Grip: two issues

[ismael]

Hello all,

Two questions have arisen to me in other threads but I thought it would be better to separate them as they were going off the main subject of their threads. Both related with the drivers Grip and the Random Grip Range. The first is replying to roland.

On the other hand, IMO, the "ultimate challenge" with the Original GP2 carset would be:

- insert Senna in the car number 2, with the same 16384 grip (deemed as the maximum, although I know we can go all the way to 17000 but the legend goes that you can't go quicker than 16384) AND with a grip range of 128 or even less. Way below Schumacher's 938.

- then play with car number 0 (same horsepower than Senna).

Can you beat a "Schumacher" flawless and super reliable over the course of 16 races?

hi ismael. can you explain me a lttle better this challenge, i am thinhking of giving it a go in the summer, you know a bit of gp2 between beach girls football etc sounds good hahahah.. ok to the point now. You mean to put senna in the game and put the grip at 16384 and grip range at 128 or less.. ok up to this i get it, What should i put in the car failure probability, and why it is more challenging to play with hill rather than with verstappen or ferraris??

For beach girls you should go to Algarve; there's more than a fabulous Grand Prix circuit, it's an amazing beach destination, although I would happily spend a few days in a Greek island

So, there are two ways of playing the (almost) vanilla game. Either you play it 100% vanilla, or you activate Selected Team Power.


If you play it 100% vanilla, you'll always race with 780 HP (race), which happens to be the same HP of Williams-Renault. So, it's no different to play with car number 0, with a Ferrari or with Verstappen or even with Belmondo. You always have the same horsepower than Williams number 2, and always 30 HP more than Schumacher.

Beating a car with 16384 grip having the same horsepower than him will be quite hard; harder than the vanilla game, where you always have 30 HP more than Schumacher.

Beating a driver with 16384 grip, have the same horsepower than him, AND knowing that he has a Random Grip Range of just 128 (which means he will never be not a little bit slow in any weekend!) is the Ultimate Challenge. Only Alain Prost accomplished it, in 1989 (please, polemics about the 1989 season should go to a new thread...)



If you activate Selected Team Power, then things are different. Ferrari will have 800 HP in race, so you'll have 20 HP more than Williams-Renault and 50 HP more than Schumacher. It's a different challenge.

I don't think much about Car Failure Probability. I think what comes with vanilla seems right. If you want to recreate a challenge like the 2014 and 2015 season, where the Dominant Car never fails, put it to 0...





Now for the legend TdK.

For driver performance, I give the best driver of that season the max grip, 16384. Next I try to work my way down and try to put the driver performance in the same sequence as how the corresponding championship ended. For grip range, I just follow my intuition and put in some random numbers. fe: I give Senna a very low grip range (230), and Decesaris a high grip range. (1230)

I work completly different. I use data from each qualifying and race (average speed), and convert them into (percentage) % values. With this i make an average value, 1 for quali, 1 for race. Together they create the drivers grip. I use difference in engine power to create variations in how good a car/driver performs in either qualifying or race. The random grip is also a calculated value, from the fastest driver, increasing on each driver who has a lower grip value.

It's all very difficult to explain, but it's all done in Excel sheets, and they make a lot more sense . I even do engine power based on the real F1 cars top speeds, with some adjustments to make it realistic for in the game.

I understand you calculate it through Excel, but shouldn't you start from the 16384 reference? I recall a famous post, written by yourself:

"16384 is not the maximum grip for a driver. Is can be set to a max. off 17016. But with the important notice that when you increase the value to 17016 you won't be able to reach Schumacher's his speed. The maximum grip a player can reach is about 16100."

Accesible here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=385&p=5884&hilit=16100+faster#p5884

This makes total sense to me. So I avoid recreating carsets with drivers having more than 16384 Grip, as they can only be beaten with too much of a difference in horsepower.

