The Team

Team Finalgear is probably the most international team in the Live For Speed community. Our members are from all over the world. We have racers spread all over the globe, starting from the land down under, through Malaysia, across Europe, to the United States. What's more, is that most of us, live abroad. Half of our members were born in a different country then their current location. This brings even more fun and excitement into racing. Unfortunately, it also means time zone problems, connection problems and other obstacles that sometimes disturb our races, but no problem on such a scale is strong enough to overwhelm a competitive racing spirit.

Our Goal

Have fun, enjoy racing, take part in as many dogfights on the track as possible, and make races as competitive as possible. Clean racing and obeying the general racing etiquette being a must. As a team, we do not have any special requirements or criteria each member has to fulfill. The main idea behind our team is to have fun and relaxed races. All decisions are taken together, with everyone contributing to making our races better and better. Be it website coding, video editing, wallpapers, renders, statistics outputs. Everyone is taking part not because it is a must, but because we enjoy racing with each other, which means that action does not end when we leave the track. We are not after publicity, braking world records all the time, racing in other LFS competitions, or advertising by means of guerilla marketing strategies. We are not looking to lock in new members all the time either. We focus on our core competence, which is having fun on the track.

Team History

As with most things, it's hard to tell really where and when it all started. Most of us are huge fans of everything that is car and racing related. Big 'petrolheads' if you wish. One more thing we had in common was the joy in watching one of the best automotive TV shows there is - Top Gear. So one way or the other, we ended up on a Top Gear fan site forum, called Finalgear, where we could discuss everything that is related to the show and the presenters. The forum had obviously sections for general automotive talk as well as motorsports. I believe originally it was Jos who initiated the idea of playing Live For Speed, and the LFS section was born. It was all at a very primitive level back then, 2-3years ago. LFS was in S1 stage, and hardly anyone of us had a full license, so we played mainly the demo version. Graphics was horrible, keyboard players were forced to use car stabilization aid, no aerodynamics engine, no tire wear, no fuel, no damage, hell, even skid marks were not implemented. Not everyone had a wheel either. You might think at this point why on earth did we play this simulator then? Well, one thing did get us addicted to this wonderful game. Physics.

No other simulator could offer such realistic physics as LFS did. And at a price of 12GBP it was a bargain. What's more, this game was specifically focused on multiplayer. No single player championships or task, all the cars and tracks are present, and that's it. Thanks to this, all of us were looking to race online against each other. The regular Saturday session, starting at 19:00CET, was born marking the beginning of our team. To be precise, that wasn’t a proper team back in those days, more like a gathering of car nuts, and racing against each other just for the fun of it. No championship or points, simply one race after the other, till we got bored. This was pretty much all we did until S2 came out. By that time we were all well equipped, fully licensed, and most of us had a wheel already a luckily, because with S2 physics and the new powerful GTR cars, LFS became a proper hardcore simulator.

Although the release of S2 brought many nice things, it also resulted in lower attendance during the weekly races. Not everyone was up to the task of racing GTR cars, some people still didn't have an S1 license and felt that an additional 12GBP for S2 would be too much. Only 5-6 of us remained truly dedicated to racing. It was time for a change, and something had to be done to get more people involved. So I suggested to Jos that we start a small league, scheduled races, different car and track combination every week, and implementing a point system. In its early stage this did't attract as many people as we hoped, and what's more, Jos left us, due to late night work schedule, and a newly found hobby for classical cars, such as the nice VW Beetle that he bought. With Jos not being able to attend our races and spending time with his 'new' car, he also left the Top Gear fan forum overall, leaving the LFS section without a moderator. Somehow I got appointed then as a moderator, in a sequence of quick turns that I dont even remember. Adding more and more rules and twists to the league, things started to roll slowly but surely. The first team car livery was done by that time as well with quite a few people regaining interest in this, and joining us racing.

The other important milestone was the birth of our website, where we had all the information, schedules, pictures etc organized. Enter basic html code, some simple design, and the first static site saw the light on a free webhost server. It did''t take much time to realize this was not going to be enough, so FireFox took matters into his hands. Using PHP coding, the result was a very nice dynamic site, with a lot of information, several sections and a lot of other features. Now that we had a site, people could have a look at Team Finalgear, and the way we do racing business. Meanwhile, the media part of the site got filled quickly with videos by MXM and Mischief, some wallpapers, poster and screenshot edits by me, and finally with some very nice car renders by Morrow. Last but not least, Viper also provided us with a nice sub-domain, and site hosting.

With already one racing season behind us, we started our 2nd season in January, which will end in the summer. A few minor touches to the rules here and there, detailed statistics outputs from each race, screenshots, race summaries and videos occasionally, made this new season quite interesting and successful.

Now we are a proper team by all means. Although, it must be said that we are not very active outside our own championship. University studies and work, keep most of us quite busy, and limit the time that we can devote to LFS racing. Nevertheless with one race evening per week, each race is still hell of a fun, challenge, joy, and excitement. We had a lot of outside people racing with us randomly, and our races don't lack participants anymore.

The Future

FireFox and me are still working on the website, constantly adding new bits and pieces to it, implementing new ideas, and keep adding interesting features on a regular basis. New layouts, poster for each event, currently also a new team skin design, are the things that keep us busy. Busy in a nice way though. Apart from racing, things such as coding and graphics manipulation by means of software such as photoshop, are some of our other hobbies, which we try to combine and make use of regarding LFS racing. We hope that we will enjoy racing in the future and that our team will be still active for a long time.