Grand Prix 2 is a computer game from Microprose where you are the driver of a Formula I car. In case you don't know, Formula I is the auto racing series that many people consider to be the world championship.
Grand Prix 2 is often described as a simluation, rather than a game, because tremendous effort has been made to make the driving experience as realistic as possible. In real performance driving, for example, you spend little effort concentrating on steering the car. Instead, you concentrate on looking where you want to go, and making sure that your timing (such as when you start to turn in, or when and for how long you brake, or when you start to ease on the throttle) is correct. If this is done right, the steering some how takes care of itself. Don't ask me how this works - it is just the way it is. Where you get into trouble with a real car is when you wait too long before braking, or get on the accelerator too soon or too hard, or just plain go into the corner too fast.
With most of the "driving" games I have tried, however, you spend most of your energy fiddling with the steering, wandering back and forth across the road. Throttle control and braking seldom play much of a part, and it is virtually impossible to drive "the line" because the car simply never settles down. If you do enter corners at ridiculous speeds you can sometimes manage to flick the the steering wheel (or joystick) just right to keep you on the "road", and if you do go off the road, you can usually flick yourself back on again.
With Grand Prix 2, the steering feels much more natural, and the car takes a "set" as you drive. You end up looking where you want to go, rather than continually fiddling with the steering. If you enter a turn a little faster than the program determines you have grip for, well, you go off the course, with the severity of your spinout related to your speed and how little traction you had.
Besides the driving feel, many other aspects of GP2 are realistic. The drivers and the courses are taken directly from the 1994 Formula I season. Since playing this game, I have started keeping up with Formula I (Jacques Villeneuve's success is a bonus!), and the cockpit views you see on TV are just like those in the game. I know the F1 courses by heart now - it is the only way you can play the game - and it really gets me involved when I watch the televised F1 races.
You can practice on the tracks (both to learn how to drive them and to figure out how to best set up the car) and you can race. There is no point racing on a track until you know every turn of the track, and, unless you are playing at the "rookie" level, neither is there a point racing on a track until you have set the car up just right. (At the rookie level, I have found it possible to win races with the default car setup). What do I mean by "set up the car"? Well, GP2 allows you to modify the spring, damper and anti-roll bar rates, the front-to-rear brake balance, the wing settings ("more" wing turns more of the air resistance into downforce, slowing you down but increasing your grip in turns) and the gear ratios. Each track has different demands, and a different setup is required to get the fastest lap times.
For me, the most frustrating aspect of GP2 is to get the car set up "right" for each track, so that I can just concentrate on driving. I have searched the Web for fast setups, but the ones I find invariably allow fast laps times, but with an illegal amount of wear on the plank (F1 cars have a wooden plank underneath that is not allowed to wear down more than 1mm during a race to prevent drivers from lowering their cars too much). Yes, the game even simulates how much the plank wears!
For this reason, I have posted my current car setups at the bottom of this page. Feel free to use them as starting points, if you have GP2. My car setup methodology is to keep tinkering with the setup (the game manual is full of advice) until I can be competitive with the leaders (with the game set to "Ace" - the most difficult level), with negligible plank wear. Recently, I have started saving my fastest practice laps using my setups - for sceptics, I have these available for some of the tracks. (You can play them back in GP2 by "replaying a hot lap").
Perhaps the biggest drawback to GP2 is the hardware requirement. My old Pentium 90 was too slow to allow much graphic detail. The game looks and feels much better on my Pentium 200 MMX. You can control how many frames per second the game displays, and how much detail of the surroundings is shown. Faster frame rates and more detail really improves the experience, and I could use more than my Pentium 200 MMX can deliver. If you have an older slower computer, I'd say forget GP2 and look for the original Grand Prix, which is based on the 1991 season, doesn't have as much detail, but still has most of the good points of GP2 yet runs well on slower machines.
Another hardware requirement is something other than a plain joystick. You can play the game with the keyboard or a joystick, but it sure doesn't feel like driving. I have played it with one of those flight-yoke joysticks, which feels like driving except that you press the whole thing forward to accelerate, and pull back to brake. These are not too expensive ($40 or so), and work well.
