Talk:Research & Development/BMW 3.0 CSL Hommage/@comment-34326785-20180205144315/@comment-34600274-20180208114529

@Geceo: Those are some excellent points that should be helpful to others down the road. Aside from Test 50, the three most annoying tests for me were Test 26, Test 38 and Test 42. Tests 26 & 42 had a main goal of 15 Knockdowns with an important "Without Wreck" secondary goal component. My car was definitely over-tuned for both of those races like many other people who experienced some difficulty with it. What I found most frustrating about those races was when you overshot an AI car and tried to slow down, the AI would also slow down behind you. Ultimately you'd be wasting valuable time waiting to see if it'd ever pass you. The best option here is to immediately nitro to the next available AI. My car was so over-powered for those races that it was quite easy to overshoot an AI even when drifting behind it! Those races (especially Test 42) would've been a lot more reasonable had they been a mere 10 seconds longer.

As for Test 38, that was an odd one for me. You'd think that making 7 flat spins for a main goal would be easy on French Guiana Reverse, but for some stupid reason "The Pig" just seemed to be too large for the course. It was like trying to drive a 1:48 scale Hommage on a track built for 1:64 scale cars. I just couldn't get the darn pig to spin without it hitting its ass on some invisible "force field"! And trying to spin with reckless abandon meant putting in danger an easy 4 QCs by simply wrecking the bacon. Meanwhile, the remaining secondary goal of "6 Perfect Runs" might as well have been a giant middle-finger.

Anyway, there's no shame in auto-passing Test 50. I had a car that was much closer to MAX/PRO than yours and I still found it extremely difficult to get a clean run under 1:15.000. On a track as long as Azure Coast, the fractional km/h benefit from increasing nitro performance becomes more apparent as the race progresses along. So the definition of a "perfect race" is very different between our two cars, with the "perfect race" for me being significantly more forgiving than for you. In other words, you'd need to run a race line that was so tight that your risk of wrecking would be multiples higher than for me. I actually upgraded my suspension and exhaust from Level 2 to Level 3 just to extract every possible ounce of performance in the case of a "photo finish". If beating the AI required the skills and risk-taking needed to beat it at your car's current tuning, then I would've definitely auto-passed it without hesitation. In retrospect, the amount of time and effort that I put into beating the AI was far more costly than just paying out the 2350 tokens. At the time I just couldn't see it that way because I totally lost perspective of the situation. The decision to auto-pass or not is as much a strategy as any other decision in the game. So congrats on the Hommage, because you earned every piece of it!