AC 499P mod personal review

Anyways guys this is my long-overdue (tested last Monday, wrote last night, due to hectic work and laziness😝) test result of VRC and Yzd 499P on Imola (Vanilla), Le Mans (by Tiago Lima), and Spa (Vanilla w/ Pyyer 2022 extension). To make the test a lil bit more fun, I included 2 TRR 499P into the test (which by my test last year is the best 499P grid-filler car we have before launching of VRC and Yzd.)

All tests are done under 100% AI strength and 80% aggression, I tried my best to balance the fleet number between large enough to have meaningful sample and small enough to avoid AI blocking each other.

For your reference, the real Quali (including Hyperpole) laptimes are also included.

Here's come conclusion on AI performance:

VRC made a great job again! The CSP car matches the real-life laptime almost perfectly, if not a tad too fast given the AI of AC is not that competent. Yzd is also great and is actually the best pace-matcher on Spa. But the VRC non-CSP car fell into the same pseudo-BoP category with RSS BMW LMDh and VRC non-CSP 9X8 - it's just 3-4 secs slower than CSP car on each track - or, as their Spa laptime matches 2024 IRL results better it is indeed some kind of BoP???????

I also assume that from the result, maybe CSP car's advance aeromap DID helped with replicating the laptime as they are soooo fast on Spa we all know with a ton of fast sweeping corners.

Yeah I know all cars failed to match the Le Mans laptime IRL (not even enough to enter Hyperpole) but I used Le Mans by Tiago Lima on racedepartment and the AI line seens indeed a bit conservative, anyone could try on sx_lemans?

Ok, driving feelings.

VRC cars, both CSP and non-CSP cars, feels tighter and more rigid, but some times it feels too rigid like there is no "give" (or more accurately elasticity?) in tire wall and on suspension, so they WILL give you a very bad time if you ride the curbs too much or ever dare to touch the sausage curb. It's hard to explain but if you have driven VRC's LMP especially TS050, you will know what I mean. Maybe it's VRC team's taste or preference, maybe it's more real, I don't know. None of us have driven a LM Prototype IRL. (pls share your experience if you are the lucky dog). Also I feel both cars understeery like they lack front downforce, the front wheels will easily reach their max slip angle and the grip just lost suddenly - this may relates to the actual tire character of Michelins in real life or somewhat related the ERS system I'll talk about it later. On the contrary, Yzd 499P feels a bit too bouncy on uneven surfaces, you can definitely feels it bouncing around on Eau Rouge-Raidillon corner in Spa, and IMO this could not be right, it feels more like a GT car rather than a prototype, given Yzd's past experience that is also...making sense??? The Yzd car drives less understeery like VRC, but during corner-exit you need to control the throttle very carefully as it will abruptly turn into power slide like driving on wet. Maybe some setup tuning could tackle both cars problem but I have yet to find good solutions (due to laziness again LOL😝).

One unexpectedly good small detail: All cars have implemented the tyre warmer rule in WEC - they exit pit with only 45° tire temperature, you will need one whole careful lap to warm them up.

ERS System.

A crucial part of the LMHs and LMDhs is the hybrid ERS system, I have to say VRC team and Yzd both must have put a huge amount of work on ERS, as both cars requires CSP 0.2.2+ I assumed they both implemented some advanced features in CSP, and they did. Yzd and VRC CSP car (especially) have tons of ERS options in setup to play with, some are beyond my knowledge on those hypercars, let alone the dedicated VRC app that let you adjust the setup on the fly. VRC car did replicate the ERS system pretty good, you can feel the front wheel driven ERS gradually kicks in (and worsen the understeer problem) during fast cornering like in Stavelot (the last corner into the back straight) on Spa (can you imagine I have to release the throttle a little for respecting the track outer limit on a LMH?), and you can check the energy deploy, recovery and ERS speed limit notice on virtual steering wheel, pretty mad! Yzd car also featured most of these but due to its physics it is harder to feel. And if you have a dashboard that could show the turbo boost like me, you will see both cars, when they started energy deploy, will decrease the turbo boost to follow the combined power limit, that's also pretty cool ERS-ICE collaboration!!!

