F1 1965 by CROMS V2.022.7z

F1 1965 by CROMS V2.022.7z


1965 Formula One Season by C.R.O.M.S. (v2.2.0.2)
° ChaosZero, Flying Dutchman, Ozpata, Mgs_ita, Smallblockhero °





At the time I'm writing this, there aren't lots of Formula One historical mods for rFactor: we are plenty of mods from the new millennium of racing, some great others span between the 1970s and the late 1990s, but I've never saw mods going further beyond the 1967 mod by F1Classic aside from the sadly unfinished 1955 mod by Team Players: this is what appalled our team, like nobody knew Formula One existed before that year, in a certain sense.

It all started as a dream ChaosZero, a long time friend of mine, had in his mind: he is more into modern endurance racing and started a mod with yours truly called ILMS – International Le Mans Series: it all went well until my life took its toll and I had to leave almost everything in his hands. He made a great mod out of that initial pile of conversions we had at first.
So, he started converting the cars from the F1 1965 mod by Luigi70 and Wookie, which was a conversion for EA's F1 Challenge '99-'02 sim converted from the original mod made for Grand Prix Legends way back in 2004. Soon after, I joined the party by asking him if I could help him converting the cars and providing the physics necessary to the mod, he agreed.

It was the 10th of February, 2013.

Just a couple of days after, Smallblockhero (a great American fellow: no-one knows how much I've relied on him on the early stages of developing) offered us his help for conversion and we agreed: his models were straight-up conversions from F1 Challenge, but he knew how to do his work and the first conversions were something that really left us speechless.
After a little while, a couple of months if I reckon right, I asked Ozpata over at VirtualClassics for a helping hand for technical data about the cars: he was so enthusiast he gave us both hands, he had endless sheets of data, grids, graphics of every sort, lots of them derived by first-hand experience with those cars back in the day. We also had a big push by Lady Luck because I had a very fortuitous chat with Engineer Mauro Forghieri and former F1 World Champion John Surtees in a café in downtown Modena, in which they gave me every sort of info about the data I had back with me and how to correct them where needed.

COMS (ChaosZero, Ozpata, mgs_ita (me) and Smallblockhero) group was born.

After 7 months and some agreements with Nil, the DRM group and HistorX modding team, the 1.03 version came out: we were quite pleased by it, but me personally I coulnd't find it quite finished: most of the great modding teams take a year to get something finished and we did everything 5 months earlier. To me, something was a bit off, but we decided to release it anyway and patch it eventually if something new popped up.

Soon enough, The Historic Simracing Organization - HSO and F1-S-R forums adopted our mod to run each one a vintage league of their own: there I met DaveSR1 and Flying Dutchman, with the first helping us a lot with tyre physics by making them anew and more realistic than ever and the latter making the greatest classic F1 trackpack you can ever see on rFactor. In HSO forums we've met also JP Campmajo, the author of the great classic Monaco track in the standard form you can see on the 'Net, the track you see in this mod is based on that but it has been heavily reworked by Philrob, MotorFX and François.

Again, as the leagues continued, the partnership between us and both F1-S-R and HSO got stronger by the day, we were giving each other feedbacks about the mod and everyone sent ideas on how to improve it. Months passed and the leagues unfolded and ended, but the mod contined its developing: soon enough Barcika granted us his East London track to be reworked and used, and the original GPL modders came to us in the person of Bill Guillaume to congratulate us for our work and grant us the release of it but we had to give credits for the original team and the one which made the 2.0 version for Grand Prix Legends. Being absolutely respectful of their work, we agreed to do so.

Also, back at F1-S-R, Jeeve79 worked hard to make the intro video you see both here and on Youtube, while Jason White made all the skins for their league and corrected the ones in the base mod because of some colour palette problems. In the meantime our group, now called CROMS to include Flying Dutchman (the "R" is for is surname) and reward him for the hard work he did, was proceeding at full speed: it was a continuous flow of data, mod revisions, track revisions, videos and car sounds.

And now, after 15 months, the final result is what you have in your hands: we hope to give you the great passion we have for these little beauties, the big grins we have on our faces while we drive them in four-wheel drift and the great satisfaction a good race can give.

We hope you like this mod as much as we loved to make it.

See you on the racetrack!