blog.CarlRydquist.com: Royal Purple Need for Speed Challenge

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This is the place where you will find quick reports directly from my race weekends, plus a lot of other fun stuff going on, not always about racing.

Cheers! /Carl

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Grid before the race, Nordschleife 2008.

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Royal Purple Need for Speed Challenge

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Here's an awesome summary of the Formula D Irwindale event on and off track by Speedhunters.
http://speedhunters.com/archive/2009/10/22/gallery-gt-gt-so-cal-speedhunting-_2D00_-drifting-and-gaming.aspx

As can be seen I was invited to do a Need For Speed: SHIFT video game contest sponsored by Royal Purple, to which I qualified 2nd on the Thursday before the events.

Brands Hatch Indy, BMW M3 GT2
1 Quoc Ly 45.300
2 Carl Rydquist 45.500
3 Darren McNamara 45.830
4 Tony Brakohiapa 45.930
5 Tyler McQuarrie 46.620
6 Vaughn Gittin Jr. 46.660
7 Chris Forsberg 47.850
8 Daijiro Yoshihara 48.310
9 Michael Essa 48.340
10 Tanner Foust 49.790

For the finals I was to compete in a Maserati MC12 in Time Attack mode at the Nurburgring against two other FD drivers. Could it be any better? Sadly I was a bit thrown off by having to stand up(!) and play and I had already had big problems during practice and qualifying to manage to adjust to even use a game controller at all, I never raced a car standing up and I always used a steering wheel in all racecars so far...

The Nordschleife is my 2nd home and I can drive it mentally with closed eyes more or less spot on the second for each reference point if I am visualizing racing it with a Porsche 996 GT3 RSR. So that part was easy. The game is even so realistic that a few spots really reward you for taking the right line - or hurt you a lot for taking the wrong line. Impressive.

In practice I ran 6.53 at best and most of the time around 6.55-6.56 playing it a bit safe. However came the race challenge, the others got an important advantage as DMac was late and I had to go first; they could see me backing away from the screen several times during the first 3rd of the lap. The radio cord we had to wear was too short and the default standing position was too close to the screen so the perspective got really skewed and resulted in a couple of off-road excursions. Eventually got back enough to get a flow, almost snapping the radio cord off.

The few seconds lost didn't worry me yet, I had reference points and was still going for around 6.57-6.58 which I know would be hard to beat under these conditions, however a few additional errors with the game controller from standing up to play, were enough to loose more important seconds. Not good... I went all out towards the end and manged to limit the damage, but only took a 7.05. That hurt a lot.

It took almost a full day to accept such a lousy performance from myself. It had been easier to handle putting something like a regular 6.57 or so and then see Quac put a 6.56 and lose to that, then I would have at least did a decent job myself. As it was now, I gave it away and Quac took it easily with a 7.00. I am not used to performing poorly in a racing situation and I am incredibly competitive, which also has made for all the success so far, so this was tough to handle, especially in combination with a broken engine on the City Tire drift car.

Anyway, the Royal Purple sponsored Need for Speed: SHIFT competition was a brilliant idea and I am in a way proud after all, it was a super close qualifying between gamers and racers who are all very good Formula Drift drivers and Champions, so very cool to know that even though I suck at game controllers, my real racing skills made up for it.

It was a really good adrenaline rush, competitive action and great for the overall show. Jarrod DeAnda, the FD regular commentator came down from the FD booth to do a good job by entertaining the audience and making it sound authentic and exciting, giving facts about the drivers, the NFS: SHIFT game and also doing his share to be in our ears during our laps.

It also definitely served as even further motivation in my preparation for upcoming racing events, added to Formula Drift. I really missed competitive racing lately so I am glad I have some upcoming stuff already planned.

Labels: Events, Media, Misc

posted by Carl Rydquist @ 12:57 PM

1 Comments:

At January 26, 2010 10:28 PM, Anonymous said…

You are so driven! 2009 was a fun year and 2010 will be too!

-Jen