Although, the ERS energy state(or State of Charge) on Yzd car seems off. I tried everything but energy will stay 100% full on the virtual steering display and my race dashboard.

The non-CSP car on the other hand is a bit “bland”, from the dashboard I use it seems there is no deploy speed range and ERS-ICE collaboration like CSP cars and IRL and ERS will always deploy power during full acceleration. I think VRC gave a totally different power-curve to ERS-ICE unit as a whole in non-CSP car. As a result I felt a lack of acceleration during corner exit especially slow corner, I had to shift down 1 more gear in some corner to have a better exit acceleration. I think that's why the CSP car is so much slower on Imola and Spa but on Le Mans the gap (In proportion to track length) is not that big. Also there is no "ERS kicks in yoooo😆" feel in fast corner as I said in last paragraph, it is a good thing to some extent???🤣.

Now modelling and visual details.

VRC car is a piece of art, PERIOD.

...Although if I have to point a finger or two, there is no exhaust backfire nor underbody sparks, yeah yeah I know it is not alway could be seen IRL (But we saw a lot sparks action before Tamburello during the past 2024 4 hrs of Imola!) but it does not harm to have those as some little eye-treats isn't it?

Yzd DO have a nice feature I really love, the upper dash in cockpit could show the flag information just like IRL as in the picture!

Sound-wise.

Both VRC cars wins again, it sounds just more like real cars, however they both have some problems:

When observing AI driving the CSP car with cockpit view, oddly I never hear the ERS electric squeaking sound, like AI never used the ERS energy but I think that's not the case, maybe due to some bugs.

On the non-CSP car, the ERS sound is just toooooooo loud on external view, I checked many external footages on youtube to confirm it's not real, the turbo engine is definitely louder with only a fraction of ERS squeaking sound (which was also absent from CSP car).

Yzd cars are good, just not great, the sound is a bit...to "vague" and "bass-y" compared to VRC.

Oh to add a bit more info, VRC CSP car have the real-life startup-pull off-electric-to-engine sound which to me it's very exciting, althoght the "electric" period is too short and ICE kicks in too soon(unlike the great TS050) and it is only availble on the very first startup in a session, after that it's no more, I tried restart session and turn the car off and on again and it's no avail, the engine will start immediately, pity. I think they could implement some mechanism bond to pit limiter like the engine will be shut down when pit limiter is on until it's off, just like in real life.

Yzd car will play a short "startup" sound once you shift into Neutual, yeah a lot of racecar mod use this technique, but it's a bit “out of play" when you lost control and stopped on track.

Yeah that's all fellas, all info based on 1.0 version of all cars, To me the winner is VRC, but I struggles to choose between CSP and non-CSP cars.

Reasons?

First the CSP car are, as VRC always do, toooooo complicated to operate, it requires an extension app to fully function, requires a steering wheel with a million buttons to map all the controls on the fly, has tons of dedicated setup options not really covered in their manual...(I know it is more close to real life but they just do not explain thoroughly...)

I mean...What are all those above?!

Secondly, with an RMAed CPU (13900K problem damn you Intel), CSP still crashes time to time when I use any version above 0.180, I've tried everything but I think this time CPU is not the reason, maybe the PSU or the GPU, who knows, I will change a PSU later this year too see if anything gets better, but for GPU, I will stick until RTX50 series' release...So until now the most stable version to me is still CSP 0.178, yeah, I cannot even enjoy Sol HiRes skydome...😭

Now with VRC V1.1 on the way, some of the review could become obsolete, thank you for reading this subjective crap written with my rubbish English as always, I will update it when we have v1.1 here (if any meaningful difference).

Oh, lastly, ditch the TRR 499P, it was a good grid filler, but looks like rubbish now.

Next: VRC 9X8 latest version (I tested non-CSP version during first release but never tried CSP version - yeah it requires CSP 0.2.0) if I'm not lazy😝 or there is not too much workload(excuses, excuses😝) or there is no new exciting things from those mod teams...