Race 07

[Art Blade]

Race 07 by SimBin, 2007

A friend recently recommended this game to me which seems a bit funny given that the game is six years old. He is one of the members of a TDU2 (Test Drive Unlimited 2) racing club I am a co-founder of. A few other members already bought Race 07 so I joined them and yet another member has just bought it. It is infectious and spreading :) Rumour has it that real life drivers or ex-drivers such as Rubens Barrichello play online because it is so realistic.

First off, it is a simulation, not a game. Someone once said, don't pay attention to the graphics which are just basic yet they are still quite OK, pay attention to how well the physics are done and how great the racing experience is; it is well optimised, you'll easily get 200 fps.

What is really special about this sim is that it has been supported and developed since its release. It is not limited to a set of tracks and a set of cars of one particular class. There are so many add-ons available I lost track of how many there are. You'll get races ranging from MiniCooper to Formula1 and tracks and race events for all classes from 2007 until recently; the newest addition is from 2012 as far as I can tell.

I bought the SimBin Megapack on steam (again thanks for your help, Binnatics :) ) which includes every add-on except "Race Room" which is a free DLC and includes F1 cars.

It sports single player races, practice, arcade mode, time challenges, online races which may be password-protected (good if you don't want to get involved with the average internet punks just go private) and LAN (!) races and what not; so many things to do with it. You can even download other people's car setups when they're online. Nice.

Here a vid which basically sums it up very nicely.

Race 07 - Race sims you never heard of Pt 2

This is the main menu. As you can see, there are loads of options already
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This is "additional events" so I can practice a bit on a track I don't know or I want to improve my lap time. Note the menu above "11Silverstone," it starts with 2010 and goes all the way to the right.. more race types and tracks :) The "add on" will be there only if you downloaded custom tracks.. in case you haven't got enough already  :-D
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Here you see no less than FORTY different class types. Each with its own set of cars..
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..among which you'll find known and unknown types. Ever heard of Lister?
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Just pick a car.. the appearance (ads on the car, colours) vary but you can't customise that unless you get a mod (and there are mods for about everything. I got one that removes the helmet view in F1 cars so you can see better)
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Loading screen showing the upcoming track
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Just one example of how detailed this sim is. You can tune your car to your heart's content and save those files which are specific for both the car and track it's being used on.
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In case you want to test what tunings other players came up with, you may download them online (note the button in the lower right corner) there will be a list of available setups if other players are currently online with a matching setup. Cool :)
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Out the pit. You may notice that there is no steering wheel.. I chose an option to get rid of it since I got a wheel on my desk -- no need to see yet another wheel. Excellent :) You can choose between various different HUD layouts and camera views. Even adjust your seat position, up-down and forwards-backwards. MOST excellent  :) :-X
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On the track. Not exactly eye-candy but good enough. You won't have time to admire details anyway. While on track.. you get replays of all kinds if you like and may save them automatically. There is an option to chase your own or someone else's ghost car (try to beat yourself).
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[Jim di Griz]

You're right, I've not heard of it  ^-^ That looks like too much fun and incredibly cheap too. I can see any number of the 'spoilt generation' out there complaining about the lack of tyre deformation and other difficult to implement factors - but I think that's a solid game.

Now, where did I put that gaming PC...

[Binnatics]

 ^-^

Impressive review Art!! And indeed, that game is huge :o

40 different classes, meaning there's got to be something for everyone 8)

Have fun in there!

[Art Blade]

Yesterday was great: I had set up a password-protected dedicated server and four members of my racing club joined so we had five drivers on track.

Basically we re-created what we used to do in TDU2: One massive practice session (server countdown set to 999 minutes) which allowed everyone to pop in and out as they saw fit, on top the server offered access to every car class so you could pick what you liked best. I had set up one race track, Nürburgring. We ended up with four Formula1 racing cars and one BMW M3 which was a tad slower than the rest (fastest guys did lap times of 1:29.1 and the BWM 2:05.6) but no one minded it. When you needed a break or wanted to do some car tuning you just hopped back to the pit. There the sim offers a race monitor which is the same as you might know from replay options: Observe and watch cars. Choose and switch cars, camera angles and so forth, up to a bumper cam view that showed the road ahead of a car so you could observe the track almost from the same perspective that you get when driving a car yourself. Very nice along with a coffee..  :-D

All five of us were also communicating via voice chat in a private conference chat room using the steam interface. It was a lot of laughing and bantering and driving and chatting, we enjoyed it very much. Gotta love this sim :)

[Binnatics]

Sounds really great! The steam chat must be a great advantage to the setup you used to play in TDU2w, where text chat was the way I remember ;)

[PZ]

Sounds like loads of fun, AB  :-X

You running this server out of your home?

[Art Blade]

yes :) but only if and when I like to. So no 24/7 server, but the guys know it's up when my steam profile reads "in game, Race 07 dedicated server" :-D It's been quite busy -- whenever I have it up and running, some of the guys pop in and race a bit. And I'm usually joining  :-()