DLC #168 - Grid - Season 2

It seems as though the Grid Season 1 DLC lured me into a bit of a false sense of security - After all, what would one more bump in the road be for a game that's just made me oversee a car bouncing off the walls of an oval track for over 200 hours to earn a trophy?

Season 2 adds exactly more of the same to Grid. 33 new events to tackle in the Career Mode, which are split between 15 Classic Touring GT events and 15 Modern GT events, with an additional 3 for the GT Grand Finale.

An additional 3 trophies added also follows the exact same format as prior, meaning the effort gone into including a large handful of new Career events to potentially work through is yet again wasted on trophy hunters.

Fine by me, although contrary to the sub-1 hour completion time of the previous Season, this one stung me a little bit, with a list of objectives linked to trophies that weren't quite as plain sailing as they were before.

The 3 trophies on offer this time relate to the following Season 2 objectives;

• Beat a 1:53 lap time on Silverstone Circuit Grand Prix with the Brabham BT62
• Beat a 1:54 lap time on Sepang International Circuit with the Ferrari FXX

These first two objectives fit the standard already set from Season 1 - Easily achievable within a small handful of laps at best. However, the final objective stands out, related to the following trophy;

A Wheely Good Time - Complete the A Wheely Good Time Objective.

The "A Wheely Good Time" trophy, awarded for completing the A Wheely Good Time Objective is linked to the following objective requirement;

• Beat a 1:40 lap time on Crescent Valley GP with the Aston Martin Vulcan AMR Pro

I've loaded up each of these time trial objectives with 50 laps, which is a standard practice, but never did this in anticipation that I'd actually need to exhaust the full amount of laps without having achieved a par time - This did somewhat come unexpectedly given how easy the DLC content had been up to this point.

I did see the warning signs fairly early though. The first few laps are always used to get used to the car handling and the track, and even though I never expect to achieve the time requirement within the first few laps anyway, they do act as a good measure of expectations - And I was over 10 seconds short in the early going, which made me realise quickly I was potentially in for a fight here.

The 1:40 lap time is harsh. There's practically no margin for error, and the Aston Martin Vulcan AMR Pro is an extremely fast Supercar that is challenging to control around a track like Crescent Valley, which contains alot of tight cornering and hairpins. I burnt through 50 laps mastering the track and still needed to find an extra 4 seconds or so, so I had to start tuning the car to accommodate acceleration to power through tight corners where loss of speed occurred.

I booted up for another 50 laps, and whilst I was getting close, I was still around half a second, to a full second out from the target time, and after hitting another 20 laps, I decided I had to look into further tuning to squeeze that last second out from somewhere.

After experimenting with adjusting the traction levels, and somewhere between another 10-15 laps, I managed a 1:39.82 lap time, and just about popped the trophy, but I did not expect to put 80-90 laps into any of these trophies when I originally researched their requirements.

Time trials have this fascinating aura of hooking you in sometimes, and the trophy reward on the other side of accomplishment always brings out that addictive form of repetition that simply doesn't exist elsewhere. It may have taken me 3-4 hours for this single trophy, playing this on repeat and only breaking away to delve into some fine-tuning, but persistence will usually win the day.

Thankfully, from here, it's straight, smooth and all downhill the rest of the way.