spdoRacing :: Latest News

Matthew 'Messy' Beattie has this evening joined the team. Messy has shown a lot of enthusiasm at the prospect of joining spdo, and we decided that, despite one or two mistakes in the past, his pace, enthusiasm and friendly nature warranted him a place on our member page!

Messy is a 17-year-old Brit, living in Kidderminster, England. In Live for Speed, he tends to favour the GTRs and open wheelers, which should mean that he fits into the team well alongside our more established members!

Just a couple of months after he joined us, he's gone. Rudy's done a great job in the short time he's been with the team. Inevitably though, when the great F1RST RACING (!!!111) see someone they want, they must have them no matter what.

Good luck to Rudy with his new team.

This evening, Rudy van Buren became the third Dutch driver to join the team!

Rudy, who is 15 years old and lives in Lelystad, Netherlands, has shown a lot of interest in the team recently, and after seeing some impressive league performances from him we finally decided to invite him to join us. In addition to his fast pace, Rudy is also extremely keen, and hopes to drive for the team in the big races very soon!

Rudy also races in real life, his weapon of choice being the westfield; similar to the LX6 in LFS Wink

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Give him a warm welcome guys! Smile

I'm delighted to announce that spdoRacing has signed it's first Spanish driver, 19 year-old Ignacio "Elgar" Garcia.

As always, I've been on the lookout for new drivers and Elgar's great speed and league experience meant that he fit the bill perfectly!

Welcome to the team Ignacio, I hope you enjoy racing with us Smile

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You may have noticed performance issues on the website lately; I believe the source of the problem to be the database server. I've now moved the main database to a different server and hopefully performance will be more consistent now. There's still a problem with attachments which doesn't appear to be database related, I'll try and fix that soon.

Another young German driver joined the team yesterday. Marc "MarcG" Gassner is relatively inexperienced in LFS terms, but has already shown great potential with some quick laptimes despite a very low online mileage.

The German has some sim-racing experience in F1C as well as in rFactor, and when I spoke to him he impressed me with his good English skills and mature attitude.

I think Marc will be a great addition to the team, and I'm sure he'll fit in well with the friendly and relaxed atmosphere in the team!

Welcome to the team from me Marc Smile

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Ex-Scirocco driver, Carsten Horenbaum, this evening became the 23rd driver in spdoRacing's 2+ year history (19 current drivers, about 5 of whom are active Razz

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The 17 year-old German, game alias "KiLl3r" and LFSW name "CarstenH", is an experienced driver in LFS, having driven over 70000 online miles.

He is also an experienced league racer, having competed in the last 4 EAS seasons, narrowly missing out on the EPS promotion/relegation season last time around. Carsten's experience also includes endurance racing, and hopefully he can be an asset in our push to compete in the next Masters of Endurance season.

He's really happy to have joined the team, and is keen to do well with us in the future.

Give him a friendly welcome everyone!

The team has been recruiting a lot of new members this year, and we are showing no sign of stopping! Today, Ramon "FiredUp" Blauwhoff (LFSW: ChristijaNL) from the Netherlands, joined spdoRacing.

Ramon, co-admin of the Dutch LFS league, has been racing in LFS since september 2005. He drives a broad range of cars in LFS, his two most used cars online being the XF GTI and the Formula XR.

I am looking forward to lots of good racing with Ramon in the future, and hopefully we can bring in some more drivers of his standard in the coming months!

The 24 hour race turned out to be an incredible event, driven at a high level throughout and culminating in a breath-taking finish.

This was spdo's first real endurance race, although we had the help of German Hendrik "b0nd" von Eye of n!Faculty, who has taken part in such events in the past. Teemu "Misan" Hirvonen, Josh Di Fabio and Jari "Define" Mattila completed the driver lineup.

Teemu had qualified the car in 4th position, the fastest FZR, out of the 70+ teams competing, 45 of which were GTR teams. Hendrik drove the start, and it went without trouble. After a few laps Hendrik got the car up to 3rd position, and a few laps later was up to 2nd. Vollak of Zocker Tempel (ZT) #024 had got from third up to first on the start, and it was ZT #024 who continued to lead, followed by spdoRacing for the first part of the race.

