The Rendition version of IndyCar II is currently my favorite of all the sims. I'm not alone in this; ICR2 seems to be generally regarded as the sim for the purists, who place realism in the racing experience above all else.
ICR2 is the oldest of the sims reviewed here in terms of its design, and this age shows in its dated menu system and lack of networked play. The menu system is less attractive than that of either GP2 or NASCAR2, and the structure of its menu hierarchy is awkward; for example, if you're modem racing, you can't adjust certain important parameters without disconnecting from the modem link first.
But oh, those graphics! While the original version of ICR2 was state-of-the-art in late 1995 when it was released, its graphics have since been eclipsed by GP2, which has much better texture mapping and a variety of visual improvements which lend greater realism. When GP2 came out in the summer of 96, this realism was so appealing that I stopped playing ICR2 altogether.
Then Sierra released the Screamin' 3D video accelerator card, which included a new version of ICR2 which supports the Rendition chipset used on the Screamin' 3D.
The result is awesome. On a Pentium 133, with the Screamin' 3D card, you can leave on all the detail, and get a frame rate in the high 20's to low 30's. The cars are vividly real, the scenery lush, the motion smooth and the response to the controls is instantaneous. There is nothing like it! This sim shows that the best software 3D is just no match for doing it in the hardware.
Several of the tracks in this new version of ICR2 have been revised to take advantage of the 3D card, with more lush and detailed scenery, and clouds in the sky. The effect simply has to be seen to be believed. With headphones on to give you the full audio effect, and a wheel and pedals for input devices, you may find your palms sweating, your heart racing; you may even flinch when the car hits the wall!
ICR2 has other strengths. Because its vehicle dynamics accurately reproduce those of a real Indycar, it is immensely satisfying to drive. With a good setup, on a track with a lot of slow and medium-speed turns, you can pitch the car sideways, squeeze the throttle, give it some opposite lock, and drift through the corners like Fangio. I especially love the Turn 6/7 sequence at Long Beach for this.
Other responses are equally realistic. Pitch and weight distribution changes from braking or accelerating cause oversteer or understeer appropriately. Too much throttle in a slow corner, and the tail comes around. In a well-balanced car, you can induce oversteer or understeer as you wish, just as with a real car. My training in the Skip Barber schools, where I learned trail braking, comes in very handy, especially at some of the street circuits like Detroit and Long Beach.
Of course, this is a sim, and it does have certain limitations. There is no feedback through the steering wheel or pedals, or through the seat of your pants, so you have only visual and audio input to tell you what's happening. On the good side, your neck doesn't get sore from fighting the G forces, and there's no vibration to blur your vision. No bugs on the visor, either!
ICR2 has some excellent audio cues. When the tire slip angles reach a certain limit, the tires start to squeal. Thus, despite the fact that you don't have the steering go light when the front wheels break loose, you can still sense understeer by steering angle, the lack of steering response, and the squealing noises.
Oversteer is more difficult. There doesn't seem to be tire squeal as consistently as there is with understeer. In a real car, there are certain inertial cues I'm used to which tell me when the tail is starting to go, but of course these are missing in any sim. At first, it was very difficult for me to sense when the tail end was letting go, but eventually I learned to interpret the subtle shift in the rate of turn displayed when this was happening. I also learned to anticipate a power slide, from my experience with grip and the car's response to throttle inputs, but it's still harder to powerslide an ICR2 car than, for example, a real dirt track kart or a Formula Ford.
Of course, some of this difficulty may be related to the horsepower differential. With 800 hp, an Indycar is going to react a lot more agressively to mashing the throttle than a 120 hp Formula Ford! Also, with large slicks and a few thousand pounds of downforce, the speeds through the corners are a whole lot faster, and in general things happen much more quickly. I was most aware of this when driving on tracks where I'd raced real cars, such as Mid-Ohio.
I could go on about this all day, but I'd better tell you about some of the other features.
One of the best features is the ability to create and save your own car setups. You go to the "Garage", and you can adjust front and rear wing angle, shock/spring stiffness, gear ratios, tire compounds and pressures, and camber on all four wheels. You can also adjust the steering ratio by increasing or decreasing the amount of lock available, and you can adjust tire stagger on the rear wheels. In the garage, you can add or remove fuel. In the pits, you can also adjust wing angles and tire pressures and compounds, as well as the amount of fuel you want to take on, and in the pits or in motion you can adjust roll bar stiffness, front and rear; brake balance, front to rear; and turbo boost.
