Hi all. Well I'm starting to warm up to that circuit of Spa folks, I tell you. This weekend I kind of expected Bas to call me and claim the weekend for racing, so in order not to let him down I asked my dad if I could have the Saturday off. That was no problem, as it rarely is when asked, so I was available for the entire weekend :-) And Bas did call, however not to make an appointment for the weekend but to tell me his back was telling him it wasn't a very good idea to go racing. So I was on my own for the entire weekend. I decided it was time to do a couple of serious races on Spa, as we're still in the middle of training for the 24 hours race with GTR. The beauty of GTR is that it has 4 phases the track goes through when doing a 24 hour race. This means when you start the race you begin in daylight, then turn to dusk, night, dawn and daylight again. The switching between those phases is not that brilliant, but I'll tell you more about that later ;-) The daylight version of the track was already known by us, as it was included in the demo but when it switched to dusk mode ... boy oh boy ... d*mn this looks good people, and I mean really, really good. We now have a total of five versions of Spa in our GTR game: plain Spa, the 24 hour of Spa, the dusk, night and dawn version. The thing is that when you select the 24 hours circuit of Spa you can also set how long one hundred percent of the race will take. So when I for example set it to six hours, I will have a complete 24 hours race packed in that six hours. So every one and a half hour the track changes to the next mode. And this is where one of the biggest down sides of GTR comes in: changing from one mode to the next. The point is that the 3D engine on which GTR is build doesn't support a smooth transformation from day to night and back, hence the 4 different versions of the track. So what happens when we're moving on is that the game briefly displays a message telling us drivers that a track change is on it's way (and that message last a whole whopping second it seems ...) and then starts reloading just about the entire game, after pausing the whole thing. This does not necessarily need to cause any problems, but unfortunately in many cases it does. When you're for example just emerging uphill in Eau Rouge, flooring the throttle in fifth gear, at a speed of just about two hundred and fifty kilometers an hour and the game freezes for that track reload, it can take up to half a minute for it to return and hand the car over to you in the exact state you where in when the transformation begins ... It's almost impossible to maintain the exact steering rate and throttle position so the odds of you crashing out at that moment are a whole lot bigger than you winning the lottery. In single player mode you get an option screen when the track returns enabling you to choose whether you want to quit the race (and that could well be the best choice after all ;-), or save the race or hand the car over to AI, stuff like that. As I have yet to run my first long race on-line I'm not sure what happens with the track changes then. Now my first choice was to simply continue the race. At that time I was in the middle of the Blanchimont turn (yes I had to look that up, as I'm not that great with remembering turn names) and just about zero point seven seconds later I was in the tire barrier, wondering what the h*ll just happened. Now I'm pretty easy going by nature so why not simply try again and see what happens, after all it could well have been a glitch (which happens when they change something :-) ... So there I was again, at it again, driving to the best of my ability and eagerly awaiting the change of day. And there it was. The message flashed through the picture and the track started reloading. This time I thought it might be a smart idea to choose for the option to let AI take over and let him/her/it figure out what to do then the picture returned. So I did and that were pretty much the last couple of meters my Gulf Saleen drove that race. I mean what a mess. The AI driver I trusted my million dollar race car simply drove the d*mn thing for about five meters and then slammed the brakes harder than anything I'd ever seen slamming brakes before ... The result was catastrophic, to say the least. I'll need to check the replay to see what happened exactly but when the smoke cleared just about the entire straight after the bus stop chicane was filled with car parts. In all seven cars crashed, first into mine and after that into one another. Like I said I have no clue how this works on-line so we can only hope for the best and see what happens I guess.