A Nice Sunday Ride

Here we go again! Time is money and if you snooze, you lose (© Martin Faber), so let’s start quickly with the raceweek recap of the 4Fun team guys activity! Well, if we were talking about Omer Kinay we would already reached the end of the recap, so it’s better to slow down a little – except for Matteo Venuti of course, since he doesn’t know the meaning of the word “slow” and consequently never slows down.

Since we mentioned Omer Kinay, one major question goes on top: when will he get back to the track? Everyone in the team misses his perfectly setupped roaring engine noises, especially Gianluca Roncaglia, that in order to ease his nostalgia called “PhantOmer” the ghost car he uses for practicing, although he quickly dropped that since he wasn’t able to beat one single laptime anymore, being instead lapped a couple of times. Rumors says that in the Caribbean island where he lives now Kinay is designing a track for his own private racing, only puzzled with how to avoid the palm tree just in the middle of the final straight. Well, Omer, in the tracks of the rest of the world you’ll find pure tarmac, why don’t you take a look?

Meanwhile, Matteo Venuti gets back to his usual and solid rig after a period of experiments, like keeping the racing wheel on his legs – he needs challenge, and he knows the word “easy” as he knows the word “slow”. Anyway, once again throughout the week Venuti experienced some lag issues during the game, and he solved that by completely rewriting the Assetto Corsa code, getting also the copyright of the game from Kunos and consequently renaming it Matteo Corsa. Moreover, Venuti was still struggling with disconnections during races, and he asked for consulting to the top expert on the matter, Dario Bucalo, but they’re still working on it with some difficulties since their vocal chats on Discord are continuously breaking down. Despite all that, Venuti is still fighting for the top places in all the series he attends, especially the one with the Lotus 49. For the last race in Monza the winner will be the one who will be able to stay on the track all the time with that damn uncontrollable car, so probably there will be no winner at all.  

And talking about expertise, the King of Modding Dario Bucalo finally introduced Gianluca Roncaglia to the mysterious ways and pleasures of the Custom Shaders Patch, Crew Chief and Sol extensions, teaching him step by step how to install and configure them, not declining the verbs in his explanations in order to make it easier and swipe that idiotic look from Roncaglia’s face. After an initial struggle – in the Sol mod everything was black and white and with a 800×600 resolution, and the Crew Chief voice was in ancient Latin – Roncaglia finally took confidence with all the changes and started deeply configuring Sol, being hypnotized on the slider for the brightness of stars at night. He took his time to see if it was better to keep the value at 100% or to increase it to 105%, deciding after 8 hours of testing to switch it to 103%. Roncaglia plans to perfectly configure all the options within the end of 2021, taking also a pause from racing in order to save time.

To complete his teaching training course, Bucalo showed also to Roncaglia how to install the L.A. Canyons mod and invited him for a relaxing Sunday ride on the winding Los Angeles canyon roads. Initially Roncaglia was a bit lost in search of starting lights and opponents, then thought about ramming other cars or to rob a bank in a Grand Theft Auto style, but then he took his pace and enjoyed the ride, although he destroyed almost 3 km of guard rails while driving his too powerful Nissan GT-3 Nismo, while Bucalo was searching for rare flowers offroad with his Chevrolette. A nice and pleasant ride, indeed! Of course during the week Bucalo and Roncaglia also raced in Okayama with their Cupra, but who cares? L.A. modding is the new racing! Have a nice Sunday ride too, and stay tuned for the final week report!

P.S.: Omer Kinay is evaluating how to name his private track. The candidates are Somer Point, Doningtomer and Hockinaym. Any suggestions?

Playlist of the week:

Vic Chesnutt – Where Were You (for Omer Kinay)

Elastica – Connection (for Matteo Venuti)

XTC – Mayor of Simpleton (for Gianluca Roncaglia)

New Riders of the Purple Sage – Lonesome L.A. Cowboy (for Dario Bucalo)