I can add a different reason for not having no driver carrying more than 16384. I believe that, over the last 40 or 50 years, the combination Schumacher-B194-Ford V8 was the strongest. It won 8 of the 12 races he entered. That's right; he was disqualified from the other 4 races. This means a win rate of 75%. No other combination got close. Nor Schumacher itself in 2004, nor Vettel in 2013.
Of course that I also believe that Prost and Senna were likely equal to 16384, but anyway I don't think a realistic carset should go above that cabalistic number.

What do you think?

[roland ratzenberger]

Hello all,

Two questions have arisen to me in other threads but I thought it would be better to separate them as they were going off the main subject of their threads. Both related with the drivers Grip and the Random Grip Range. The first is replying to roland.

On the other hand, IMO, the "ultimate challenge" with the Original GP2 carset would be:

- insert Senna in the car number 2, with the same 16384 grip (deemed as the maximum, although I know we can go all the way to 17000 but the legend goes that you can't go quicker than 16384) AND with a grip range of 128 or even less. Way below Schumacher's 938.

- then play with car number 0 (same horsepower than Senna).

Can you beat a "Schumacher" flawless and super reliable over the course of 16 races?

hi ismael. can you explain me a lttle better this challenge, i am thinhking of giving it a go in the summer, you know a bit of gp2 between beach girls football etc sounds good hahahah.. ok to the point now. You mean to put senna in the game and put the grip at 16384 and grip range at 128 or less.. ok up to this i get it, What should i put in the car failure probability, and why it is more challenging to play with hill rather than with verstappen or ferraris??

For beach girls you should go to Algarve; there's more than a fabulous Grand Prix circuit, it's an amazing beach destination, although I would happily spend a few days in a Greek island

So, there are two ways of playing the (almost) vanilla game. Either you play it 100% vanilla, or you activate Selected Team Power.


If you play it 100% vanilla, you'll always race with 780 HP (race), which happens to be the same HP of Williams-Renault. So, it's no different to play with car number 0, with a Ferrari or with Verstappen or even with Belmondo. You always have the same horsepower than Williams number 2, and always 30 HP more than Schumacher.

Beating a car with 16384 grip having the same horsepower than him will be quite hard; harder than the vanilla game, where you always have 30 HP more than Schumacher.

Beating a driver with 16384 grip, have the same horsepower than him, AND knowing that he has a Random Grip Range of just 128 (which means he will never be not a little bit slow in any weekend!) is the Ultimate Challenge. Only Alain Prost accomplished it, in 1989 (please, polemics about the 1989 season should go to a new thread...)



If you activate Selected Team Power, then things are different. Ferrari will have 800 HP in race, so you'll have 20 HP more than Williams-Renault and 50 HP more than Schumacher. It's a different challenge.

I don't think much about Car Failure Probability. I think what comes with vanilla seems right. If you want to recreate a challenge like the 2014 and 2015 season, where the Dominant Car never fails, put it to 0...





Now for the legend TdK.

For driver performance, I give the best driver of that season the max grip, 16384. Next I try to work my way down and try to put the driver performance in the same sequence as how the corresponding championship ended. For grip range, I just follow my intuition and put in some random numbers. fe: I give Senna a very low grip range (230), and Decesaris a high grip range. (1230)

I work completly different. I use data from each qualifying and race (average speed), and convert them into (percentage) % values. With this i make an average value, 1 for quali, 1 for race. Together they create the drivers grip. I use difference in engine power to create variations in how good a car/driver performs in either qualifying or race. The random grip is also a calculated value, from the fastest driver, increasing on each driver who has a lower grip value.

It's all very difficult to explain, but it's all done in Excel sheets, and they make a lot more sense . I even do engine power based on the real F1 cars top speeds, with some adjustments to make it realistic for in the game.

I understand you calculate it through Excel, but shouldn't you start from the 16384 reference? I recall a famous post, written by yourself:

"16384 is not the maximum grip for a driver. Is can be set to a max. off 17016. But with the important notice that when you increase the value to 17016 you won't be able to reach Schumacher's his speed. The maximum grip a player can reach is about 16100."

