Gran Turismo 7's Group 4 category of racecars is the rough equivalent of the real world's GT4 class, and it is, as politely as I can put it, an unmitigated, unabashed, and unabated flustercuck of a category, populated by actual GT4 racecars, Cup Cars, FF hatchbacks, 5–speed family sedans, a DTM racer from the 90s, 7–speed midship AWD Huracáns, a 433HP Bugatti Veyron, and Kaz knows what else.
You know what else Gr.4 has? Balance of Performance. Supposedly, anyway.
To compensate for their complete inability to preserve their tyres or put down power out of a corner, FF cars in Gr.4 are given comically over–the–top power–to–mass figures to help them vaguely compete in Gr.4 against all the other mumbo jumbos in Gr.4 better suited for racing. This immediately gives FF Gr.4 cars speed unapproachable by their Gr.4 peers, both in a straight line and in races where tyre wear is not a factor. And so, if all six FF Gr.4 cars are going to be completely untouchable in a straight line, it would only make sense to pick the lightest one of the bunch, wouldn't it? After all, the lightest car ought to corner quickest and preserve its tyres the best, desho?
Enter: The Suzuki Swift Sport KATANA Edition Gr.4.
But here's the thing: the Swift isn't just the lightest FF car in Gr.4; it's the lightest car in the entirety of Group 4, and by a ridiculous margin, too! Fresh from Brand Central, the Swift doesn't weigh a tonne—LITERALLY—coming in at a mere 900kg (1,984lbs), and even after current Mid–Speed BoP adds a whopping 95 kilos (209lbs) to the car, it's still lighter than the next lightest car, the Alfa 4C Gr.4, by 55 kilos (121lbs). And while it may only have the second lowest power in all of Gr.4 under Mid–Speed BoP, beating only the aforementioned 4C, its unmatched lightness means that it really needn't that much power to achieve the best power–to–mass ratio in Gr.4 BoP: 303HP (226kW) when bopped down for Mid–Speed competition, and 345HP (257kW) when allowed to drink and breathe freely after the kill. It's one thing to be the lightest car in its class, but to also have the best power–to–mass ratio quite frankly renders the other five FF cars irrelevant, impressive in their own rights as they may be.
Version 1.43 BoP data taken from the incredible resource that is gt-engine.com
Dizzying numbers and abstract charts that a Samurai would never have are nice and all, but what do all those geeky stats mean for the Swift Gr.4 out on the battlefield? The FF Swift will obviously struggle with drawing its blade from a kneeling start, but once it's up on its feet with its glistening blade out, the Swift lives up to its suddenly threatening name. GT Engine claims that the Swift, under Mid–Speed BoP, dances through the 100–150km/h kata in 3.64 seconds, which the keen eyed among you might realise is faster than the freaking Veyron, and if I were to call on my own experience like a decent reviewer should instead of pulling studies from other sources, my svelte and smooth Cayman GT4 got gapped by a Swift that just went 4 wheels wide into the grass at Turn 1 of Bathurst. In other words, the Swift has acceleration performance that is completely devoid of honour and valour, at least, until its tall hatchback body drags it down to a stalemate somewhere in the 220km/h (137mph) range, where the winds of change finally catch up to the way of the Samurai.
#miku #miku16th #itasha
The road car on which this Gr.4 warrior is based may sport a 1.4L Inline–4 engine that would seem at times to not even be generating any boost, but that lackadaisical turbo has been torn apart, slapped awake, and (presumably) had its family killed before its eyes at the hands of Polyphony Digital, resulting in the turbo now vehemently blowing out around 0.8 Bar of boost, most of which being concentrated in the low to mid rev range. This transforms the usually rev–happy Swift into a seething, short shifting psycho, demanding its driver to be familiar with where along its 7,500rpm–long blade where there is the most cutting power, lest they lose a tenths of a second on longer straights, or even a few positions off a standing start against other similarly trained Swifts. This possessive boost I find does make the Swift well–suited for sipping fuel if it finds itself on a long and arduous mission, as the car almost doesn't seem to mind being shifted whenever, as long as its revs are kept below 6,7, which is where I personally shift it. That's about 40% of the HUD rev–bar, or just about when the second set of shift lights come on for you VR folk.
