I’m not posting in the Bug section since it is more a question than a bug report.
We all know about the issues with qualifying (well a lot are aware) and since the last two tweaks to balancing this seems to have
come back with a vengeance and quali times for each compound now seem to split into two distinct groups with a gap of around 0.5 secs even though the cars are at similar levels of development.
However, having watched a number of live and offline races I have noticed some very strange behaviour on the 1st lap especially in the first half where some cars immediately move from say 25th on the grid to 10th at end of lap and others drop from 11th to 22nd. There are a lot of inconsistent movements constantly happening on the first lap for most cars with multiple position changes, back and forth. However, often by the end of the third lap the car which started 25th and moved up the field rapidly on the opening is back to their grid position and the cars who lost many places often has not only recovered them but has gained a few extra places. This behaviour is more noticeable in offline races as there are less factors affecting position, but is also seen in live races. The examples I have used are just representative of what I have observed when watching the start of many races.
My questions are could there be a bug that affects the opening lap performance and could the age of the account be a factor for both the qualifying bug and the opening lap inconsistencies? By this I mean accounts are created all the time and some obviously are very old and created when the game worked differently, i.e are all accounts created equal. There have been many updates to this game over a long time and any program that has lots of patches is susceptible to changes causing unintended consequences on other parts of the game. Could the first lap chaos be a result of the qualifying bug as the program struggles to determine a car’s true position relative to others?
I’m just throwing this out there for iGP consideration, based on anecdotal observation and not suggesting I have any evidence to back this up, but something isn’t quite right with both qualifying and the opening lap behaviour.