My Speed Challenge quest

I have always been fascinated by this mode, mainly because Dreamarena players managed such fast times while being forced to use automatic gears with ABS on.  It is very easy to assume that cheating must have been involved, especially as it was quite easy to hack an MSR gamesave or use a Action Replay/Xploder DC device.  

I managed to beat the Dreamarena competition times just over 12 years ago, however I used manual gears and switched ABS off.  I did this by creating Time Trial VMU files for each Speed Challenge course.  However this year, I decided to try and beat those times under the same conditions - automatic gears and ABS on.  After a lot of time and effort, I finally managed to beat them (just)!  It's not all good news though; the London course involved hitting the railings so that could have been the strategy used during the competition.  While I try to race as cleanly as possible, 'playing dirty' is sometimes the only way.  I'll keep trying for a faster, cleaner London time.

Here are the original Dreamarena competition winning times:

Here are my results:

...and here are the videos for each course, including a bonus 'best corner' collection.  All runs were done in 60hz mode; 50hz mode has not been optimised and runs significantly slower.  It took a while getting used to the automatic gears and the 'unwanted downshifts' when you lose speed during certain turns.

It's a shame that the best Dreamcast racing players (who competed in the Ferrari F355 Challenge and Sega Rally 2 internet rankings) were not involved.  If they were, I believe we would have seen some genuine unbeatable lap times!

For more information on the Speed Challenge mode & its Dreamarena competition, please see my blogpost at:  https://msrdreamcast.blogspot.com/2013/04/speed-challenge-competition_3.html