All of these factors make significant differences in the way the car responds. I can't begin to claim expertise in this area, but, starting with some setups given to me by some real experts, I've managed to come up with setups I like better than the stock setups for a number of tracks. Each track comes with four setups, titled Easy, Fast, Ace, and Qual. The Easy setup has lots of downforce, so it's good to start with, while you're learning the tracks and also while you're adjusting to how quickly things happen with an 800 hp, 1400 pound car!
The Fast and Ace setups have less downforce, and therefore are faster in a straight line, but take more skill to drive because with less downforce, the car is more skittish. At most tracks, the Qual setup is identical to the Ace setup except it has less fuel on board.
Generally, once I've mastered the track to some degree, I find I can go quicker with one or the other of these setups than I can with the Easy setup. However, none of the stock setups are optimum. For example, at Long Beach, with any of the stock setups, it's very difficult to take the sweeper on the main straight flat-out without spinning. After I tweaked a setup someone had given me for Surfer's Paradise, giving it wing angles appropriate to Long Beach, this challenging sweeper became a non-corner.
This setup had lower tire pressures and dramatically different spring/shock rates than any of the stock Long Beach setups, and made the car far more "tossable", particularly at Turns 6 and 7, and I was able to go about four seconds a lap faster than my best with a stock setup. But I tried the same setup at Cleveland, with wing angles similar to those on the Cleveland Ace setup, and it was a disaster.
Developing a good setup is both an art and a science. I won't expound on my limited knowledge here, but perhaps in a future article some expert can give us some clues.
While the driving and the science of setup comprise the heart of the simulation, there are a number of other important and useful features. From the main menu, you can enter a series of menus which allow you choose the type of input device (keyboard or joystick) for braking and steering and, if joystick(s), you can calibrate the axes. Wheel and pedals are considered joysticks, and are calibrated the same way. You can choose buttons or keys for shifting up and down, and going in reverse.
You can also choose to let ICR2's "onboard computer" do your shifting for you, and, if you really want help, it will also do your braking for you, and it will point your car in the right direction again after you spin. I've only used automatic braking and spin recovery a couple of times, but I use automatic shifting all the time. I just can't spare the brain power from steering and braking in order to think about shifting too, and if I turn off automatic shifting, I invariably blow the engine before the end of the first lap! Also, I find that taking my right hand off the wheel to hit the shift lever causes me to jiggle the wheel, which generally leads to a spin.
You can enter your own name, team name, and home town (although only your name seems to be used anywhere else in the sim), and choose the type of chassis (Reynard, Lola, or Penske), engine (Ford, Mercedes, or Honda), and tires (Firestone or Goodyear). You can choose the number of computer-generated opponents to race against (and their names), along with specifying how many ahead of you and behind you will be displayed and how many will be heard. These factors affect the frame rate, since it takes processing power to compute the path of other cars, and to display them and generate the sounds they make.
The sounds, by the way, are one of the more realistic aspects of ICR2. I believe the audio is supposed to have been digitized from a real Indycar, and it's quite convincing. Being able to hear the car ahead of you is something that surprised me; it's one of the aspects of real racing that ICR2 reproduces and which enhances the sense of realism.
You can also hear cars behind and beside you, which I never did in real racing, but, hey, maybe you can in Indycars! When you go by the pits and it's full of cars idling, you can hear their growl at idle. Nice!
Other options: you can set the level of detail to be displayed (see the section on frame rate elsewhere in this article) and other things such as whether to have a pace lap or a standing start, whether there will be yellow flags, the race length as a percentage of the real races, and the strength of the opponents. At 100%, they are really hard to beat! If you lower the percentage, the computer cuts both power and grip available to the opponents. I started with them at 80%, and am now up to 95%. At that setting, if I practice a lot, and have a good setup, on my favorite tracks I can usually qualify on pole and I can win if I don't goof up.
Incidentally, learning to race with other cars nearby on the track is a whole 'nuther skill in addition to learning to go fast. First you need a certain minimum skill level, to be able to keep the car on line and be reasonably smooth and consistent, and be able to run reasonably close to the lap times that your opponents are running. Then you need to learn how to be patient, learning the places on the track where you are quicker and where it is and isn't possible to pass, and waiting till the right moment to go for a pass. Most of my crashes in races are due to impatience, trying to force a pass when it's just not on.
