Archive for the ‘League Announcements’ Category

The first batch of successful team entries have now been announced, further information can be found on the official forum.

We currently have two vacancies available within Sprint Trophy. Applications will therefore be re-opened as of now, until 23:59GMT Sunday 27th February.

Additionally, information as to how to go about submitting your license acquisition fee for the 2011 season, whether you are a team owner or a driver, can now be found on the official forum.

Team applications for the 2011 are now open and will remain open until 23:59 GMT on Sunday 20th February.

You can submit your team’s application by visiting the “Team Application” page found on the GPO home page and entering all of the details, it is also linked to at the end of this message.

On Monday 21st February my fellow admins and I will scrutinise the applications in order to determine the thirteen teams (for each series) that will compete. We will inform you all of the successful applicants as soon as possible following this.

Please complete the entry form for EACH team you wish to enter. DO NOT apply for more than one team entry on a single application.

I must remind you that upon your application being successful, you will be required to submit a £5.00 fee for each team entry. Information regarding driver entry fees will be forthcoming when we publish information as to how to submit your team entry fee.

As usual, if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

APPLICATION FORM: Click Here

You can now download the GPO 2011 Regulations via the link towards the end of this message.

We have also included a seperate document detailing the Research & Development system that will be implemented for the World Championship division of GPO this coming season which you can download via the link towards the end of this message.

The regulations and R&D document are comprehensive in their content and I am confident that they will answer the questions you have asked over the past few days, however, as always, if there is something you are unsure of please feel free to ask and we will do our best to help. Please note that these documents are open to refinement and alteration as we progress through the year. The upgrades system in particular will require testing and pre-season trials to make sure it works in the way that we had envisioned.

Please read the documents thoroughly as there are a lot of topics covered.

*Please note that should there be sufficient demand, we have the capability to add a third series*

DOWNLOAD: GPO 2011 Regulations
DOWNLOAD: GPO 2011 R&D Information

It is with the greatest pleasure that we welcome you to the 2011 season here at Grand Prix Online.

After the success of our first ever season in 2010 we are proud to have researched, developed and tuned what we believe to be a far more in-depth racing experience as you will take the role of a top racing driver to compete on some of the greatest tracks on earth.

Focus for 2011

The focus throughout the league for 2011 is teamwork. Being part of a team is an essential part of any form of motorsport and it is something that we are keen to strengthen and emphasise within GPO.
Maintaining our ethos of quality rather than quantity we will be opening up thirteen team slots in each of our race series to control the introduction of teams and promote the idea of team identity and keep a unique flavour to the grids during the 2011 season.

League Format

The format for 2011 will change slightly with 2010′s GPO challenge becoming the GPO World Championship with the best drivers competing with each other for top honours and perhaps some unexpected prizes. The World Championship will be the pinnacle of GPO and should provide a goal for new drivers to aspire to – can you prove your worth and catch the eye of a team manager to get your break in the WC?

This is not to say that our second series, the GPO Sprint Trophy will be any less of a challenge as drivers from all corners of the globe will gather to compete and prove themselves. In 2010 it was this championship that proved the most competitive with four drivers taking the title fight down to the wire and the constructors championship being decided at the very last race. Again only thirteen teams will be admitted to the series at any one time so team slots will be valued highly and drivers will have to show that they have the skills to be
worthy of a top line race seat.

Both series will benefit from the introduction of a live marshalling system this year that will allow the Race Directors and their team of dedicated marshals to provide on the spot penalties for any race infraction. Joining this system will be the introduction of the safety car; driven by a veteran of GPO and sim-racing in general the safety car will be deployed when the situation arises and will provide a further dimension to the on track action.

The World Championship series will also utilise a new vehicle upgrade and engine management system that will see the teams working together to upgrade and improve their cars over the course of the season whilst also keeping an ever watchful eye on the condition of the allocated eight engines; can you out develop and out think the opposition to get you to the chequered flag first? Only time will tell.

