Thoughts on one combined Free Practice session

[AJ]

What are your thoughts on Codemasters combining FP1, 2 and 3 into one 60 minute session? Personally I think it's a bad idea since I used all the time in those sessions in 2010 and 2011 to help me adjust the car, check out the wear on tyres and get used to the tracks.

After playing the game for the first weekend I've got to say that I'm not so keen on this change since it feels like you're pressured into trying to do too much in such a short space of time, it's as if every second counts and it does. From a simulator point of view too it seems ludicrous that they would remove some of the most important sections of the game. If they wanted to, they could have quite easily did an option for a combined Free Practice in the game length settings which I think would have been more than adequate!

Thoughts?

[BassPunk_]

Restart the session if you want more time to test setups etc.

There is no point in the other two in a game.

[RenaultTalisman225]

Originally posted by GTN AJ:

Thoughts?

I think you are right. I really enjoyed doing all three practices (with different weather conditions) to find an adequate setup. But I always accelerated the trainings because three were to long as a whole. Thus only one is OK, too. 60 min seems to be more than enough.

[xplicit]

In the previous versions I never really liked the fact that there was 3 practice session. While it would stay true to the whole F1 experience, sometimes I would just skip FP2 FP3. You couldn't really gauge a strategy by teams or race pace from the sessions anyway.

[Pantha]

I think you're supposed to be able to choose between a full long weekend or a short weekend with full qualifying, but it seems that whichever option you choose it just goes to P3 by default. I think it's a bug which will hopefully be fixed ASAP.

On the other hand, it means you only need to do R&D once, rather than 3 times? :P Although I'm not sure if you really did have to do it all 3 times.. I always did it just in case :P

[AJ]

Originally posted by Pantha:

I think you're supposed to be able to choose between a full long weekend or a short weekend with full qualifying, but it seems that whichever option you choose it just goes to P3 by default. I think it's a bug which will hopefully be fixed ASAP.

On the other hand, it means you only need to do R&D once, rather than 3 times? :P Although I'm not sure if you really did have to do it all 3 times.. I always did it just in case :P

Interesting because I had automatically assumed the same thing but maybe it is a bug. We'll know soon enough when Codies finally push something out there...

Yeah, I always did mine every session too because I wasn't sure. Always found it bizarre though that you did have to.

[Slendamann]

R&D always seems to fail in my game. I do the R&D session with the required setup, but then when I do the qualification, my engineer says something about the R&D part not working - and that's the last I hear of it.

[AJ]

Originally posted by HNRKSN:

R&D always seems to fail in my game. I do the R&D session with the required setup, but then when I do the qualification, my engineer says something about the R&D part not working - and that's the last I hear of it.

Seems strange, I haven't done an R&D objective yet but I'll certainly look out for this when it comes along.

[Camero_Ji]

It looks strange to have only one free practice. I used to have some general adjustments on FP1, long run on FP2 and qualification practice on FP3 while playing F1 2011.

PS, I know it's a 'tough decision' made by CM to combine three free practice into one. Maybe it's a better idea to leave the decision to players?

[AJ]

Me too and after doing another location yesterday one session just isn't enough time to do everything, if it was they wouldn't have 3 sessions in real life!

Just a shame really since this is one feature which I feel really changes the gameplay if you want to put as much work in as possible to learning how your car works and getting to know the tracks.