So, numbers don't lie, and the Swift is stupidly fast on the straights. Surely the FF Swift must be slow in corners to compensate? Well, the numbers also say that the Swift is the lightest car in Gr.4, and one that has quite a short wheelbase too, so good luck catching this Swiftie in the twisties. As can be expected from a racing machine, the Swift Gr.4 comes with a limited slip diff at the front as standard issue, and with BoP trimming off its unhealthy power obsession while putting more weight over the front to keep it grounded, this Samurai is kept on a short leash, with minimal wheelspin and steering wheel juddering, and the car remains incredibly agile and "chuckable" into corners despite the extra mass. On some sharper turns however, it still is possible to peek into the madness the Swift had prior BoP, spinning up the inside wheels in a frenzy, and so throttle discipline is still very much a necessity. The Swift also stops stupidly well, enabling its driver to stomp on the brake pedal about a car length later than your typical Gr.4 offering for a corner, making this thing an assassin nigh impossible to defend from in conjunction with its swift approach.
As if it needed any more advantages beyond the ones absolute numbers generously confer it, the Swift has some perks where numbers don't reach, too. An amusing by–product of this stopping power is that it makes the Swift stupidly easy to drive in the dark, as long as there's an opponent ahead of the Swift. There isn't any need to grope around for braking points in the dark: the braking point is, "where that guy braked, but a car length later". Also, the extremely tall silhouette of the Swift makes following it closely nearly impossible if driving in bumper or cockpit view, as the Swift would completely block off all visibility of the trailing car. Several times in the week's Wednesday lobby, I've had to back out of closely following a Swift into a corner, simply because I couldn't see where the accursed bend was. The one time I didn't, I choked away a fight for the podium at Laguna Seca. It's not fun being behind that thing.
Just one of those photos taken moments before disaster...
#onlyfans
Don't let its commoner disguise fool you; the Swift Sport KATANA Edition Gr.4 is a stealthy sleeper of a car. Without tyre wear reining it in for longer races, it is an unmitigated menace, both on a spec sheet and on a battlefield. Granted, the power of the Swift may well have changed by the time you read this. The Swift could easily put on another fifty kilos or lose 20 more horsepower with the flick of a pen. After all, the pen beats the sword, right? But, at least for now, "I have found that whoever wields the sword decides who holds the pen", to borrow a quote from one of my other favourite game series.
Videos from this Saturday's small, but fiercely contested lobby:
HSR:
https://youtu.be/8AFzMlNTQNA
CroixB
https://youtu.be/0OIEkbUlNNA
GVH
https://youtu.be/mEoRhj5p7mM
A Long Tangent: About My Tamaki Iroha Itasha
As described in the Swift's announcement post, I had made an Itasha out of spite for a friend a little prior to Swift week. The problem with actually showing that off is that, because I've made it for them specifically, it's full of decals closely associated with them, with me even going so far as to spell out their name in archaic runes of the MadoMagi series.
They uh... yeah, didn't want to be identified publicly.
Alright then, small matter. All I had to do was to take that livery and make it mine, editing out all identifying decals on it. The problem arose in the two days between the announcement post and our weekly Wednesday lobby, when the damn livery refused to load for editing. I've read that this is a rare, but prominent nonetheless issue that some decals can cause, and as I don't usually deal in complicated creations, this is my first time encountering the problem. To my knowledge, there's no surefire way of fixing this issue, other than testing each and every user–made decal by saving a design with one decal, and then loading it back up. Yeah, I have about 300 layers in my Itasha up to that point. I'd sooner show up in a default livery than to go through that madness.
