GPL is not a game.... it's a sim. Average age of the GPL-player is 37...need I say more?

The year is 1967: the last year before aerodynamic styling and other technology aspects of motor-racing began to supercede the driver in terms of importance. The cars are monsters, V8 and V12 engines developing over 400BHP with a weight of not more then 600kgs. Remember the Lotus 49 or the Brabham BT20/24 or the fascinating scream of the Ferrari 312?

Papyrus developed a physics engine for GPL that comes close to reality....very close. To control the cars and to learn the 11 original tracks which also includes the Green Hell (Nürnburgring) takes time and patience. Within GPL there are no helpfeatures, if you want to know when the next corner is coming you have to learn the track. If you want to know what gear you're in you have to look at your gearshifter, it's as simple as that. You want to know your speed? It's not important ... engine revs, oiltemp/ pressure and fuel are important so that's what you see on the dash. 

After so many years the GPL community is still growing and a small group of people is dedicated to improve the graphics of cars and tracks. Up to now >250 tracks are available and by now playing GPL is more exciting then ever.

Below a few screenshots to indicate the current state of the graphics. To achieve this level of realism you do however need a fairly heavy computer.

GPL Rank

To make things even a bit more exciting, you can upload your tracktimes to the GPL Rank website. At GPL rank there exist reference times for each track (benchmarks) and naturally thousands of time from other players. Based on these figures a rankinglist is calculated where I currently float around place 4500. My current rank is +66 which means that at the combined 11 original tracks I'm 66 seconds slower than the benchmark. Ultimate goal is to get negative in other words to go faster than the benchmark. In below pictured table you can see that only at Monza and SIlverstone I was able to beat the benchmark.

In order to achieve this I need to practice ........a lot.

Below a picture of the place where it all happens. Unfortunately no money and no space for a real race frame but this works quite allright. The wheel is a heavily modified Logitech WIngman Force Feedback. All the original plastic bushings have been replaced with sturdy ball bearings to eliminate any play on the shaft!  The 24" TFT monitor is from Samsung and supports up 1920*1200 resolution, more then enough to spot the tiniest details on the track.

Did I already mention that GPL supports analogue clutches? If you have a set with 3 pedals this means a big advantage at the start of a race.  So recently I bought a handmade pedal set from Finnland.... what a difference with these flimsy standard Logitech pedals.......