Accesible here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=385&p=5884&hilit=16100+faster#p5884

This makes total sense to me. So I avoid recreating carsets with drivers having more than 16384 Grip, as they can only be beaten with too much of a difference in horsepower.

I can add a different reason for not having no driver carrying more than 16384. I believe that, over the last 40 or 50 years, the combination Schumacher-B194-Ford V8 was the strongest. It won 8 of the 12 races he entered. That's right; he was disqualified from the other 4 races. This means a win rate of 75%. No other combination got close. Nor Schumacher itself in 2004, nor Vettel in 2013.
Of course that I also believe that Prost and Senna were likely equal to 16384, but anyway I don't think a realistic carset should go above that cabalistic number.

What do you think?

oh now i catch the point with it. the goal is to recreate a little bit the prost senna livarly but this time with hill and senna.. seems interesting.. here in greece even in athens we have nice beaches not to mention the islands and as far as i am concerned i have allready start see baths and eye-therapy.. if yoy know what i mean haha .. i hope someday to be able to come to portugal and visit the algavre and its beaches

[MaxX]

Some intresting points here indeed

Hm, that leads me to that point where I`d like to have adaptive player grips accourding to the teams. In 1994 Ferrari and Benetton had quite different concepts. Ferrari had massive engine power and a heavy car, while Benetton went for a light chassis with much more grip. So, if you use "Use selected Team`s power", which I always do, you get an unfair advantage driving as Alesi or Berger, you get the bhp and the grip. This leads to a much easier beatable teammate as it should be and easier fights against Schumacher and Hill. What would be a good formula for this to cope with that issue? I don`t want to patch everytime I switch teams so the best teams just get best bhps (even if that`s not true), but for a whole season it makes sense to go for that grip and really have the ultimate Simtek challenge (or career mode) with harder controllable car as well.

The second tool we have in our arsenal is rremedios great magic data editor. You can adapt the slot grip as well there. When you run track which is in vanilla or an update of such one, the slots might be good, even in most cases the suggested slots by the author for other tracks. But on some occations the ccs where just off the pace which lead to easy wins even in the slowest car.

Personally I think the 16384 grip rule is perfect, I use it for most carsets. Due to the bhp-trick I mentioned earlier, the best team and driver combo always gets 800bhp and 16100 grip, which pretty equals the time, at least accourding to gp2edit. (I do this because I want to reuse carsetups). For modern carsets I also tend to go for smaller grip ranges (100-300), to ensure the constant hard to beat adversaries for the victory. With that tight midfield you also get quite some rotation with that smaller grip ranges. I also have my personal carset which uses max grip for some cc cars, but I tailored the grip with magic data, because I use player grip 0 in the best car. It makes fun to push that hard, but the max grip is not enough to provide a challenge on all tracks.

[roland ratzenberger]

If you activate Selected Team Power, then things are different. Ferrari will have 800 HP in race, so you'll have 20 HP more than Williams-Renault and 50 HP more than Schumacher. It's a different challenge.

it is past midnight here but for some reason this sentence give me a new food for thinking and guessing. Let me explain.. i will follow ismael suggestion up to the last detail. insert senna put the appropriate grip and grip range , play as hill etc,,

then here comes gp2 edit . if i use selected team power on, and as a result have a quicker ferrari , would this be even more challenging, not only you have to beat senna, not only you have to beat shumacher , but also the superspeeds ferraris.. would this be even more challenging than the one mention by ismael in the beggining??

oh man this game never stops to surprise us

[MaxX]

Indeed

[peke12]

Very interesting thread.
I'm still in interested in how to accurately set up grip range in GP2edit.
I know TdK wrote in his old thread it is a secret, but if anybody else has good tips about the grip range, let me know. .

grtz

[ismael]

Just to add that I was quite wrong on my calculation:

SCHUMACHER Michael 2004 13/18 72.22%
VETTEL Sebastian 2013 13/19 68.42%
SCHUMACHER Michael 1994 8/12 66,66%

Discounting the 4 disqualifications (which would be polemic, but it's just for the sake of it), Schumacher won only two thirds of the races he competed in 1994.

