SuperKa Races

awaiting confirmed data and pictures

P

erhaps the most challenging aspect of the Gran Turismo games is to race against cars that have an advantage compared to your own. The simplest way to do this is to enter a race in a low powered car. And it is this way that I get the most from the SuperKa.

It’s a sub-200 PS front wheel drive supermini, and even with optimised gearing and suspension, it is not all that rapid. An interesting race might be a Subaru Impreza WRX STi, with 270 PS, all wheel drive, and rally tuned suspension. Well, perhaps, but the extensive modifications to the Ka’s engine, gearing, suspension and braking, coupled with the light weight of the Ka, means that it will be quicker of the duo on a racing track.

But the trouble with the computer drivers in the Gran Turismo series is that they are reasonably easy to defeat. In each game, the other cars get quicker and meaner - in the original game, they all follow one another, in the second game, they are rather more active. And in the third game, they can be downright mean. But they are repetitive: it’s much better to play against a human player.

There are lots of reasons, but the primary one is that most human player has the capacity to think about the tactics of the situation, and assess the strategy. A human player won’t always follow the racing line, and will make mistakes, or will deliberately block an overtaking manoeuvre - this little injection of chaos makes a lot of difference.

It’s all the more exciting when you pit two identical cars up against one another, because the loser cannot claim that his or her car was inferior. But by the same token, different cars and different set ups suit different drivers. My own driving style tends to prefer cars that only slide when provoked, with a few exceptions. A fairer compromise would be to agree on a certain car, with a given number of modifications, and then let the players tune the car to suit their own driving style. However, this does have its problems - especially if there is just the one Playstation between the two of them.

An alternative is to use cars with similar headline figures. For this, I often match the SuperKa up with the SuperCinq. These two cars are very well matched on paper, and each car has specific strengths and weaknesses. The Ka’s chassis is excellent and it has lots of grip, plus decent mid range heave, but it’s easy to scrub off too much speed when cornering. The Cinquecento’s chassis is not so thorough and it does require precision driving to get the most out of it - if you make a mistake, you do tend to scrub off a lot of speed. It also tends to lose out on tracks where there is a gradient to climb (such as Deep Forest), since the engine lacks torque compared with the Ka, and it doesn’t tend to make ground up on the way down, either, because it is a very lightweight machine.