, or it will come up invisibly. Removing XD from your installation ‘fixes’ this problem. Hopefully a new version will really correct this soon.

Thanks to HumpheryB on our crew, for bringing it to our attention!

Edit: There appears to be another workaround that lets you keep XD. You can disable the Steam Overlay (Shift+Tab) in the Steam Settings. Once you do that you can start the game and tab out as usual.