550pp RM V8 4 door Adjustable wing

Following another great night's racing of this class I thought it worthy to share not only the cars I've got that are suitable but also the cars that may be in the game.
It's fair to say that we'll race them again, so time to spend some pennies...

Some I've tuned, some not, spot the wing time:

Classic all rounder car. Aussie Icon.

Ballistic in a straight line, class car.

My Go To car, love the look and it's no slouch.

New this week! Glued to the road. Maybe too slow.

This is the later model S4. Early ones were not V8.

Even I couldn't put a wing on this - so wrong.

Note this is the early S6. Check those cylinders!

Not a bad TC500 car - looks great too.

Great car. Handling questionable.

Great, but too slow once tuned.

A winner for some. Certainly works in this class.

Fast in corners. Slow at top end it seems.

Can this have a wing added? Not sure.

Prototype car - somewhat not allowed really.

So that's the list as far as I can tell. Not a crazy amount of cars by any stretch, but certainly plenty to make this class a viable one. Not sure I like the idea of pickups in the racing, but really I doubt very much they're a viable racer in what has been some very intense racing.

To reiterate the rules for this class:

• 550pp
• Road car
• Four doors
• Racing Medium tyres
• Adjustable after market wing fitted
• V8 engine (Check car info)
• No race cars - i.e. no sponsor liveries (fit a number if you like).

And that's it, any era any make.

Have fun and see you all online!

Upgrade Time

Second time if I'm honest...

Having bought an 80Gb PS3, I upgraded the drive to 150Gb a couple of years ago. And promptly filled it. No matter, call it budgeting...

But, I've been reading up on how faster drives makes for better load times, and we're all about driving faster here - had to be done.

As always, the thrill of the chase is better than the event - so lots of research over the various merits of 7200rpm versus Solid State drives.

And it boils down to this:

• 7200rpm is technically slower but your PS3 won't notice as it's got a slow interface.
• SSD is cooler. Allegedly.
• Price per Gb is huge though, expect 2-3 times the space for your dollar with 7200rpm.

So 7200rpm it was. Though I must confess that I was tempted to go the SSD approach - my PS3 seems to be working so very hard to stay cool these days.

That was until I got gifted a free 500Gb 7200rpm drive. Win.

So to fitting, there are lots of guides online, but not one that brings the whole set into one place, I'll cover the salient points here, look up the rest...

• Backup is a pain 150Gb takes four hours to complete.
• The USB ports on what I'll call a "Normal" PS3 are not enough to power an external drive of any note. I ended up using a dual USB cable and plugging the power feed into a seperate device give it juice. This worked, but it was a half hour before hand of trying to figure out why my external drive wasn't being picked up.
• Make sure you have a USB stick with the latest firmware update on it. In the correct folder structure.
• Make sure you have your PS3 charging cable handy (it requires a direct connection on restart with new drive) and it's not being re-purposed to connect your backup drive. Doh!
• Expect another 4 hours on the way back in.
• Don't bother resetting sound setup etc if you use an amp, the backup brings across all settings.

And ultimately that was that. I now have a 7200rpm drive in my PS3 with acres of space. And you know what I can't tell any difference in load times at all. Perhaps I'm honest (compared to the myriad of posts out there) thanks to the fact my drive was free and I don't have to justify my spend...

Anyway, time to sit back and enjoy new downloaded games and continued greatness of my PS3.

Grid Autosport Replays

So, in light of the fact that we were a bit slim in the race numbers last week, I thought I'd post up a better replay of Grid Autosport gameplay.

Interestingly, I've found the force feedback on my DFGT wheel better in Grid Autosport than GT6 since it's feedback update - go figure, am I moving away from GT6?

Certainly I'm enjoying the gameplay more if not the physics, and one can forgive some of that when the racing is so excellent. Some, but not all. I need to enjoy racing in GT6 again ASAP!

Anyway, here's the replay, Bathurst in "proper" cars if you will...

[Edit] 

And here's one of the A1 Ring in an E30. Intense racing actually, great fun!