FMUK Open Cup

Time for me to try my hand at marketing I guess. One thing I should point out before the off - I'm an engineer by trade and, as anyone familiar with Dilbert will know, Engineers and marketing don't usually make good bedfellows. So apologies for the lacklustre style, and please don't feel I'm trying to gatecrash the IFCA party.

Starting 4th July (already a bad start for Americans I know!), we're going to be running the FMUK Open Cup at www.forzamotorsport.co.uk The Cup will be run over two Seasons, each of 4 weeks (if I'm honest, this was just so we qualified to give away one of T10's unicorns as a prize). Being a UK based site, the comps will be running at UK friendly hours. While I know that this correlates to US unfriendly hours, it would be great to see some of you have a look in, even better to race you. The competition will run every Thursday evening at 9pm British Standard Time (I believe this is 4pm EST) with 31st July forming a break between seasons.

So, what does the FMUK Open Cup involve? Basically, it's one of our more ambitious attempts at a series. It could all go horribly wrong, but pre-season testing suggests that racing is actually likely to be quite close, strategic and with lots of opportunities for everyone to get involved in the action. Full details are in the link to the sign-up thread below (be warned, I did get a bit carried away writing the rules, but most of it is just "what if's" for comp organisers and you won't be expected to learn them by rote:blah::

http://www.forzamotorsport.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=185
The main points of the series are:

Drivers may run any car which starts in F, E or D Class built to 500PI apart from the cars listed in the thread above.

Any build is allowed subject to 3 restrictions:
1) No drivetrain swaps are allowed
2) All cars must have a roll cage (or highest upgrade possible where the roll cage option is unavailable)
3) All cars must run on drag tyres

Qualifying is a one flying-lap showdown (superpole). Races will last for approximately 55 minutes - with the drag tyres we're expecting little difference between 1- and 2-stop strategies - that's up to you. There are no restrictions on when, or how often you pit.

PI will be amended between races depending on your finishing positions. This is intended to bring everyone together as the season progresses, whatever car you run or how skilled you are as a driver. When we simulated this pre-season, by the equivalent of week 4, four very different driver/car combinations finished within 1.5 seconds in a 3 lap race at Suzuka.

Unfortunately, I won't get back here until Monday, but feel free to ask questions or check out the thread above if you're interested.

Thanks for reading,

Spiny