The coy look really sells it

Oh wow I’ve never expected that I’m used to university being full academia with no hands on on anything

Are you telling me they put them in front of actual rocks and let them lick them in finals?

Yes

I live in Argentina so you probably won’t know the car or the track but the car is a 2008 Gol Power 1.6(current picture the car rides 4cm higher in stock form) and the track is the N°6 circuit with the slide of the Gálvez speedway in Buenos Aires

The car is basically the south American version of the golf 3 but with a very old inline 4 1.6L 8V engine that they tuned up from the factory over the years and the different redesigns to have multi point injection and 97 HP (but it’s all on the top end since it’s an 8 valve engine).

The car was bone stock (I still have to go again but I’ve been upgrading the suspension and rigidity of the car while keeping it as a daily) with cheap oil shocks and tired springs so it was a wild ride around the corners, I would literally fall off my seat on the tighter ones if I tried to do anything but hold the wheel and drive with one foot. I was not fast at all (although I almost beat some cars with double the HP because it was an amateur event) and because of that it was very difficult to set a good lap time since I think I only got two or three laps in the entire event where I didn’t have to slow down to let someone pass me. Still managed to do a 2:40:539:

The fun part was a lot of people would approach me in the boxes and congratulate me for having the balls to go so hard at it with a bone stock econo hatchback from south America, it was really touching I had so much fun that day.

The go pro memory’s card was on the fritz so I don’t have the video of my personal best but here’s the one lap that it did record entirely

As you might notice I never quite nailed the braking distances (I usually just engine break everywhere and only use the brakes the last few meters so I really didn’t have a feel of how hard I could brake and how much distance I needed for it) and there’s no heel and toe at all because the car has a weird pedal layout (because of the position of the steering components the pedals and steering wheel are actually slightly towards the center console rather than straight in front of you) and the only way to heel and toe it is to use the sides of your feet which I found out it’s actually rather difficult, specially if you didn’t set the pedal height to accommodate for it.

Either way I’m sure a good/pro driver could get 10 or even 15 seconds out of that lap time even with the car in that condition

I’ve driven the top trim Audi A5 Sportback with the big engine at full throttle trough a reduced version of the track when I did a driving course and let me tell you I actually had way more fun on my crappy car than I did on the Audi, it might sound stupid but having no traction control, no ABS, a mechanical throttle, poor sound proofing and a very light car makes for a way more raw and thrilling track experience even if you’re going way slower

Anyways, I assume you’ve been all over forums looking up what upgrades to make to the car but cheap and easy for helping with the brakes is changing all the brake fluid (as in making sure to drain all the old liquid out of the lines) for new competition liquid and for a car like yours buying race pads and putting them on only for the trackday and putting the street ones back on when you’re done. That way you can have really aggressive pads on the track that require a lot of heat to work and then just daily the car with the regular ones afterwards, changing pads isn’t that hard you can do it in the boxes before the event starts if you want.

Also really sticky tires make a ton of difference but I’m assuming you already know that

I do think having a dedicated track car is the way to go if you actually want to compete (I just wanted to have the experience of going full send in a cheap car, grew up watching MCM on YouTube) but as you’ve said racing ain’t cheap so it’s up to you to do the math. Reality is if you can tow a trailer you can do things to a track car that simply won’t fly for a street a car that probably make a huge difference but that’s way out of my knowledge lol

I trained a ton in asseto Corsa before my first track day and while I had to adjust to my own car in the track (since it doesn’t exist even as a mod for the game) I found that it was a lot easier to nail the corners in real life because you can feel the g forces and get a better feeling of where the car is going. Did you feel the same?

My car is fairly slow and we’d only do 3-4 hot laps tops each session and it’s also a very light car so I didn’t have to deal with brake fade (frankly I struggled to brake hard enough since I’m so used to being smooth when driving as well)

And of course I also had the same thought you did about there being no way I could go as hard as I did throughout the day without going into the grass if I hadn’t trained in the sim (and gone into the grass multiple times in there)

You know, the fact that every single comment on this post about snoop dog being skilled at something as mundane as going from a fist bump to a handshake being all about politics is the reason lemmy doesn’t get much adoption

Or you could pm people with interesting opinions about stuff and try to engage in a conversation in this very platform

Yeah they’re totally not charging you for the expensive suspension they’re installing in your car in the hopes that you’ll pay a subscription to use it. 100% not included in the price, clearly no one would ever do that

Except that you have to have special way more expensive shocks to have adaptive suspension compared to fixed. It’s like being sold an I3 CPU for the price of an I9 cpu while being told you can pay a subscription to upgrade to the full performance

If you’re in a rough part of town martial arts will only serve you to better run away. While disarm techniques are taught in a lot of martial arts if the teacher doesn’t put emphasis on them being a last option then you shouldn’t go there. As skilled as you might get a blade or a gun is not something you can engage in hand to hand fighting really and even if you manage to disarm the attacker you’ll probably get stabbed or take a bullet for your troubles.

Martial arts are more useful as a good sport and for scaring away high school bullies. Life is not a movie, the rules of engagement are incapacitate and run away

I don’t have any friends so I’ve never played coop and I’ve always wondered, how does the game manage romance in that mode? Can players romance each other? Can they even talk to each other with dialogue options? Do they just both romance different people? How does that affect the ending???

Stop thinking and assuming and talk that shit out with her to understand why it really worries her. If you’re not honest with each other then that shit isn’t gonna work man

But how can I make it about women issues then?

Maybe change your diet then?

My current car was bought 2 km away from my house when I was 13, then it was sold to someone 40km away that happened to be the next door neighbour of my aunt before he sold it to an used car dealer who I bought it from.

I figured all of this out after buying it and it really felt like a small world

100% there are a lot of indie games worth trying

Sadly most of them are in early access and never get finished but they’re still fun

Doesn’t most cheapo aluminum have iron mixed in to make it more affordable? I worked at a machine shop a couple of months and I remember the shitty castings downright having iron bubbles inside them

Maybe Im just tired of games in general, bg3 was the kind of game I wanted to inmerse myself in but I couldn’t be bothered to read about random lore, I just kept going through the motions doing multiple playthroughs with different classes, alignments and love interests but that’s as far as I was able to get into it.

Which to be fair is still very deep but it’s not the same process of discovery it was when I was a kid anymore

Let me put it this way, when the games came out I would read every codex entry and mission description and do multiple playthroughs to see every possible scene, I have like 3k hours combined between the three games on record.

These days I just blast trough games and struggle to stop and listen to some audiolog