Cupra Leon Competición 2024 version 1.0

Hi everyone. It started to be kind of a tradition to release new version of the Cupra TCR car every two years, so I would like to proudly present the brand new iteration of Cupra Leon Competición in 2024 specs.

 A lot of time has passed since the first release of the Cupra TCR car, which came out to be quite a success to my former "Trained Monkey Modding" team. I remember working on it with couple of friends. We all were very excited and tried our best to bring the best possible experience for people who like driving modern touring cars, but we were lacking experience. After two years, we released an updated version. It was better in every way - more data gathered, more feedback received, more modding experience gained... The biggest improvements were under the hood and the sounds, the 3D model was the same, with some minor updates, but nothing big. And the car was succesful again. People liked it and still drive it in online championships around the world. That's the biggest achievement for me as a guy who was in charge of the whole project.

So what has changed on the 2024 spec version? A complete rework of the physics, once again. Over the time, I got in touch with some interesting people which were able to help me and gave me another batch of very valuable data...

 I don't know how other modders but I always aim for data approach. Usually to do this, you need to get as much data as possible. Google here is not very helpful. Sometime it can be, but these documents are not something you will bump into freely just by googling. In my case, I was given the full set of PDF documentation about the Cupra TCR. You know, in the official documentation, there is a lot of valuable data, but not everything. Some important values are usually cleverly hidden because no producer wants to reveal all their secrets. But there are always more options how to get more data. You can get in touch with a race engineer from a team who has the car of your desire and ask him for some telemetry. I was able to get this as well, not even from one source but three different sources. Telemetry is very nice, but what can be better? Direct access to the car. And yes, I was able to do it as well, I'd spent couple of weekends with my good friends at Fullinrace Academy, and later at Expres Auto Racing team. So what you can get from the car directly? Measurements. You can take your pen and paper, and a ruler and run around and make drawings, measurements, pictures. And you can talk to drivers and people around, and even spend some quality time with them.

 I remember that for the first version of the mod, all the suspension geometry was done from my personal notes and drawings and measurements which I took directly from the car. Then something unique happened. There was an opportunity to get something better - laser scanned data from the suspension. What could possibly beat that? Not my ruler for sure. When I got my hands on the data, and I projected it to the 3D workspace in my 3D editor, I found out how ruler sucked and the measurements were quite far from what it should be. Laser is laser in the end :) So 2022 version had already laser scanned suspension and a lot of implementations of newly acquired data. But I have to confess that I made quite a mistake when designing the suspension for AC, I did not realize that the scan was made with the car hanging in the air, so the whole suspension was in droop position, and I implemented the pickup points in this position to AC. The car was working, people were happy with the handling, but this small "issue" was still in my mind, so now, I had the opportunity to fix this stuff and I did.

So the whole suspension design was reworked almost from scratch, again from the data I have but I fixed the position of pickup points to its proper position, then I went trough all the other data once again, recalculated some values again, and I replaced the dampers for new Ohlins dampers, which are usually replaced by racing teams immediately when the car arrives. Nobody uses stock dampers anymore in these cars :) Then I recalculated ARBs, with a little help of the AI. I found the AI quite useful recently :)

Another part of the physics which was updated was the aero and tires. I talked a lot about this with my friend Maxime from Comtoyou Racing team, and he gave me very good tips and ideas how should aero work and where to find some data. And the tires as well, he showed me some telemetry, we did some comparisons, even his drivers were testing a lot of iteration of tires since we found some sweetspot and in the end we finished with something where I was happy and the drivers were happy as well. So thank you Maxime for all your help mate!

Last update worth mentioning is the interior improvements. Since the beginning, the interior was lacking detail. But when I was at the car, I took a lot of pictures, made some measurements, and over the time I improved my modeling skills so I did quite an extensive interior overhaul. It is still not perfect, but 1000x better then the old version. I am a VR driver and I want to be immersed more to the simulation, so I've added some new stuff like telemetry sensors, Racelogic recorder, a lot of new cables and holders, water tank etc. And the toughest part to remodel - you can now open the doors :D Totally waste of time but I really wanted to have this option from day one, I just needed to find time and the courage to do it.

So to sum it up, the 2024 is probably my peak what I can currently do. Not perfect, not in a quality of RSS or VRC paid mods, but I am proud of this one. This is probably the last Cupra Leon Competición version from me. Cupra released the VZ model, but I am not sure whether I want to do this one, I personally don't find the car attractive enough for me to do. I never say never but the chance is very low, so no promises :)

I hope you guys will enjoy this new version of the car. It will appear in Season 15 of the LowFuel Motorsport portal, so I hope you will have fun with it!

Credits:

• Maxime Delfose (Comtoyou Racing) for awesome load of data and help with their implementation to the mod

• Pavel Gellner for physics constultations and telemetry data

• Michal Weron Soltes (Expres Auto) for physics consultations, pictures and telemetry data and handling feedback

• Walczu, Racingtech CZ for some really awesome skins

• Isaac Edwards (Outside35) for the Carl Cox skin

• ACFan for the awesome sounds

• All the nice people who helped with the development and the feedback over last 4 years!

Installation:

• Just unpack the archive to AC root directory in your steam instalaltion (not My Documents!) or drag and drop into the Content Manager and click install.

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Do not modify, convert, reupload this mod to other websites or use any part of the physics, 3D mesh, textures or sounds without my permission!

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