Grand Prix Legends is an old racing sim in the true sense of the word. It's a simulator more than a game. Developed by Papyrus Design Group and published in 1998 by Sierra Entertainment, it simulates the 1967 Formula One season and is considered one of the most realistic racing games ever. It is definitely not an arcade experience as there's not a weapon or a power up in sight. This is definitely for the die hard racing sim fans.

So with all the years on offer, why would a game choose to simulate the 1967 season?

The romantics will sigh and tell you that 1967 was the last year before advertising in F1 and all manner of advertisements and logos were plastered all over Grand Prix cars, which until then had just been painted in pristine national liveries: British racing green for Britain obviously, red for Italy etc. They would also yell you that it is the last year before Grand Prix racing “went commercial..” Where grand prix cars are now pretty much nothing more than mobile cigarette packets.

The realists will tell you that the true significance of 1967 was that it was the last year before “wings.” Before things like “spoilers,” “aerofoils,” “air dams,” wind tunnels,” and other aerodynamic developments were added to the cars, so it is seen by many to be the last year that the driver was truly driving the car. Where the driver was doing more to hold the car on the road than the laws of physics were.

The 1967 season is widely viewed as a turning point in Formula One with championship competitors like Jim Clark, Dan Gurney , Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill. More importantly though, the cars of 1967 made driving them quickly a real challenge and that has definitely been carried over into the game.

Why wre the cars so difficult? Well, they were were much more powerful again after certain rule changes in 1966 when engines were allowed to be up to three litres. The formula which had immediately preceded it had limited engines to a measly 1.5 liters, and so the new three litre formula was widely heralded as Grand Prix racing’s “Return to Power.”

In truth, many of the sport’s leading engine suppliers were caught out by the sudden doubling of engine displacement and by the first race of the 1967 season (the South African GP on January 2), many of the teams still didn’t have their new engines ready and a local hero almost won the race in an ancient Cooper-Climax, and would have done had he not run out of fuel.

Like i said, aerodynamic wings had not been introduced yet so things like wind effects and huge fans underneath the car weren't thought of, the cars were still using regular treaded radial tyres that were not developed for racing, and these tyres would often not wear out during a race and they would be used for more than one. Something which would be unthinkable nowadays, so just getting the power down to the road was a challenge, and don't even think of mentioning traction control. That wouldn't be around for a long time to come.

The late 60s and early 70s were also before the days of safety measures and regulations that were really pushed for after jackie stewart's crash at Spa in Belgium when he found himself upside down in his BRM soaked in fuel and in somebody's cellar. The Spa circuit, like many others of the day was raced on real roads with houses right at the track side and people stood on grass verges watching the cars fly by. This was far from the only accident of note too, there was the high profile fiery crash of Lorenzo Bandini at the Monaco chicane in 1967 and then Jim Clark's death in 1968 at Hockenheim. Jim Clark was widely regarded as one of the greatest drivers at the time and still one of the best ever, and when he didn't reappear at the end of his lap people drove round the Hockenheim circuit looking for holes in the trees where he may have gone off the track. They eventually found him.In fact the 1969 race at Spa and the 1970 race at the Nürburgring in Germany didn't take place because the drivers boycotted them as safety upgrades were not installed as they had demanded.

If you want to gain a taste for what the racing in this era was like, you should watch the 1966 John Frankenheimer film Grand Prix which was released to DVD in 2006. Starring James Garner and featuring actual race footage of the 1966 races at Monaco, Clermont Ferrand, France, Spa in Belgium, Zandvoort on the Dutch coast, Brands Hatch in England and Monza, Italy with the now defunct banked curves, Grand Prix gives a good insight into the dangers and the realities of being a race driver. These classic circuits made for great racing, and in fact Clermont Ferrand was so twisty and undulating that drivers like Jochen Rindt raced there in open faced helmets in case they vomited from motion sickness.

A game based on any other era or season then would lack these classic racing circuits, and in particular the Nurburgring. The game without the Nurburgring would be unthinkable.