[rremedio]

Very interesting thread.
I'm still in interested in how to accurately set up grip range in GP2edit.
I know TdK wrote in his old thread it is a secret, but if anybody else has good tips about the grip range, let me know. .

grtz

It is impossible to get perfectly accurate values but in theory, you can find a value for the best performance and another for the worst performance and the grip range would be the difference between the two (for instance, if a driver is the top performer you would give him 0% for that race, then you look at their worst race for that season and they are 1% off the pace of the best performer in that race, then you would have 1% grip range...just use the GP2Edit calculator to see how much in terms of grip values would account for that 1%).

In practice, this is hard since performance changes during a race so you won't have an objective way to find the values. Using best laps, qualy laps, or final results are all approaches people have used. But best laps can depend on strategy (like in current F1 where people change tires to try and get the best lap, or when drivers use different tire types). Qualy laps may mask differences between qualifying and race performance. And final results will ignore incidents, strategy, etc...

I personally use qualifying data since it is easier to make sense of. It won't work as well if there are huge differences between qualifying and race performances (like 80s F1 with special qualifying engines, fuel and tires) but for most cases, it is a good representation of overall performances. Then I will make a spreadsheet and calculate grips for all qualifying sessions in the season and will either use the difference between best and worst performances or double the difference between best and average performances for the grip range.

Another problem is calculating the grips themselves. I don't know where GP2Edit took its multiplier for bhp difference (0.02411) from. It works well enough for me but when I'm working with lower bhp values compared to the GP2 originals, it is clear it is not always correct. But it is good enough for me.

[peke12]

Thanks @RRemedio for the insight.
One thing I still don't understand is the problem of calculating grip. What does it have to do with bhp?
As I set grip, I use the value 16384 for the best driver and work my way down for the next best driver and so on.
The BHP of the cars, I try to set them as they would be in real life.

[rremedio]

Thanks @RRemedio for the insight.
One thing I still don't understand is the problem of calculating grip. What does it have to do with bhp?
As I set grip, I use the value 16384 for the best driver and work my way down for the next best driver and so on.
The BHP of the cars, I try to set them as they would be in real life.

If you want to derive your grip values from real data, you have to take into account the bhp since apart from that all cars are equal. The drive grip value is not just a representation of how fast a driver is, but also how fast the car is. So if you drivers set the same times, the one with lower bhp should have more grip. GP2Edit has a calculator that shows you the expected results in % of the best time and it accounts for both bhp and grip, it serves as a good guideline on how to stack your grip values.

[peke12]

@RRemedio,

Can you also elaborate on this multiplier for bhp?
What does it do?

[rremedio]

@RRemedio,

Can you also elaborate on this multiplier for bhp?
What does it do?

It is just a thing from the GP2Editor calculator. For instance, if you reduce the bhp by 10, the calculated performance will be reduced by 0.24%. It seems to give accurate results for bhps above 700 but not so accurate for lower bhps.

[TdK]

Well in the past 10 years in my absence of Gp2 i discovered something about the random grip:

It works both ways. If the Random Grip is 0, the driver will always produce about the same lap time.
If you give a driver Random Grip range of 938 (Schumacher '94 Microprose), it's grip will be between 15915 and 16853. His standard grip is 16384.
So he can perform better, and worse. Previously i thought it only worked negative. But as it turns out, it works positive as well. So the 938 value is a value effecting the 16384 level. Positive and negative.

