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I was thinking that i could make one or more snow tracks as a Christmas special.

This is a very nice idea, thanks! Running it directly on the ZakStunts site would be tricky, because the site currently has no support for off-season races, and with everything else currently in the works I don't think we'd manage to implement it before Christmas. However, there are plenty of other ways in which we could run and promote the event, so I'm positive we'll work it out  

After a slight delay, here are the updated rankings for ZCT289! Personal best ratings were reached in this round by Argammon, HerrNove, KyLiE, MiDiaN and Mortimer McMire, each of them continuing a solid run of results. Below is the updated evolution chart:

While I don't have much in the way of data or anecdotes to support any diagnosis on how the Portal is being used, I think visitors landing on it more often would be a good thing, as it offers a broader palette than any of our specific sites on its own.

One potential addition I can think of would be some kind of news feed, which might bring more of a feel of activity. A lot would depend, though, on what and how we would actually post to that feed. (A long time ago, the Portal used to have admin news posts, but it was taken down because it grew too static and wasn't adding much.)

When it comes to car selection, I was reminded of RidgeRacer on the PS1. There is a small overview of the most important features for each car:

This would be very fun to have! I remember having daydreamed with @CTG about a NFS-style display for our cars. Other neighbouring ideas: category and tier lists; Super Trunfo.

Osasco won?

Yes!  3-0 against São Caetano (25/20, 25/21, 25/22) for the third round of the State Championship.

New season at the Liberatti! 

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Yup, the site is up again for now. Between this and that "security" feature, Infinity free doesn't feel like a very reliable host...

Live racing is back on the menu -- thanks for setting it up, @Erik Barros !

The 21st or any other Sunday should be okay for me to join. Saturdays might work too, but in that case I can't commit in advance.

Sunday September 14 should work just fine for me.

I think Erik meant that September 14 is the only weekend day in which he won't be able to host it.

Is a fixed -100% coefficient sufficient to keep all the "cheat cars" at bay? I haven't tested them much so I am unsure how fast they really are.

Excellent question. The balanced bonus for PG Indy is somewhere near -30%, so let's round the coefficient to a nice 4/3. A -100% bonus amounts to a multiplier of 2, so the ratio between the driven lap times would be 2/3 for balance. The free/RH Default record with the Indy is around 30 s, while the time of a comparable lap with the Lada Niva Comeback is around 20 s. So yes, the fastest cheat cars might actually be competitive even with a -100% bonus!

(That said, if we were actually going to implement this, we might as well use -150%, or even have two tiers to distinguish cheat cars from the rest.)

@Matei Do consider posting replays at ZakStunts just for fun; you might actually like it. You don't have to care about scoreboard position or the car bonuses; just pick your favourite car out of the 16 and enjoy the ride. One of the goals of the multi-car system was making this kind of playing possible; Stan286XT did it for a long while in the recent past, and Stingray86 is doing it right now.

I lean against it, precisely for the sake of software parity with those on real hardware or emulators lacking that feature. That's specially considering that vanilla DOSBox (the one most people know and use) doesn't have save states, and DOSBox Staging (which we should make the recommended default IMO) doesn't either. (That said, I won't be horrified if the consensus turns out to disagree with me.)

P.S.: The worst part of the conventional RH workflow for me is accidentally choosing "Re-start driving" instead of "Continue driving". Aaaaargh!!

P.P.S.: Sharing tips and advice about the RH workflow could make for an interesting conversation. (Mine are: pick a systematic replay naming scheme that works for you, and save lots of partial replays!)

How strange: posts in the sub-sub-sub forums here do not show up as the "latest post" in the front page interface.

While this SMF bug remains, I have finally gotten around to removing the extra level of nesting of the Wacky and Beauty subforums 

There is a way to make all cars available: set a fixed -100% coefficient to anything outside the 16-car list for the year. I'm not really joking: this might actually be a useful way to keep cars away from the competition proper while still allowing people to drive for fun with them.

I'd love to see that! But only if @dreadnaut can implement it without going crazy. I guess this would create many special paths in the code (e.g. you must not add the time to the car podiums, you cannot generate a car icon, etc.). You also cannot "just" set a coefficient, you have to ignore the time outright to avoid it skewing the diagrams.

Some of these could indeed get annoying (in particular, I'm thinking of the top-12 graphical scoreboards). If "all cars allowed" proves too ambitious, though, this -100% penalty mechanic could be used in a more limited way as a kind of soft ban.

Besides covering exceptional single-race car bans like those we had a couple times in the past, such soft bans could potentially be used on an original car for the length of a season, be it to make room for an extra custom car, or to reduce the number of powergear cars that are available at the same time.   

Though the LambdaCube project did go dormant AFAIK, the Stunts tech demo subsists as the stunts package on Hackage. I have borrowed code from it a couple times 

Also curious about Mazda 787B, Lada Niva and Citroën XM. I have not tried any but I feel they'd be nice novelties.

I'd love to see the Citroën XM in competition! It's a well-balanced car that could be a good representative of the "proper slow car" tier (example stablemates: Trueno, Thunderbird).

Idea: all cars available and no rules.

There is a way to make all cars available: set a fixed -100% coefficient to anything outside the 16-car list for the year. I'm not really joking: this might actually be a useful way to keep cars away from the competition proper while still allowing people to drive for fun with them.