This will address my two major frustrations with current Automation community challenges.
1) Fuel consumption is not a factor.
2) Reliability is not a factor, provided you meet an arbitrary minimum.
The inevitable result is that the best way to perform well in an Automation community challenge is to set your air-fuel ratio as low as it will go, then run as much boost as you can while meeting reliability specifications. Adding fuel consumption and reliability to the mix adds more challenge - you can have high power, low fuel burn, good reliability, but not all at once. In endurance racing you need all three.
With that said, is it possible to use the specific fuel efficiency data produced in the Engine Designer (the data must exist in a readable form somewhere, given that it's used to draw the fuel consumption graph) to simulate fuel burn by tracking it against engine RPMs during the race? If not, I suppose it would be possible to just take the specific fuel efficiency stat and work from there, but I am not sure how accurate this would be for engines with weird fuel efficiency curves (particularly those running very high boost).
Regarding tire wear - could you use the tire quality slider value as an ersatz "soft vs hard" slider? Positive values being a soft compound - better grip but lower lifespan in the simulation, and negative values the inverse.
Combine all this with the 24 Hours of Le Mans rules on pit stops (crews may not refuel while performing any other work on the vehicle) and reducing the need to make pit stops suddenly becomes very important.
Just as an example, an imaginary pit stop:
Pit lane transit: 34 seconds (actual time on Mt. Panorama pit lane)
Refuel: 28 seconds from a near-empty tank (4l/s into a 120 liter fuel cell)
Tires: 5 seconds, 12-15 if rules do not allow sufficient crew members to change all four tires at once
Even assuming tires and fuel are allowed to be done simultaneously, a full-fuel pit stop will take over a minute. A gas-guzzling car that maximizes power above all else will no longer be a competitive entry, and that's the way it should be.
Der Bayer wrote:I would say it's the usual one car per participant rule. I don't care where you got your car from, so using the same cars is allowed. If you can specify a teammate you don't want to fight with? Should be possible, but that's not high priority.
It would be nice to run "teams" of a pair of the same car entered by the same player, if number of entries allows. Nobody likes being denied a podium because they ran over a conrod from somebody else's engine.
Tue Feb 10, 2015 10:55 am 