The Nürburgring, sometimes known as simply "The Ring", is near the town of Nurburg in Germany where it was built in the 1920s around the village and medieval castle. It remained largely unchanged until the late 1960s and was nicknamed The Green Hell by Jackie Stewart. It is widely considered, and rightly so, the toughest, most dangerous and most demanding purpose-built race track in the world.

Originally, the track featured four track configurations with a (17.and a half mile Gesamtstrecke ("Whole Course") made up of the north loop Nordschliefe and the south loop Sudschliefe. The circuit of the same name that is used today is vastly different and positively tame in comparison.

By the late 1960s road circuits like The Nurburgring were becoming increasingly dangerous for the latest generation of F1 cars so they started to add chicanes to bring the speeds down. In 1970 Formula One drivers decided to boycott The Ring unless major changes were made, so the German Grand Prix was moved to Hockenheim which had already been modified.

Even higher demands by the drivers were either too expensive or impossible to meet due to the tracks extraordinary length and the lack of space for new run off areas as it is literally sat on the side of the mountains, so the 1976 race was deemed the last ever, even before it was held.

That year, Nikki Lauda the reigning world champion, and the only person ever to lap the full 22.8km 14.189 mile Nordschleife in under 7 minutes proposed to the other drivers that the circuit should be boycotted again. The other drivers voted against the idea and the race went ahead. Ironically, it was Lauda who crashed in his Ferrari, probably due to failure of the rear suspension, and because it was only lap 2 his car was still loaded with fuel and he was badly burned. It could have been much worse other than for the combined efforts of his fellow drivers rather than by the ill equipped track marshals who came to his aid.

The Lauda crash proved that the circuit's distances were too long for regular fire engines and ambulances and this crash marked the end of the old Nürburgring. It never hosted another Formula One race again.

If you want a more relaxing look at the Nurburgring, go to youtube.com and you will see dozens of videos, both professional and amateur, showing in car footage of the circuit. Alternativley you can buy the documentary "In Car 956" by Derek Bell that features Bell driving around these old classic road circuits in a Porsch 956 with turn by turn commentary.

Incidentally the filmed lap of the Nurburgring featured in the documentary was the 4th fastest ever around the circuit.

If you want to experience it for real, then at certain times such as weekday evenings and some weekends the road (for that's what it is) is given the legal status of a one way road with no speed limit, so you can take your road legal car or motorbike along and drive around the Nordschliefe. Sadly the Sudschliefe is partly abandoned and partly used as an access road to the new F1 circuit though you can still gain access to parts of it.

Drving on the Nürburgring is only permitted using vehicles which comply with the law and which can achieve a minimum speed of 40 km/h. Joining and leaving the circuit is only allowed at the official entrances and exits, and vehicles must drive on the right, in particular when overtaken, when on crests, in bends or in case of breakdown. Stopping is strictly forbidden, including on the grass next to the track. Racing is prohibited and this includes attempting to set speed records with individual vehicles, though you can see in an episode of Top Gear Jeremy Clarkson trying to get around the circuit in under 10 minutes using a diesel saloon car.

Perhaps one of the most famous things about the Nurburgring circuit is the corner known as the Carousel. Although it is one of the slower corners on the Nordschleife, Karussell is perhaps its most iconic because of its banking. It came about when a driver called Rudolf Caracciola used to drive around it by hooking his inside tyres into a drainage ditch allowing him to take the corner more quickly. As more concrete was uncovered and more and more drivers copied his technique the trend took hold, and when the corner was reconstructed it was made with real concrete banking, as it remains to this day. As it is such a slow corner and because of the variation in viewing angle as cars rotate around the banking, it has become one of the circuit's most popular locations for photographers.

The entrance to the corner is blind, although Juan Manuel Fangio is reputed to have advised a young driver to "aim for the tallest tree" and this tree was built into game versions of the circuit. For more information, pictures (both historic and recent) visit nurburgring.org.uk.

