u/DiabolicallyOrange

I shall apologise in advance but this will be a very long post. I am a quite stoned, and I like writing so here you go. There shall be a TL;DR at the end.

I'm sure many of you will have seen Jimmy Broadbent's video on why sim racing needs games like Forza. You see, I am the kind of person he describes. I have played games like Forza Horizon since Horizon 2, and recently after getting increasingly frustrated by how it's impossible to have any kind of proper racing on that game, decided to throw myself into sims.

Now because I like to make things difficult for myself, I decided to build a sim rig as seen in the photo. Ignore the shitty seat padding and very much bodged wheel mount, both have been fixed. Also ignore that the screen is standing on two cardboard boxes, it works and I'll fix it when I can be bothered!

To answer a few questions that came up when I shared my rig on reddit before:

• The plans are from RaceKit.
• It can be hand cut or CNC milled. I hand cut it and, even though I'm terrible at all things practical, it somehow went together fine.
• It's stiff enough to handle a Moza R5 and my 95kg fat arse.
• With some thicker padding on the seat it's perfectly comfy. Longest session I've done so far was 3 hours and it was absolutely fine.

The next problem was finding a good game to start with. Figure I'll start with the games I already own. All I was looking for was something towards the sim end of the spectrum, and with some kind of career progression.

BeamNG? Not really a sim, but could be a fun way to break in the rig. Did a bit of googling to figure out how to get it to recognise the R5, set all the in-game settings to what seemed to be the right numbers from what I could find. Absolutely undriveable. No idea why but the force feedback was just completely broken. Couple of hours trying to figure it out and I gave up.

F1 2020? I know that this is regarded as one of the better games in the series, and it's got a career mode so maybe. Controls set up fine, but it just wasn't enjoyable. It's my first ever racing wheel setup so I suck, but I don't want to start turning driver aids on because where's the fun if the game is doing all the hard work for me. Even if you start the career mode in F2, those cars are still bloody quick and with no driver aids are a bit tricky. Add in that you're racing on street circuits half the time where there's no margin for error, just alive or dead, and the fact that the career progression is just "do one long race after another, in the same car every time" and I just wasn't having fun.

Forza Horizon 6? I tried it, the game doesn't feel that great on a wheel but I did have a bit of fun just hooning around the countryside for a while. Not really what I'm looking for though, and given that escaping Horizon was what drove me to sim racing in the first place, I'm hardly going to be playing much of this!

Assetto Corsa Competizione? No career mode and holy crap the learning curve is a damn cliff face. No thank you.

Assetto Corsa? Now here we go, a game I know is popular, this must be good. Right? Game picks up my wheel fine, that's a good start. Then I find that the games in-built career mode is just kind of shit. No problem, a quick google search shows there's some really good looking career mode mods that are right up my alley. Turns out that if you're new to it, modding Assetto Corsa can be a pain in the ass. I ended up trying 3 different career mods and I am damn sure I followed the instructions correctly.

The first mod wouldn't even boot.

The second mod crashed about half a lap into the first race every single time.

The third mod required downloading about 10GB of car and track mods. I got about half way through installing them and just got fed up and quit.

I'll be honest, having spent an entire weekend trying to set this thing up, I felt like shit. Two full days and all I'd done was about half an hour messing around in Forza and a couple of unenjoyable hours of F1 2020.

The rig sat there in the corner of my home office, untouched, for about three weeks. I thought I'd made a mistake, that I'd thrown a bunch of money down the drain for something I hated. Times were not good ladies & gentlemen.

Then I stumbled on a 5 minute youtube video with some clickbaity title. "Why everybody is flocking to this sim" or something stupid like that. The annoying man in the voiceover, you know the type, was getting all excited about Automobilista 2. He was very annoying so I stopped the video after about 60 seconds, but I did go to Steam to look at the game.

God damn there's a lot of DLC, that's a bad sign, but it looks like there's loads of content in the base game anyway so that's fine. A quick google search confirms it works well with my wheel, and it looks like mods are easy to install and there's a few good looking career mode mods out there, so let's give it a go.

I love this game.

In the last two days I've spent about 14 hours in the game.

The career mode mod I chose took about 4 clicks to install, integrated seamlessly into AMS2, has not given me a single technical issue. It's ridiculously in depth and is by far and away the most fun I've ever had with a racing game. Honestly, Reiza need to hire this guy because they won't be able to make anything better.

