The Lion's Rear

A couple of times a month i've been setting up little rally weekends, adjusting the weather for each stage so that the rally progresses across three days like the current WRC format with a few rain stages thrown in perhaps, and the final stage I select to be the shortest or highest speed stage as a sort of impromptu "power stage".

so tonight i queued up a ten stage rally in the new Australia region, a set of stages I still don't know very well as they were recently added to the game, and picked up "The Kingpin", the Ford Focus which Colin McRae made famous.

For background, rally is a stage racing motorsport where you are timed from point a to point b, and then drive to the next stage's point a un-timed. all the time between a-b on those stages is added up at the end and the final order is by total rally time and points are award on finish order and some other special points are awarded. (though, WRC has mucked that system up this season.)

The entire rally I was out-paced by "Colin McCrey", one of the wink-wink-nudge-nudge driver names Art of Rally uses. He kept taking 10-15 seconds a stage off of me through the whole weekend where by stage 9, the morning of the final day, i was down 2m30 leading in to a rainy morning stage and a final high-speed run through a dry stage.

The rain stage is usually a good chance to make up time, and I pushed hard, but McCrey still pulled another ten seconds on me even in the rain where the game's AI is usually quite patient or outright timid. I had taken a few stages from McCrey but had only won one outright, and so I believed my best bet was to just focus on getting the car home safe and take the second place trophy.

Well, the final stage arrived and I got a tire puncture after caressing the side of a building at 80kph while blasting through a hilly but very open high speed stage. I decided with 2 kilometers left to limp the car home rather than take a time penalty repairing it, finishing the stage in 6th. At the timing line, I would have taken an interview like this:

"it was a rough stage for you, how do you feel about it getting through it?"

"well, we thought we could get the car home in good shape and take home 2nd place but of course with a puncture that is difficult, we really were limping and trying to not break the car. Our stage time was quite bad, it's a shame, but that is rallying."

"Well, what if I told you that Colin just had an exhaust fire at the starting line and has taken a four minute late start to put it out, is down another two seconds at the second timing point? unless he pulls a miracle out of his hat you'll likely have the rally win here."

"isn't that incredible! of course it's the back half that i'm afraid of for us, but terrible luck for Colin, he had us out-paced fair and square through the whole rally. But if that isn't rallying then what is?"

These are for org-roam, don't worry about it.

Gameing is great with new things sometimes, cheap or on sale.

Baby's first MOBA on the Nintendo Switch