If you want to experience the Nurburgring in game form it is featured in Forza Motorsport on Xbox and Gran Turismo 4 on Playstation 2, but for the real thrill of the circuit you need to experience it in Grand Prix Legends.

As i mentioned the game was published in 1998 by the Papyrus division of Sierra Entertainment and there was a subsequent demo released in 2004 with limited circuits and cars. To this day it maintains a reputation as a very realistic race sim.

Its strong points are;

It has accurate car physics
Reasonably attractive graphics - for the time anyway
Impressive engine sounds.

Everything that moves in Grand Prix Legends is subject to the real-world laws of physics. Each tire has its own physics model. Each suspension part may be seen moving realistically up and down. If you stomp on the brakes, the nose of the car dives. Put the pedal to the metal and the rear end squats. Bang into a curb and the steering wheel visibly shudders. Even the rotational inertia of the engine is modeled, so when you push in the clutch and blip the throttle the chassis rocks. Let the clutch out in neutral and the idle speed drops.

Its weak points are;

The game's difficulty as the cars are quite difficult to drive well (although many fans consider this to be a virtue because Formula One cars of that era were extremely difficult to drive.
It has some minor physics flaws, such as primitive aerodynamic modelling (for drag and slipstream,ing etc.)
It has a simplified tyre model that completely omits tire wear, but does make use of tyre pressures and temperatures

One criticism (valid initially) that people had was that the cars would spin without warning but this was addressed later and I'll come back to it.

There are 11 vintage 1967 tracks in the game, including of course the 14 mile long Nurburgring, the high speed Monza circuit in Italy and the tight street circuit of Monaco. All 11 of the tracks featured in the actual 1967 Formula One season apart from one, the French Grand Prix at Rouen. The actual French Grand Prix of that year was held at the Le Mans Bugatti track, but the Bugatti track and its surrounding landscape is generally considered somewhat lacking in interest by comparison. In fact, the Bugatti circuit proved unpopular with the drivers at that time and Jack Brabham called it a "Mickey Mouse" track.

Much of the difficulty in driving the Grand Prix Legends machines is due to the accuracy of the physics model. The car handling is somewhat slippery but 1967 Grand Prix F1 cars generated a large amount of power i.e. over 350 hp (260 kW), had very little mass i.e. about 500 kg (1100 lb), and rode on hard, skinny, 'pre-radial' tires, with no downforce of any kind. All this combined to make what was in reality one of the most dangerous Formula One seasons ever.

The game didn't help matters though because certain decisions were made during production that perhaps with hindsight would not have been.For example the demo version gave users a taster of the Brabham BT24 at the Watkins Glen circuit. Unfortunately the car was set up with approximately one degree of positive camber angle whereas an actual car of that era would have run one or more degrees of negative camber. What negative camber does it physically change the angle of the wheel. When you stand in front of the car looking back at it, negative camber will mean that the whole wheel is tilted in at the top so when travelling in a straight line the inside edge has most contact with the road. However as soon as you turn into a corner and the car and tyre start to roll, the whole of the outside tyre is in full contact with the road surface, so this meant that the game gave you less grip that you would have had in real life.

The learning curve was steep too because the "trainer" cars had reduced power and in the case of the Novice Trainer, fewer gears but they were only available for use in practice sessions so your first taste of an actual race had to be in a full f1 car at F1 speeds with F1 opponents.

Add to this the fact that low powered PCs of the time allowed users to reduce the number of computer opponents if their PCs were unable to render a full grid of cars at a reasonable frame rate, but unfortunately, reducing the field was achieved by removing cars from the back of the grid starting with the slowest first, so you were left with a full F1 grid containing only the fastest drivers.