Also i discovered that only Schumacher's Random Grip matters: The Random Grip (RG) of the other drivers are calculated from his Grip values.
An Example 1994 Microprose values:

GRIP: RG:
Schumacher: 16384 938
Hill: 15980 1342
Alesi: 15468 1854
Belmondo: 13846 3738

Maybe if you are very very sharp you will notice it already. Hill his RG is calculated from the difference in grip between Schumacher and him. The calculation goes like this: 16384 - 15980 = 404. 404 + 938 = 1342. Alesi the same: 16384 - 15468 + 938 = 1854. Belmondo: 16384 - 13846 + 938 = 3738.

I discoverd this only just last years summer. And i implemented it within my 2020 carset, with a few deviations, and it seems to work perfect. In the meantime i tested it on other seasons\years and it works fine. It maybe even works better than what i first used as RG values, each driver it's own random grip, instead of reflecting/feeding it back to the fastest driver. You can always higher or lower the RG value, like i did in my 2020 carset as well, to get a more realistic result with some drivers.

If you want i can upload some carsets with the new data regarding to Random Grip. I personally believe this is how it should be, and it works better.

Commenting on that 16384 is the highest grip: as it turns out now, some drivers will exceed that grip number. And if you give a driver a higher than 16384 level, they are hard to beat, you need to have more horsepower than them to beat them. But that can also be solved, or 'tuned' by adjusting the "Grip Factor" to a lower number in the "Car Settings" menu in Gp2Edit. With this only the player gets more grip. A little fine-tune value within Gp2.

[peke12]

Again very interesting insights!
@TdK:
I was also curious if the random grip worked both ways. (positive and negative)
How did you come to this conclusion?
I'm definitely interested in some carsets with updated performance data.

[rremedio]

Well in the past 10 years in my absence of Gp2 i discovered something about the random grip:

It works both ways. If the Random Grip is 0, the driver will always produce about the same lap time.
If you give a driver Random Grip range of 938 (Schumacher '94 Microprose), it's grip will be between 15915 and 16853. His standard grip is 16384.
So he can perform better, and worse. Previously i thought it only worked negative. But as it turns out, it works positive as well. So the 938 value is a value effecting the 16384 level. Positive and negative.

Also i discovered that only Schumacher's Random Grip matters: The Random Grip (RG) of the other drivers are calculated from his Grip values.
An Example 1994 Microprose values:

GRIP: RG:
Schumacher: 16384 938
Hill: 15980 1342
Alesi: 15468 1854
Belmondo: 13846 3738

Maybe if you are very very sharp you will notice it already. Hill his RG is calculated from the difference in grip between Schumacher and him. The calculation goes like this: 16384 - 15980 = 404. 404 + 938 = 1342. Alesi the same: 16384 - 15468 + 938 = 1854. Belmondo: 16384 - 13846 + 938 = 3738.

I discoverd this only just last years summer. And i implemented it within my 2020 carset, with a few deviations, and it seems to work perfect. In the meantime i tested it on other seasons\years and it works fine. It maybe even works better than what i first used as RG values, each driver it's own random grip, instead of reflecting/feeding it back to the fastest driver. You can always higher or lower the RG value, like i did in my 2020 carset as well, to get a more realistic result with some drivers.

If you want i can upload some carsets with the new data regarding to Random Grip. I personally believe this is how it should be, and it works better.

Commenting on that 16384 is the highest grip: as it turns out now, some drivers will exceed that grip number. And if you give a driver a higher than 16384 level, they are hard to beat, you need to have more horsepower than them to beat them. But that can also be solved, or 'tuned' by adjusting the "Grip Factor" to a lower number in the "Car Settings" menu in Gp2Edit. With this only the player gets more grip. A little fine-tune value within Gp2.

Wow! That's very nice!

So this confirms it works like in the later games where the RG is a range that goes both ways.

I'm a little surprised tho since I've never found actual grip values that were higher than the driver's grip when supervising the memory during the races. That value is probably stored in one of the many unknown sections.

Also very surprised nobody ever noticed that pattern with the original grips and grip ranges before. Well done! All of this makes total sense if you think about it since the grip range becomes more important than the driver's grip when there are such big grip range values like in the original game and the top drivers are on the top most of the time anyway.