Le Mans Circuit Bugatti

This is a little website to inform you that Roland Ehnström and Greger Huttu have built the Le Mans Circuit Bugatti for GPL! The track was released on New Years Eve 2000.

News

December 31st, 2000

Track RELEASED! See download-section at the bottom of this page for download and installation instructions!

December 22nd, 2000

AI is finished! Also, grandstands and pits are added, and graphics improved. As you can see on the new screenshots below, the AI really know how to RACE!

December 8th, 2000

As I hope you can see on the screenshots below, the track now looks a lot better, with some new (though still far from finished) graphics and objects. The track also has a racing-groove. The AI is on it's way...

November 15th, 2000

Thanks to many people sending great pictures of the track and from the 1967 French Grand Prix, we now have a much more accurate track. The layout has been altered in a couple of corners. The Dunlop Curve, for example, is now a great bend to race through. You can take it flat out at more than 160 mph, but only if you take the exact right line. Just at the end of the corner there is a difficult hump (like the one at Mosport) where the car actually lifts all its wheels from the ground! The final corner - Virage du Raccordment - has also been altered. It is now slightly faster and longer.

The main update, however, is the scenery (trees, hills, banks...) around the track, which is now nearing completion. The next step is to add better looking graphics to this scenery.

Track Info

As most people probably know, the Rouen track in GPL was not used by Formula One in 1967. Rather, the 1967 French Grand Prix took place on the infamous Le Mans Curcuit Bugatti. This track was built inside the long Le Mans track, using part of the car-park area behind the huge Le Mans pits. The start-finish straight was the same as the long Le Mans track, and the famous Dunlop Curve was also included, but then, instead of going down to the Esses, the Bugatti Circuit hairpins to the right, makes two more hairpins with short straights in between them, goes through a forest, and through a rather slow S-bend, before rejoining the long Le Mans track in a very tight righthander.

Le Mans Circuit Bugatti - 2.748 miles / 4422 meters

Turn 1 (Dunlop Curve) and Turn 5 (Chemin Aux Boeufs) are both very fast, but the other six turns are all taken in 2nd gear at 70 mph or less - the last turn being the slowest at a mere 35 mph. However, the straights are fairly long, so the average speed is not too low, in fact, it is slightly higher than at Brands Hatch, at just over 100 mph. The pole time of 1967 was set by Graham Hill in a Lotus 49 at 1:36.2. This is also just as fast as we are now going in the Lotus at our GPL-version of the track.

Screenshots

Below are a few screenshots from beta-versions of the track.

(Click on a picture to view it in higher resolution)

Even the AI cars catch air as they crest the hill under the Dunlop Bridge!

As mentioned, the AI sure don't hang about...

...they'll even go three-wide in the hairpin sometimes!

The front straight, with newly added grandstands and pits. Not exactly like Le Mans in real life, but close enough and we want to finish the track before GPL is finished...

The famous view up the hill from Virage de la Chapelle, with the Dunlop bridge in the background

Just before the braking-point for Virage de Musée

A couple of wheels on the sand in the first part of Virage de Musée

Accelerating hard in the middle of the long back-straight between Garage Vert and Chemin Aux Boeufs

Turning into Chemin Aux Boeufs at 130 mph

Braking for Esses du Garage Bleu

Braking again for Virage du Raccordement

Download

- Download Le Mans Circuit Bugatti by clicking this link: LE MANS CIRCUIT BUGATTI (2.5 MB) Thanks to Eric of Sim Racing Mag for providing the webspace!

To install Le Mans Circuit Bugatti, simply unzip the file TrackInstall.exe in bugatti.zip into a temporary folder, and then run it.

- Because the 4-bit sky and horizon textures included in the zip above look less than perfect, you can download a 16-bit version of the same sky and horizon here: 16-bit SKY (26 KB) Please note however, that if you do not have a fast cpu (over 350 MHz), and/or a very good 3d-card (Voodoo3 or better), your frame-rate might suffer if you use these files. These 16-bit sky and horizon textures were converted from NASCAR 3 by Jay Beckwith of Team Friendship.

To install the 16-bit sky and horizon, you must first install the track. When the track is properly installed, simply unzip the three files in sky.zip into your new gpl\tracks\bugatti folder. If you find that the 16-bit textues cost you some frame-rate, and want to un-install these files again, then simply delete the files page03.mip, page03b.mip and skyindex.mip from the gpl\tracks\bugatti folder (GPL will then use the 4-bit versions of the files, which are located inside bugatti.dat).

- A small bug was found: With a full AI-grid, only 17 or 18 cars would qualify. But now George Smiley has come up with an easy fix for it! Download this small file: New track.ini, and simply unzip the file to your gpl\tracks\bugatti folder, overwriting the old file.