Gaming Through They Eyes of a Noob

In the last few weeks, there was two F1 mods released for the popular car racing simulator, rFactor, the 1993 F1 mod, that I will review later, and this one, the 1999 F1 mod, by WCP.

The 1999 season of Formula One was the second year running of the rivalry that can be seen between Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher, and McLaren’s reigning world champion, Mika Hakkinen. All seems lost for Ferrari when Schumacher broke his leg at Britain that year, but his teammate Eddie Irvine suprisingly continued Ferrari’s challenge. Thankfully he fell short in the end.

This is reflected in the mod, which features all cars, liveries and drivers from the 1999 season. You can even choose Mika Salo, who subbed in for Schumacher after his crash. Liveries are well painted, and reflected all the paint scheme that was seen during that season, and you can choose between ones with tobacco or non tobacco sponsorship.

Weirdly, the default car setting for the mod is the low speed setup that is used for (at the time unchanged) Hockenheim and Monza, and not, as people would expect, a medium setup. This confused me for a while when I can’t seem to get my wings to go more than 9 clicks in the car setup menu

This leads to some interesting result. Its seems that with the default settings + low wings, you CAN drive the car comfortably, as I tested at Spa. I hardly feel any understeer, and I didn’t even loose time in the 2nd sector, which is made out of the twisty section of Spa. There is much grip, TOO MUCH in my opinion actually. Even without traction control, the car doesn’t feel like it’s going to throw it’s back out, and I can take Eau Rouge at full throttle with low wings! I think WCP need to look into this matter. It makes driving the car too easy and you don’t really have to care about the wings much, which doesn’t seem logical considering that it’s a V10 era with grooved tyres.

The car model itself does not really look well rendered, and looks really boxy when viewed from far away. Mind you I have the car model settings on FULL at the menu, and yet they look kinda crude. I hope they release a better, high res model and texture of the car, as it’s seems like a waste to see all those liveries that they painted look really ugly in game.

Might need a few more spin with the mod, but my initial view for this is that it’s a good mod for you to relieve the 1999 season, but if you want a real challenge with better physics, CTDP ‘05 and ‘06 is a better choice, that is until I review the 1993 mod, which seems promising.

Rig
Intel Core2Quad Q8200
Windows 7 Ultimate (32bit)
nVidia GTS250
4X 1GB Kingston HyperX ram (3GB physically used)
rFactor 1.255 (running at 1680*1050)
Logitech G25 (200° rotation)