I've just finished a series of Caterham Academy and had an absolute blast. I don't know how realistic it is, but it feels realistic enough to me. I've got noticeably better over the last couple of days because I've started in nice slow cars . You don't get mercilessly punished for every tiny mistake, and you're racing on tracks with nice big runoff areas, so you can push the limits and play around to find what works.

During my series I've done a couple of kart races, the TSI cup in a little VW Polo, a couple of fun tracks in the Ginetta G40 Cup, and a vintage touring car event in a Mini. Every single one of them has been a blast.

The only lowlight was the Formula Vee's. "Oh look, an entry level Formula series. This'll be fun." I thought. Alas, I was mistaken. Those things are right little bastards. The only way to drive them without spinning is to be incredibly smooth and gentle with your inputs and think ahead to make sure you're always braking in a straight line because they will spin if you have even a degree of steering angle. You know what newbies are very bad at doing? Being smooth with their inputs and setting up correctly for corners.

I hate them with every fibre of my being.

Anyway, I think I got sidetracked.

The world of sim racing can be quite intimidating for total novices like myself. There's no end of rabbit holes to fall down trying to figure out how to get started. There's nothing with a good career mode out of the box unless you absolutely love F1, and the most commonly suggested option is an absolute ballache to mod.

AMS2 is a bloody gem!

A metric ton of cars, worked seamlessly with my wheel, an incredible career mode mod set up in minutes and it's just great fun. It's made me feel validated in my decision to build a rig!

I can't imagine that anybody from Reiza looks at this subreddit, but if they do then thank you for making a great game!

I don't really know where I'm going with this, so I shall end these stoned ramblings here. I fully expect to be back in a couple of months, once I'm a bit less crap, to ask about the best way to get involved with online races. If any of you ever see this username in a lobby, I apologise in advance!

TL;DR - Automobilista good.

When I was a teenager, 20+ years ago, I had a really crappy desk mounted steering wheel and sunk many an hour playing Grand Prix 4.

Now that I'm an adult with free will, and a bit of money, I decided to throw myself into some sim racing, but I'm also a bit weird so I decided to build instead of buy.

It definitely needs a little bit of strengthening, at 6'3" 95kg it has to work quite hard, and god damn did building it remind me how crap I am at woodwork, but it was good fun and (once I've loosened up the tolerances a bit) very adjustable rig. I have no doubt it'll evolve over the coming months, but for now I'm happy! Holds up to the forces from a Moza R5 perfectly. Would likely need a redesign for anything more powerful, but I suspect I'll be sticking with the R5 for the foreseeable future.

Please ignore the bodged wheel mount, I'm still waiting on a proper universal mount to be delivered and I didn't want to wait! I'm also waiting for some proper padding for the seat, so for now I've just glued a couple of yoga mats on there. Not amazing but I get about 80 minutes before my bum starts to go numb, so it'll do for now!

Looking forward to sinking many an hour into AC, ACC and LMU.

When I was a teenager, 20+ years ago, I had a really crappy desk mounted steering wheel and sunk many an hour playing Grand Prix 4.

Now that I'm an adult with free will, and a bit of money, I decided to throw myself into some sim racing, but I'm also a bit weird so I decided to build instead of buy.

It definitely needs a little bit of strengthening, at 6'3" 95kg it has to work quite hard, and god damn did building it remind me how crap I am at woodwork, but it was good fun and (once I've loosened up the tolerances a bit) very adjustable rig. I have no doubt it'll evolve over the coming months, but for now I'm happy! Holds up to the forces from a Moza R5 perfectly. Would likely need a redesign for anything more powerful, but I suspect I'll be sticking with the R5 for the foreseeable future.

Please ignore the bodged wheel mount, I'm still waiting on a proper universal mount to be delivered and I didn't want to wait! I'm also waiting for some proper padding for the seat, so for now I've just glued a couple of yoga mats on there. Not amazing but I get about 80 minutes before my bum starts to go numb, so it'll do for now!

Looking forward to sinking many an hour into AC, ACC and LMU.

Given they're one of the favourites, we could soon have two World Cup winners at the club!

Have we ever had a World Cup winner on the books before?