Even so, perhaps the most damaging aspect to the game's reputation was that of ride height, the height that the car's body physically sits above the track. Grand Prix cars from 1967 typically ran 5 to 6 inches of ground clearance but Grand Prix Legends only allowed its cars to be set up with a ground clearance of one inch. Lowering the ride height is good because it lowers the car's centre of gravity of the car which helps improve cornering ability but a consequence of this is that the car has less available suspension travel. It just cant bounce. So when the suspension is fully compressed it reaches the bump stops, small blocks of rubber that catch the suspension arms at the end of their range of movement. This is often referred to as "bottoming out" and once that happens the springs have no effect and the bump stops become in effect very hard suspension.

Having harder suspension at one corner of the car or on one wheel means that weight is transferred onto this wheel and away from the other wheels, so if a front wheel is taking all the weight the car will understeer and if it is a read wheel the car will oversteer.

The default setups in Grand Prix Legends combined uncharacteristically low ride heights with short bump stops which meant the cars bottomed out a lot, especially on 1967 tracks with bumps and kerbs around or even under any significant amount of acceleration or braking. These sudden onsets of either understeer or oversteer meant that you needed not only lightning reflexes but also a lot of luck. What didn't help was the fact that there was no sounds associated with bottoming out so you didn't know what had happened, all you knew was that you had spun off the track again.

On the very first page of the manual, it cautions, "The first time you go out on the track, you WILL spin and crash. This is because, the first time they play Grand Prix Legends, EVERYBODY spins and crashes."

There is a rumor that when Jackie Stewart had an opportunity to play the game he claimed that it was harder to drive than the actual 1967 Formula One cars were.

Papyrus recognised the ride-height problem and the first patch (version 1.1) prevented setups from being lower than 2.5 inches but the reputation of "overly difficult handling" and "no grip" was already established, but for those that persisted the cars were now extremely driveable.

The setting up of the cars is probably more technical than it was back in 1967 where cars would often turn up at a circuit with the setup from the last race and build on it, and there are so many set up options that at first, setting a car up to be quick at a circuit is quite daunting, but if you're not sure about setting up your own car then there are tons available for download.

There is a great community built around this and the sharing of setups is encouraged because at the end of the day, even if you use somebody else's setup it may not suit your driving style and you still have to physically drive it around the track. To help still further you can also download people's replays of their laps so you can see things like where they brake and where they are changing gear, where they stray from the racing line where they feather the throttle etc. A handy feature is that a saved replay contains the entire field so you can jump from one car to another and from one view to another

A good source for these setups and replays is a driver called Steve cloyd who is the world record holder on several tracks. His downloads can be found at www.gpladdicts.speedgeezers.net. If you're going to be good though you need to learn the art of setting your chosen car up as well as just driving it quickly.

So what do you need to run the game hardware wise?

The answer my friend is not much, not much at all, but when launched, GPL required what was for the time quite high-end hardware. While a software renderer was available, for smooth gameplay a 3D card was all but essential, and GPL supported only two types: 3dfx and Rendition Verité. GPL's box stated that the minimum CPU required with hardware acceleration was a Pentium 90, and without it a Pentium 166, but in reality both these figures were well short of what was needed for a satisfactory frame rate

Hardware Requirements

Minimum requirements:
- Pentium 166 or better
- 32MB of RAM
- Windows-compliant video card with 2MB or more of video memory
- 2X or better CD-ROM drive
- Mouse

Recommended:
- Pentium II-266 or better
- 64MB of RAM
- 3Dfx Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2, or Rendition v2x00 series video card
- Joystick or steering wheel and foot pedals
- Windows-compliant sound card

Let's be honest, most machines you have in your house these days will run this game well enough, and I've even played it on a laptop with a crappy graphics card, it's that easy. Alas Grand Prix Legends did not sell very well, especially in the US, where a Formula One based game was less appealing than in the European market, while the game's hardware requirements meant that it did not run well on many computers at the time of its release. GPL's lack of inbuilt support for 3D accelerator cards other than those produced by 3dfx and Rendition contributed to a decrease in sales when those cards became obsolete, since at the time there was no Direct3D support.

