Le Mans Ultimate revises large-scale Le Mans test race plan

cars

• Hi everyone, First of all, thank you for the continued support and turnout for our endurance events in Le Mans Ultimate. Our recent 38-car 4, 6 and 8 hour races have been running consistently well, and we’re really pleased with how those events have performed. However, as we continue to gear up for much larger team races, we’ve identified some unacceptable service issues when running events with 130+ clients connected to servers - which is expected for longer races and 62 car grids like Le Mans. These issues don’t show up in smaller races but become critical at this scale. Because of this, we’ve made the decision to change how our larger team races will run going forward. [h3]Why the change?[/h3] In our automated testing after completing some work to prepare for the upcoming test race, we found some anomalies with the network traffic within containers on these high-load servers. This led us to need to explore new options to handle this type of event. However, it won’t be possible to run the level of testing required to give us enough confidence to run several 24 hour races concurrently next weekend. We know many of you have set aside that weekend for racing and already made plans, so to try and make sure you still get track time the test will still go ahead but with following changes, [h3]Revised Test Plan for Le Mans[/h3] To properly validate the new setup, we will now run a test race initially on Friday 27th February only : [*] 12-hour race with full day/night cycle (2x time scale) [/*][*] 62 car grid [/*][*] Le Mans [/*][*] Single timeslot with start time: 10:00 UTC (Friday 27th February) [/*] This limited time slot will allow our community and development team the ability to monitor closely the behaviour in “the wild”. [h3]What happens next?[/h3] [*] If Friday’s test goes well, we’ll proceed with another race with the same format on Saturday 28th February - we will communicate this around the finish of the Friday race. [/*][*] Once the test races are reviewed, we will pragmatically analyse them and schedule any follow-up tests if required before committing to the next 24 hour test race. [/*] We know changes like this aren’t ideal and will be disappointing for some, but our priority is to deliver stable, enjoyable racing, rather than push ahead and potentially cause the community the disappointment in losing time towards testing if we are not as confident as we could be with more time. Thank you everyone for your understanding, flexibility, and continued passion and we will share further updates as soon as we’ve reviewed the results from the Friday test. Until then enjoy getting those liveries ready and let the practice laps begin! See you on track 🏁