When shooting photos for the review, I just thought, "what the hell", and tried loading it again. It worked this time! Though, I couldn't complete all the edits I wanted in one sitting, and the livery chose to not load again the next time. It was a game of trail and error, with me going to GT Auto with the car each time I played the game, hoping it'd load. I kinda "found out" that this extremely cursed livery only fancies loading at around 2–6 A.M. Singapore time, so... yeah, that's why the review was so, so late—all just because of one photo. But hey, I don't know when will be the next time I'll get to show off my hours of hard work on the Swift. It's not an efficient use of time, but I'm willing to sit on a review to have something I can truly be proud of. It's not like I have a deadline or am getting paid or anything. This is entirely for my own self satisfaction, and rushing out a bad piece of writing or livery would leave a bad taste in my mouth forever.
But the "completed" Itasha was only half of the envisioned end result.
The original impetus for the Itasha was that the higher–ups of a certain league didn't want our regular blatantly teasing this idiot guy by showing up in an Itasha, because the idiot guy thought Itashas were super uncool. Now, it's not my place to tell others how they run their leagues, but to me, it seems a bit extreme and incredibly wrong to disallow everyone from running a safe and inoffensive Itasha just because one guy doesn't like them. And so my idea was: I'm going to go ALL IN on creating an Itasha, only to then cover it up with censoring to make it look dirty, despite it being completely safe. After all, can you call it an anime livery if you can't make out anything on the car? That toeing the line of definitions really excited the rebellious part of my brain.
That's all the logical and rational part of me can tell you. I have no idea why I took such "playful offence" to the higher ups disallowing an Itasha RX8 made for our regular. I have no idea what possessed me. I knew that I was working way out of my depth with an Itasha, but I just kept playing and kept experimenting, and no one told me to stop at 3 in the morning. I didn't have much of a plan on how the thing was to look, but ideas just popped in one after another as I was working on the car, and I just shut up the rational side of my brain and just flowed with the creative juices.
I usually don't like having very elaborate liveries on my cars. A lot of liveries I find tend to try to hide the shape of the car. Some of them even have very complicated and "messy" background patterns just to fill space and look busy for the sake of it. I hate that. It takes my eyes away from the natural shapes of the car and forces me to look at the utter chaos and confusion. Maybe it's me taking the role of "car reviewer" a bit too seriously, but I really want to see and show the car in photos. A lot of times, I'd just slap a plate on a car and call it mine. It might not look like much, but that small effort I've put in makes my lizard brain go, "I've invested into that. That's me. That's my horse in the race." And that feeling overpowers any sense of satisfaction I can find in Discover.
But it's also that unjustified sense of pride that makes me paranoid of sharing the few things I do create. I'm afraid that a labour of love can turn right around and appear to be insulting because it's so poorly made. Again, I don't invest a lot of time making liveries, and I'm therefore not good at it. I'm not a very artistic person like Baron, Rick, Rob, or SPD. Every time I think to make a decal or a livery, there's always that thought of, "someone out there must've done it already, and done a better job of it than you could". I thus only make and share decals that are absolutely necessary for even my simplistic creations. The only reason I can circumvent this with written reviews is that an opinion is unique, and if explained well, can really open one's eyes up to how one thing can come to be perceived differently by other people. I find that incredibly interesting, and I believe that by itself holds value.
With liveries, I just put stupid amounts of effort into it, sit and stare at it for a few days, tear the whole thing apart and redo large chunks of it, rinse and repeat until I get sick of the process. Then at least I can tell myself I've put in an unreasonable amount of effort into the thing, and if it ends up sucking anyway, then knowing that I've put in stupid amounts of effort into it makes the suckage easier to bear. It's not a very efficient use of time, and it's extremely tiring, hence why I don't like to do it often, or at all.
This one? This was fun, though. I was giggling to myself as I put the censors on the car. Even as a kid, I've always liked spending hours on building things, like houses and train sets, only to destroy it in a quick and violent fashion, admiring the wreckage. I don't know what the hell is wrong with me, don't ask. Censoring my own painstaking Itasha and making it look dirty was hella fun, and something I could only bring myself to do to my own creations. I just really wish our regular could've brought it to their league race, and that I could've shown it off in both censored and uncensored variations on Tuesday. Ahh well. Maybe I'll bust it out next time we run a Gr.4 car.
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