As of 2004 total sales were around 200,000 units and many of these sales came quite late in the game's life, when increases in CPU power made the game run more smoothly, and after Papyrus had released patches to allow GPL to work with modern graphics accelerators. The addition of Force Feedback support also helped. The release of the game on budget ranges, the inclusion of a demo CD with the Nürburgring in this track's official 1999 season magazine as well as its giveaway in Germany in a 2001 issue of the magazine PC Action, also encouraged newcomers to GPL.

So, how do you get this accurate yet flawed sim running on a modern system and up to date?

Well, you can do it the official way if you like. The official version 1.2 patch adds force feedback, a second patch to add Direct3D and/or OpenGL support and a third patch that gets around a problem that prevented the original game from working on computers with CPUs faster than 1.4 GHz, but the best way is to follow these simple instructions.

(1) Insert your GPL CD and close any windows that pop up.
(2) Run the GPLinstallmax_0.97_UK.exe and install to the default location of C:\Sierra\GPL\
(3) Run the GPL v1.2.0.2 (UK)allinonepatch.exe (2.3)

That will give you an up to date install on Windows but yet again the homebrew scene has brought the best out of this classic game, it even became possible to have GPL running Linux and OS X using Wine and Cider.

These updates also include something called the Bandwidth Patch or bwpatch for short. By default, GPL online will show only 4 cars in front and 1 behind over internet dialup connections so the bandwidth patch increases those numbers to 6 in front and 2 behind or more, and it allows hosting servers to show any combination of cars in front and cars behind instead of the default 75%/25% division. To see what difference the bandwidth patch can make, see these examples.

As with anything, the backbone of this game and in particular it's continued growth and support is the strong community it has built up. It may not be all that not huge but it is dedicated and helpful. There are updates and addons for all the original tracks and cars, for the menus the A.I., the drivers. There are now more than 500 tracks made by the game's fans which are listed at the Alternative GPL Track Database at http://gpltd.bcsims.com.

One of them, the Isle Of Mann TT course, has involved the builder, jim pearson visiting the track and taking still pictures and videos of the entire track with volunteers offering to help him out with other local information and help. If you don't think that's too impressive, Jim lives in Australia. Jim's site is at http://jrpearson.homestead.com.

Online races are organised using either Virtual Racers' Online Connection, VROC or the more recent iGOR (Grand Prix Online Racing). Many other tools are available, including those allowing telemetry-like analysis and sector times as oppose to whole lap times. An important update to do for a server racing online is known as "loose grids." This gives you modified track.ini files for the tracks so that the starting grid is changed to a 1x1 staggered format, giving the cars more room off the line. This is important because online lag and warping can be an issue when cars "merge" if they are in a slightly different position than they appear. If you're not careful lap 1 incidents are quite common when the cars are close together.

Perhaps the most popular and interesting mods are the 65 Mod, the 66 Mod and the 69 Mod.

The 65 Mod

The 65 Mod was released in 2004 as the first community made Mod for GPL and since the game was proprietary software and there were no official tools or SDKs available from Papyrus, almost everything had to be worked out from scratch, and this meant that the whole process took about four years. As the name suggests, the 65 Mod represents the 1965 Formula One season, the last one where Formula 1 used relatively tiny 1500cc engines. It has all the cars and drivers and a changed physics engine which makes it a very popular mod, especially for beginners, due to the fact that the smaller engines in the cars make them easier to drive than the original 1967 3-litre cars, and while still not easy, they are definitely more driveable.

In 2004 the 65 Mod won the 'Best Mod' award at Blackhole Motorsports, an international website aimed at 'hardcore' simracers.

The 69 Mod

The 69 Mod was the next one released, and again as the name suggests it was based on the 1969 Formula One season. This one is interesting because it adds aerodynamic downforce to the physics model, a feature not included in the original game's physics model. As of the initial release, the wings were only adjustable outside the game in the GEM+ utility but the part two release added in-game wing settings.

The 69 mod contains three carsets, one representing the pre-Monaco, high-wing configuration, one representing the post-Monaco, low wing configuration and one without wings as used at Monaco. This is because wings were temporarily banned because of major accidents including one at the thursday practice session for Monaco.