But once I found out how realistic the game is, and how expensive it is in terms of wear-and-tear to take my own car to a real track (which I still do twice a year), I spent 200 [Canadian] bucks or so on a Thrustmaster Formula-T2 steering wheel/pedal set. This has a fat rubber-covered wheel with good "return to center", a "shift" stick (just forward and back, no real gear-shift pattern) and a separate unit that goes on the floor with accelerator and brake pedals (no clutch pedal). I have found that this setup lets me get enough of my yah-yahs out to help me endure the long months between trips to the real track. I have wired in my own buttons on the steering wheel to change gears (like they have on the real F1 cars), rather than use the supplied shift knob. The F1 cars require a lot of shifting, often mid-turn, and I think it is better practice to be able to keep both hands on the wheel through the turns. (In any real car I am likely to drive, I won't be shifting mid-turn!).
The default setup for this is "on" when you first install the game, and I left it that way for a long time. Every once and a while, I would try to drive some courses with steering help turned off, but I would always crash much more easily, and driving the courses seemed much "busier" (requiring more constant fiddling with the steering wheel), hence less "realistic" to me.
As far as I can tell, steering help is designed to automatically make minor steering corrections, as long as the general direction of steering is correct. This makes steering easier, and forces you to concentrate more on throttle and brake control when you are taking corners. Again, this felt more "realistic" to me, since in real driving, the steering really does seem to "take care of itself" somehow (no doubt related to the sub-conscious corrections you make because of the shifting 3-dimensional view combined with changing lateral G-forces, neither of which is available in GP2).
However, as I got quicker on the various courses, and started keeping track of my best times, I would occasionally notice an artificial feeling due to the steering help. Also, if I took a line through a corner different from what the game decides is the "ideal" line, the steering help does its best to put you back on the ideal line, rather than let you follow through with your chosen line. This artificiality encouraged me to keep trying to drive without steering help from time to time.
Finally, I realized that with the steering help turned off, you actually need to learn the courses all over again. Once I took the time to totally re-learn a track with steering help turned off, the steering is really not any fiddly than with the help turned on. You DO need to steer a bit differently, particularly through hairpin turns. With the steering help off, the artifical corrections the game makes are gone, and you can take any line you like through a turn, in case you want to experiment with different approaches to a particular corner.
Interestingly, good car setups (for me) are quite different depending on whether steering help is on or off. I have found that to go my fastest with steering help on, the back end of the car has to be quite "loose". In particular, it seems to be best to have MUCH more downforce on the front than the back, even though this requires a higher ride height to prevent the car from bottoming out. I suppose this helps to steer the car with the throttle better, since minor steering corrections with the wheel are going to be ignored (because of the steering help). With steering help turned off, these same settings become very difficult to drive, since the car always wants to spin due to terminal oversteer. A more balanced setup (with a correspondingly lower ride-height to make up for the lost grip due to less front downforce) works better.
In short, I now prefer to turn steering help off. When you are first learning the game, you might want to leave the steering help on, but I would recommend weaning yourself off of steering help sooner, rather than later, so that you don't need to re-learn as many of the tracks. Incidentally, some other steering related settings I currently prefer are: Opposite lock help-off, Low sensitivity zone-50%, Maximum Lock-14 degrees, and Reduce with car speed-50%.
If you've read this far, you either have GP2 or have decided that you are going to go buy it! In either case, here are my car setups for the various tracks which you are welcomed to try. The time shown for each track is the best time I have been able to achieve with the setup, and it contains a hot lap you can run to show you how I got the time. (I have found it very instructive to "ride" with the other drivers in a race - after I crash, of course - to see where their cars are faster, or what line they drive). My best laps always look quite ragged to me (missed apexes and so forth) but I guess that is one consequence of being on the edge!
I have finally re-learned all the courses with steering help turned off, and on every track, I have been able to go faster without the help than with it. All the setups below are designed to work without steering help. As I improve my times, I will update these setups.