Ah! And let's not forget one of the most important options: realistic damage! Very important to turn this off. This makes your car impregnable; you can smack the end of the pit wall at 230 mph, and all that will happen is that you will come to a rapid halt. Put it in reverse, back out onto the track, and you're off, ready to wreak yet more havoc!
This leads to some very interesting side effects. If you crash into another car, its wheels and wings and other bits will go flying (you can crash a car down to the bare tub if you hit it hard and often enough) and it will wind up stranded, soon to magically disappear, while yours will just keep on truckin'. If you're doing modem play, your friend will see wheels and stuff flying off your car, too, but then you'll get going again and your car will suddenly "heal" itself and have all four wheels and wings again! Kewl!
Back to the serious stuff. You can do a single race, preseason practice (where there will be no opponents on the track to distract you) or an entire championship season. You can also race against another player via modem or null modem, which is one of my favorite features. I love to race against my brother Nate and his son Cale. Unfortunately, a bug in the Rendition version of ICR2 makes modem play difficult; frequently, the modems hang up in mid-race, or the computer hangs, which is very frustrating!
If you choose to race, you get a practice session (as long as you want) and a qualifying session, which will last 10 minutes on a road or street course, or for two warmup laps and two qualifying laps on an oval. You then get a warmup session (again as long as you want) and then the race.
When you are driving, several function keys allow you to see and choose a variety of things. You can choose to view the track from outside the car, in one of two arcade-style views, instead of from inside the cockpit. You can see your best lap time and most recent time, and you can also see a list of opponents and their times (in practice and qualifying) or their position behind the leader (in the race). You can check your fuel consumption and specify how much fuel is to be added in the next pit stop, and choose which tires to change, what their compounds, pressures and stagger should be, and ask for wing angle changes.
I usually race at 10 to 20% of the real race length, and thereby avoid pit stops. Two hours in one race could get awfully tiring! Besides, I've got enough to master just getting around the track without crashing or hitting another car, let alone trying to fiddle with the keys to specify my next fuel load. This sim really helped me appreciate just how difficult the task is which real Indycar drivers face. I'll never badmouth any of them, even the slowest; they're all way ahead of me!
When you're done driving, you can view a replay of the session, and you can save the replay to disk.
The sim includes all the tracks from the 1995 IndyCar (now CART) season, and most of the cars and drivers. There are also some bogus driver names (apparently they couldn't get the license from all the drivers) but you can change these. In fact, you can generate your own color schemes for the cars, and new carsets with accurate cars, drivers, and teams are available on the internet for 1996 and 1997.
This brings us to third-party add-ons for ICR2. Most of these are in the public domain, available on the internet and in Compuserve. My favorites include utilities which allowed me to convert the tracks from NASCAR Racing to ICR2, so I get to race at Watkins Glen and Sears Point (my favorite road courses) as well as such bizarre places as North Wilkesboro (just like a dirt kart track!) and Charlotte. One of my most memorable experiences was at a CART race at Pocono in the early 80's, but that's another story. Indycars no longer race at Pocono, but in my computer, they do!
Best of all is a conversion utility which converts the Indianapolis track from the original IndyCar Racing sim so it can be used with ICR2 (Tony George wouldn't allow Papyrus to keep the license for Indianapolis after things heated up between him and CART). This is a fantastic track! The rhythm you get into after a lot of laps is something that Wilbur Shaw rhapsodized about back in the 50's, and it's still just as mesmerizing and wonderful today.
Other utilities for ICR2 allow you to compare and print out car setup files, which I find very useful for trying to figure out how those experts make such good car setups.
Another utility, called EditRpy, allows you to edit replay files, extracting your quickest lap and comparing it with laps by your friends or by the computer cars. One of the most bizarre - and educational - things you can do is watch a replay file that contains your best lap and one or two other quick laps. You can see exactly where you are faster, and where you blow it. What makes it bizarre is when your car and the other car(s) are at the same location at the same time; in the replay, they merge and diverge as though they were made of mist.
This utility is also useful because it can spit out lap analyses, in a text file of speeds, distance, RPM, and other stuff. My brother Nate, a whiz with Microsoft Excel, imports these files into Excel and turns them into a graph. We can compare our best laps, and see exactly where he's outbraking me, and where I'm quicker through a fast corner, and so on. Our driving improves along the way.
Well, this has gone on far too long! You can tell I love this sim. I hope you get a chance to try it (quick! get one soon before they're all sold out of the discount bins!) I'd be delighted to hear your opinion after you've given it a try.
If you love open-wheel racing, it's hard for me to imagine you not loving IndyCar Racing II!