Mercedes-AMG Motorsport eRacing - Discussion

(Started writing this on the 17th of October)

Well, I am now back home and as an overall experience, what a trip. Not only was this overall a great experiences but my first time outside of my homeland on my own but I think I managed to get round pretty easily when I had to. I have had time now to reflect and think over from when I left Norwich airport to arrive home and to carefully dissect many crucial or important points of the trip. Some are good, some are bad so lets start on a good note and go positive first.
Positive:

- The treatment from Mercedes Benz throughout the whole trip was great. Hotel was nice, accommodation was wonderful and the hospitality at the track was amazing.

- The high quality of the event itself, the professionalism was beyond anything I had ever been apart of. It felt like it was on the same level, if not above when I went to GT Academy in 2014.

- The racing we watched throughout the weekend combined with the awesome seats made it perfect to watch everything.

- All the finalists I was with were very friendly and made for a warm environment and it was great to finally meet some of the guys i race online, does not happen too often but it was great to put some faces to the voices

- Met and chatted with a few DTM drivers, including DTM commentator Dave Richardson and that was one of my highlights for sure. Catching up with Daniel Juncadella after we raced as teammates 9 years ago was also very nice.

- The travel was easy for me to get to grips with, for my first time flying it felt no problem when on the flights so all good.

- Despite what had happened on the Sunday, Robert Wiesenmuller was very helpful and comforting and Axel (He works for AMG Mercedes) treated me very well, drove 309 kph on the autobahn in his Mercedes AMG so that was an eye opener and quite the adrenaline rush

- A big thanks to not only Mercedes but also Robert and the rest of the RaceRoom team for making this whole event possible. It was something special to be apart of.
Now, we have to get to the negatives, some you will be able to know what they are before I say but lets get into it.

Negatives:
- In the briefing before the big event on Friday, Robert alerted us all that "some" of the wheels are faulty and I happened to get one of the bad ones but, even if I didn't I still would not have been happy as no one deserves to have that happen to them once you make it this far into the competition.

- Tim, Tim and Tim.. oh and a faulty Fanatec wheel. Why is this guy able to race when everyone knows very clearly, racing with him is nearly impossible. It's never clean and it seems to be the same story with anyone else. Look at all the penalties he picked up in the regular season so to have what eventually happen and for him to win was a joke but what made it even worse was that he came over to me and said sorry (which if he was sorry he would of dropped back during the race and dropped behind me) But also he admitted that his wheel was faulty also. When I had people behind me after my wheel had packed up halfway through, did I battle anyone? No, I just let them go but he raced tooth and nail and with a faulty wheel he was weaving when next to me and takes me out. The guy who racked up so many penalty points, got a race ban and still wrecked on Friday to win gets to take home the prize while I who had amassed over 2 race wins worth of a points lead and going into the event gets to leave with absolutely nothing because of Tim and a wheel which went haywire. What made this even more annoying was that the stewards deemed that the incident was "not clear" as to whose fault it was, well if your not sure on who out of Kevin and Tim (Who were behind me/on my left rear quarter) then you penalize them both! You can't just let them get away with it. It was a total joke.
So the event was great, but having a big drive off with dodgy gear is a no no especially when we all worked so hard to get there.

- I lost my hat

- The travel on my way home on Sunday was botched. Even though I got on all the right connections to frankfurt airport (and actually my train arrived at the airport ahead of my printed schedule) The plane was near to take off that I was supposed to get and the person at the desk would not let me on despite being 5 minutes late. "There is nothing I can do" The old bag said to me, yeah there was, let me on the plane! So I got my flight rescheduled for Monday afternoon and that went off without a hitch. Robert, as usual, was brilliant at getting things organized and Axel got me sorted out that night so no problems after that, but KLM...tsk.

 

My two cents from my personal view as a peer (stream) I originally posted at the AMG Competition thread @ News & Announcements. Guess it should be here as well, as it got some resonance by other folks that watched the Final Race.
I btw. know Robert from VR Community and we had some debates at times regarding our former League Races - nonetheless he is a very ambitious but also very nice guy who puts all his heart into Simracing /E-Sports and I'm glad he has found that opportunity to co-manage events like that ( on a grand scale).
Well done !

 

Hello All,
i want to give my opinion on this as well.

First off, i was not a driver, i was the IT guy behind the scenes doing his best to make everything work.
There were many problems with the wheel and pedal setup while testing the week before and we even worked through the whole night between wednesday and thursday.

I was also the one who went up to Robert directly after the race to tell him that Tim had his ffb die pretty much directly before the incident with Jack, though i did not tell Robert whether to punish anyone for that or not.

Of course, i am incredibly sorry that we were not able to sort out all of the issues beforehand, we tried our absolute best.

We (RaceRoom Event IT Team) promise to sort out these issues asap, so the next event can go even better than this one.

Cheers,
Alex

 

First of all thanks to Robert and all the guys from RaceRoom! Great guys with a great ambition.
And also a big thanks to Gamesworld/PC Games who set up the hot lap competition that made it possible for me to participate in the final event.

I’ll start off with the season before the final.
As a last year finalist to hear that the Mercedes eRace will happen again with Multiplayer races over a whole season was really good, because hotlapping doesn’t make a good RACEdriver. The thing is hotlapping is still necessary to even participate in the online race but I don’t know how to do it differently. You could do it like iRacing that everyone races the race and the grids are split into the Rating you have. RaceRoom is already on it to make such a ranking and I hope it will be used for next years qualification.

Most of the races were pretty good except of a few ones with a lot of crashing and bad driving. I think we need a better or even a damage model. People would be more careful with overtaking because a lot of drivers set up their overtakes that car contact was unavoidable and stupid crashes happen.

For me the time of the races was kinda bad. Sunday at 1 pm is a bad time for someone who does football. I know it is because of the Mercedes drivers at the race track and the timetable of the DTM.

Final event was just awesome!
From the organization side it was so much better and you felt that we were not just gamers that do nothing else than sitting in front of our computers.

The taxi ride was one of the best experiences I ever had in my life! The acceleration and the speed through the corners is just phenomenal.
You can barely see brake points from your seat position and to keep the concentration over a whole race must be really hard.

That’s pretty much it. Of course it was nice to meet all of you guys!

Hopefully till next year!

 

Won’t there be a highlight video like last year?

 

Ok nevermind. Just got the confirmation that it will be out in a few days.

 

The video highlights can be found here:

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1983519631895668

 

Another video: http://www.pcgames.de/Race-Room-Rac...unsere-Gamesworld-Rookie-Competition-1242637/

I had a great weekend in Hockenheim, too.

 

Well, @Moritz Löhner, I think I heard this name somewhere before.

 

Wer hat dich eigentlich im DTM Taxi chauffiert, Moritz ?
Das war kein aktiver DTM Fahrer oder ?

 

Bernd Mayländer war's.

 

Exakt.