Easy to grab (just build yourself a Beetle or something), in a fun championship to boot (D500 on the proper tracks to run them on).
I’m sure there will be “metagame” builds for this car, but I don’t expect it to be competitive. It’s supposed to be enjoyed for what it is. I’m not sure how accurate the sound is, but it does remind you of an old plane engine, as expected. The suspension is fully modeled and animated. The car is fun to drive, as long as you drop the triassic (older than jurassic!) stock brakes for a Street kit. Indeed, the Napier-Railton will take 260 meters (!) to stop from 160-0 kph and the brakes are so weak they don’t even make my left trigger vibrate! Street brakes more than halve the distance.
No Forza aero, nor crazy engine swaps (with 1700 Nm on your right foot, do you really need a new one?) makes it even more anti-establishment than commonly thought. This is a car for the automotive, engineering, heck, the history enthusiast. Vintage Racers is usually a class where skill prevails over machine and the Naiper-Railton feels right at home in it. A must have for anyone with petrol in their veins!
It really is an awesome car, and for what it’s worth, the reason the stock brakes suck so much is because the Napier-Railton doesn’t actually have any front brakes at all, only rears. Though I haven’t upgraded mine so I don’t know if adding street/sport/race brakes adds a front set or not.
I see. It even adds to its quality in the game. The rear will break loose very easily under braking, as if with a 100% rear bias. Nice bit of info, thanks.
Street brakes will give the car a “proper” set of brakes. The stock brakes are probably just tuned to 100% rear bias in the files, and worse stopping power as well. I left mine at B630 with the Street brakes, it’s very fun to drive.
I agree, it’s a great addition and one of the most fun and unique new cars we’ve gotten in a long time - and the deep rumbling engine sound is just unbelievably great. So far I refused to water down the driving experience by upgrading the brakes or anything else - it’s a heck of a wild ride, and I absolutely love it. It’s not meant to be competitive in multiplayer, or even to be useful for winning races at all - but it’s the perfect freeroam car if you’re looking for a pretty extreme driving (and listening) experience.
I have to agree. One of the best additions in the last months.
Built it to B700 and although it uses stock tires and no aero it does not care about ~2000Nm torgue.
Of course not a performance car but so much fun to drive, especially with stock suspension.
Will test it today against the other vintage racer on B700 on my test track. Maybe its class-unique race brakes upgrade can make a difference.
Please don’t take this as a personal criticism, because so many people say that sort of thing that it’s totally understandable why the idea is so pervasive. But torque in isolation means nothing at all, it only has meaning when the rpm is also specified. It’s perhaps easier to understand if you think about a cyclist. A cyclist could use a really long gear and apply immense torque at 1rpm, but they wouldn’t move very fast. They accelerate and move much faster by applying low torque at high rpm. The product of torque and rpm is related to power by a constant factor, i.e. it’s really power that determines the ability to break traction. People get confused because they say things like “but there are cars with high torque that are beasts at spinning the wheels at low rpm”. If one car has higher torque than another at the same rpm, then it also has more power in direct proportion to the difference in torque, so sure, it will be more able to spin the wheels because it has more power at the same rpm.
The other thing that affects the ability to break traction is the speed at which you’re delivering a given power. Force = power divided by velocity, so for the same power, the force at the tyre contact patch reduces with speed. So a car that produces its power lower down the rev range might produce that power at lower speed, depending on the gear ratio, and hence more easily break traction.