Some time later, ZT #024 had to insta-pit and this put spdoRacing into a lead which was held for a large portion of the race. Hendrik and Teemu drove the car exceptionally well, until around 2130 UTC, at which point Josh took over, with spdoRacing now holding a 1 lap lead over the second-placed team. Josh, nervy as always, had little time to settle, as, on his third lap, he spun after a poorly judged attempt to lap an LX6 in Turn 1, fortunately only losing a handful of seconds. Upon recovering from this spin, he re-passed the LX6, this time without trouble, until the extremely aggressive Lenker of ZT #024 decided to attempt to go three-abreast with Josh, who was now fully up to speed, and the LX6 into the already tricky entrance to the chicane. This resulted in Josh having to drive straight across the dangerous curbs in the chicane, to avoid hitting Lenker. ZT's #024 team displayed a lack of willing to use their brake pedal behind lapped cars throughout the race.

The consequence of this event would be evident around 40 minutes later, when Josh, who in hindsight should have been less aggressive in the chicane, snapped his front right suspension completely. After an extremely slow lap and a visit to the gravel trap upon realising he could no longer turn left at above 50MPH, Josh pitted to repair the car, and feeling unsettled and nervous during the stint decided to radio Jari and swap drivers earlier than planned. The incident cost spdoRacing around 1 minute including the extended pit-stop to repair the car.

Jari's first two stints were very solid, with only a couple of minor hiccups and stabilised spdoRacing's lead over ZT #024.

When Josh returned to the car, he was very cautious at first when lapping the slower cars, but his confidence grew after a few laps and he was able to drive some better lap times. Unfortunately, around 10 laps into the stint he timed-out, this put ZT #024 back into the lead. Minimizing LFS, Josh opened firefox believing it to be a server crash but realised quickly that the server was infact still running. In a rush to reconnect to the server and continue racing, he didn't realise that he had left the web-based race tracker open and that he was no-longer connected to TeamSpeak, his only means of communicating with the other drivers.

Throughout Josh's first stint following the disconnection, the tracker was refreshing automatically several times on each lap, causing the game to pause for up to half a second, which made the slow corners extremely tricky. Josh actually lapped more quickly and consistantly during this 45 minute stint than he had done before, despite almost losing control a few times during the tracker-inflicted pauses. When entering the pits, he was able to minimize LFS and close the tracker while the car was being refueled. The next stint was better and stabilised the gap somewhat between ZT #024 and spdoRacing.

When Jari returned to the car, for his next double stint, he again drove very solidly without any major hiccups, although by this point he was very tired having only had a couple of hours to sleep before he started driving for the night. It was now around 0500 in Finland, 0200 UTC.

Hendrik had been supposed to drive now, so that Josh could sleep and drive later on. However, Hendrik couldn't match his ability to drive a racing car with his ability to ensure a fully charged mobile-phone. Josh had to drive instead. This, his final double stint came at around 0515 UK time, 0415 UTC and ran until about 0645 UK time, 0545 UTC. Having had no sleep during the night Josh was very tired by this point.

After a relatively event-free couple of stints from Josh, Jari took the driving seat for another two stints running from around 0845 Finnish time, 0545 UTC, to around 1015 Finnish time, 0715 UTC. Two more good stints from Jari, and now Teemu was awake after having his rest for the night.

Teemu drove two more fast stints, followed by a single stint from Jari to give Teemu a break. Teemu then drove another two stints, again with good success. The schedule required Teemu and Jari to sleep at rather awkward times, and both found it rather difficult to manage. Combined with Josh's complete lack of sleep, this resulted in three very tired drivers!

Hendrik returned after this, and drove an outstanding double stint, followed by an exceptional single stint from a tired Teemu. The drivers had managed to reduce an, approximate, 2 lap deficit to leaders ZT #024, by over a minute.

Hendrik drove the final two stints of the race. With around 20 minutes of the race remaining, we informed Hendrik over TeamSpeak that he was now 1 lap and around 6 or 7 seconds behind ZT #024, and we agreed it would be a good result if we could end the race less than one lap behind the German team. You may remember that earlier on I mentioned that ZT #024 had insta-pitted earlier in the race, well, there was a 1 lap penalty for this action. The tracker added this 1 lap penalty with around 15 minutes of the race remaining. We couldn't quite believe our eyes when we saw that we were now only 4 seconds behind ZT #024, and with over 3 laps seperating us from the team in 3rd we told Hendrik over the radio that he was now racing for the win.

Hendrik had been closing on the ZT #024 team with monumental efficiency, and there was a lot of excitement on the official IRC channel of the 24 hour race. However, almost right on queue with the 1 lap penalty being given to ZT #024, Hendrik got caught in traffic. The gap quickly increased to around 11 seconds, and then reduced to about 9 by the end, following Hendrik getting past the GTR backmarker.

