I'm glad to see this thread back on track. While it never got actually Tunafied there was a lot of good thinking and stuff about Time Trialing. My original purpose was to gauge interest in maintaining a bench thread. Two different animals.
Time Trials, to me, are more organized. More focused, if you will. Specific conditions are set down for everyone. Specific car. Specific track(s). Specific tires. etc. It's competitive only in the sense that everyone tries to go as fast as they can and gets to brag for a day or two that they were two tenths faster at DRC than some other guy. Then Spec posts his time and our jaws drop.
A bench thread is more free form. You run whatever you want on one of the suggested tracks and post your time. For the data to be useful I'm thinking we should agree on a tire choice or two, and recommended PP. Otherwise, I'll be posting up my time in my Spyker Laviolette at 432PP and it won't mean shit to anybody.
In Prologue, clacksman's bench thread actually provided useful information. You saw what the fast guys were running, and you saw what the slower times were. And you saw what middle-of-the-roaders like me were turning in. It was such a closed world that you knew right away something was wrong with your car if you were way off pace.
GT5 might be too vast to gain that same information. I don't want to limit car choices, but I think we should build in some sort of controls using PP. Maybe 4 categories at 400, 500, 600 and 700PP. Maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe we'll just start one and see how it develops.
Oh. And we run on the honor system here. Always have. Always will. If you're so inclined save a replay, but I'll never ask to see it.