The 66 Mod

The 66 Mod was formally announced on August 8, 2006 and naturally simulates the 1966 Formula One season, with the cars themselves being based on the late season grid to allow as many cars as possible to be nearer the three litre engine formula that the 1966 rules allowed, as opposed to the two litre engines that some teams ran earlier in the season. The 66 teams are the same teams from 1967, but the cars are generally lower powered and generally somewhat heavier than their 1967 counterparts which makes them corner less well.

The 66 Mod includes all the physics developments from the previous 65 and 69 Mods (though even further refined), including the downforce model, more realistic tyre characteristics and the slipstreaming enhancements.

Another new feature with this mod is that car choice has been expanded from seven cars to sixteen c cars, and more tracks than 64 per season can be installed, and to increase the realism of 60's engine characteristics, most run irregularly at low revs.

The Night Mod

Released before the 66 Mod but not as popular was the Night Modwhich includes the original 67 cars and 65 cars but the difference is that they have headlights which allow them to drive in the dark. Until 2008 there had never been any Grand Prix races run in the dark but perhaps now that Singapore has hosted the world's first night race this year, this mod will become more popular.

The screenshots of the Night Mod look amazing.

GEM is a tool necessary for launching the different mods once they are all installed.

http://gem.ebi-service.de

A standard Grand Prix Legends install has a gpl.exe but the 65 Mod copies and renames that to gplc67.exe and creates a new gplc65.exe. The Night Mod uses gpln65.exe and gpln67.exe but instead of you ahving to launch each one of those directly, you run GEM, select the Mod you wish to run and it will launch the correct .exe for you, and also load the car set and .ini files for the Mod.

You can also use GEM to adjust almost everything before you start Grand Prix Legends such as sounds, layouts, graphics and track lists etc. GEM also has a launcher for iGOR.

Like i said, the force behind Grand Prix Legends nowadays is the community behind it, and a great resource for all things GPL is gpllinks.org which has tons of links to all aspects of the Grand Prix Legends communityas well as links to sites about historic real world racing circuits, many of them no longer used.

The online racing community i joined is UKGPL and you can find them, and me, at www.ukgpl.com

Once you get proficient enough at the game and you want to compare your progress with others, including me, you can go and get yourself a GPL RANK using the site at www.gplrank.schuerkamp.de

Here you need to upload your player.ini file or your plac65.ini file for the 65 Mod and the site will chart your progress, give you a final rank and allow you to compare your progress with other drivers and their ranks. You can do it on a circuit by circuit basis or as a whole. It will be disheartening believe me.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about before you go out and buy the game visit www.youtube.com and search for either Grand Prix Legends or the user gxtracker and you will find tons of videos there.

If that whets your appetite you can buy the game from play.com for £33.99 or Amazon for £4. Hmmm. At the very least pick up the demo version which you can find online for free, but for how cheaply it is available for you should really pick up the full game, and once you do you'll take your first step into the community that surrounds Grand Prix Legends.

I had a spare PC sat here doing nothing so I turned it into a GPL Online Race Server for people to practise on in between races initially and actually now I use it to host UKGPL races. There is nothing like having other human cars around you, even during practise to help you prepare for racing. Its fine being able to drive around a circuit, always on the racing line, within a second of you Personal Best each time, but throw more cars, especially human ones, into the mix and people can easily go to the dogs.

This is where you begin to find out if two cars can get through a corner side by side and its no good finding that out for the first in a race. Thats what practise is for, and especially online practise. My efforts here have been much appreciated and I've been given an official UKGPL server number (5.UKGPL). I know, next stop O.B.E. or Victoria Cross, but seriously this is a great community to be a part of and it makes for great racing.

The 67s race every other sunday and the 65s every other Tuesday but there is somebody on the practise server most evenings, or mornings, depending on where you are in the world. So do yourself a favour, pick up the game and I'll see you on track and online.

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