We are obviously disappointed to come second following the position we were in, and given the closeness of the finish, but this was still an outstanding result in our first real endurance race.

We would like to thank the organisers for doing such a great job, the team behind the live race stream and also Hendrik for driving for the team, and doing so superbly well!

Today we have moved to a new web server, and with it, a new domain name. We have done this because of instability on the old server, as well as a very low amount of storage space.

www.spdoracing.org should still work for the foreseeable future, but it is advised that you update your bookmarks to point to www.spdoracing.com.

Yes, another new member joins the team! This time it's vincper, our first dutch member, and our youngest member ever. He turns 15 in a month's time!

Vincper mainly drives the formula cars at the moment, and he's devilishly quick given his low number of miles. He's a bit of a hotlapper, so hopefully he can bag the team some WRs in the future Wink

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He's incredibly polite, overly so at first, he was actually being nice to the finns on the spdo IRC channel which isn't how it's supposed to be. So if you think he's coming onto you, he's really just like one of those dogs that whores itself to anyone with it's constant licking of anything that moves.

Anyway, you get the picture, so give him a warm welcome everyone! But remember, he's only a minor Razz

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He's our 4th new member in 2007, which is almost as many as we had join in the whole of 2006, and he's our first Danish driver!

16 year old (don't worry, he seems mature Razz

) Thomas "paavon" Christensen, LFSW name "evans", has been racing LFS since July 2003. He favours the Formula cars, especially the Formula V8.

I know what you are thinking, another scandinavian... I don't like them either but I can't find any drivers from proper countries!

So everyone give him a warm welcome, etc etc etc Smile

We have another new recruit, 20 year old Kenneth "axabaxa" Olsen from Norway has joined the team.

He's a relatively new driver, but is already lightning fast, having got his first world record. Kenneth also tells me he is very interested in league racing, which is good news, and hopefully he can be a part of our attempt to win some leagues in the future, as a team!

So let's all give him a warm welcome, hopefully he will enjoy being a part of the team with all it entails Smile

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Another Finnish driver has joined spdo in the last couple of days. 17 year old Valtteri "Vale" Bottas is relatively new to LFS but is already showing that he has a lot of speed. No suprise if you consider that in real life he is a 3 time Finnish karting champion, and will this year be moving up to race Formula Renault 2000s in the Northern European Cup.

I'm sure Valtteri will make a good addition to the team, so make sure you all give him a warm welcome Smile

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I have been working on the Event Database recently, as a couple of you may have noticed. Please check it out and give me your thoughts (positive / negative).

You can now see the online status of each of the team members, as well as the last time they were active, on the members page.

You may want to delete your browser's file cache, I have updated most of the images on the website in the past couple of days.

He is an extremely experienced racer, is active online and is pretty quick too! I think he will fit in well and prove a good addition to the team.

Although this happened a few weeks ago, the website was not fully functional at the time so I thought it would be appropriate to post this now. He is another finnish driver, and has settled in to the team well. Like many of our drivers, his weapon of choice is the Formula XR and I am sure that he will enjoy racing with us in the future.

To all you internet explorer users out there; please upgrade to mozilla firefox! Anyone in the know will tell you it's faster, more secure and generally more nifty than internet explorer, so please go to http://www.mozilla.com/ now and see this website how it's meant to be seen! (What I'm trying to say is that spdoracing.org doesn't work properly yet in IE6, not sure about IE7...)

Congratulations to Misan and Huppis who finished first and second respectively in the Open Wheel Racing League Season 6 FOX division. Misan won 5 of the 8 races, and claimed second place finishes in 2 of the other 3 races. As usual Misan was extremely strong in qualifying as well, grabbing pole position in all four rounds. What was most impressive about Misan's regular victories, was the fact that he often had to come from far down the grid to win. In OWRL FOX races, the first 8 drivers' starting positions are reversed for the main race. An odd system, considering that the second race is worth double points and one may benefit from finishing lower down on purpose in the first race. Huppis also claimed a thrilling win, by a margin of 0.18s from Misan, and a total of 4 podium finishes from the 8 races, in what was a very strong showing over the course of the season. To see the full standings click here.

Hi guys, you should be able to register on here now and use most of the basic forum features. As i have integrated the forum into the rest of the website, i am having to change a lot of things to get it working properly. Because of this there are still lots of bugs, if you find any, no matter how small, PLEASE post here in this thread and tell me.

Also, if you have any improvement suggestions feel free to post them here as well.