The Mod

Many of you have been asking about the car itself for the 2011 season and we are proud to announce a new partnership with the incredible Reiza Studios. A renowned car, physics, track and overall game developer Reiza Studios will be a sensational team to work alongside in 2011. We have been sworn to secrecy for a long time now as the administration worked closely with Reiza Studios lawyers and copyright partners to ensure we could reach the agreement we all desired. This agreement will see GPO using a custom built 2010 spec Formula One car in the shape of the mighty championship winning vehicle of Sebastien Vettel and Mark Webber – The Red bull RB6. Using the usual system of unique liveries for our teams, every allocated team will be issued the painting template for this car so that they can create their own work of art and have it grace the bodywork of this new vehicle. This marks a big step forward by GPO as we begin to work closely with a well-established mod group. The car itself has taken a great deal of discussion and financial commitment by GPO to secure its use for 2011. This naturally comes with various protection methods, contract agreements and a new, dedicated sim sync tool that will allow us to distribute the mod and the car to the people that deserve it, our GPO community.

Membership information

As a reflection of this, 2011 will bring in a membership application and fee process. This is not something we would do in an ideal world but if we wish to push the league to new heights, provide the leagues members with the best experience possible and also begin to offer prizes and rewards for competing in the league then this is the only way to go. The fees will be realistic and relatively small at just ten British pounds per driver and five British pounds per team (one entry one fee). We believe that we will be offering a league and experience that more than justifies this cost.

We have a staggering twenty race calendar that has already been published, a detailed new rulebook which outlines every aspect of the 2011 season and it’s on track rules, some incredible new tracks to include, new partners still yet to be announced, continued broadcasts from the 2010 season, new admin staff to welcome and some exciting new teams and drivers waiting in the wings. 2011 is building up to be a major step forward for GPO and we hope you all agree once you get a good look at it.

Release Schedule

As for when this will happen; the team and driver application process along with fee payments will open on the 16th February. Once a team’s application is processed the official car template will be sent directly to each team ready for painting. On the 1st March we will take delivery of the actual car from the Reiza factory and the remainder of the 2011 mod will be finalised and released through the SimSync tool to our drivers. After that we will be opening our new server with the Jerez test track for a week’s worth of car shakedowns and test runs. After this first week the server will move to our first official 2011 event, the Bahrain Grand Prix, Round 1 of the 2011 Grand Prix Online Championships. We hope you will all join us for the action beginning on the 12th March.

The warmest of welcomes and the very best of luck to you all.

GPO 2011 is almost ready to open it’s curtains for the upcoming season.
As time progresses, GPO administrators are working very hard to get the best experience for our members. With just a mere month to go till the opening race in Bahrain, the GPO 2011 season is almost ready to open it’s curtains for all members.

Stay tuned for more information!

A bit late perhaps, but the administration of GrandPrix Online wishes you all the best for 2011.

Behind the scenes the administration is working hard to ensure an even better 2011 season.
So stay tuned for some exciting new regulations, mod, and much much more.

An official statement will be made shortly.

It is with great pleasure that we can announce to you the introduction of a support class race series to Grand Prix Online.

In the next update to GPO, as well as the final tracks, adverts, loading screens and the usual things you expect from an update we will also be including a specially modified for GPO Porsche supercup mod and a Formula BMW single seater mod to form the GPO Support series.

Details of the races, times and schedule will be posted in the coming weeks but we can say now that we will not be using the standard F1 tracks for this series. The decision was taken to include some of the very best circuits rfactor has to offer and make a truly great add on to the current GPO series. Templates for both cars will also be included and on the run up to the start of the series we will release a skin pack for you all to include your teams liveries.

We really hope that this will be a good thing for GPO and will open up new doors for the league and give us some more exciting racing as well as a great test bed for upcoming GPO F1 drivers.

Stay tuned for further announcements in the coming week.

Many thanks

The GPO admin team.

You can tune in this weekend for the Challenge & Sprint series to watch these exciting races!
Click the “Broadcast” button to watch these races live.

Broadcasting starting at:
Challenge: 18.45 GMT (Starting with Qualifying)
Sprint: 9.00 GMT (Starting with Qualifying)

It is with great pleasure that GPO can announce its new partnership with simrace.tv, a dedicated simracing broadcasting service. This will provide all GPO races with full broadcasts for the remainder of the year. We are still looking for dedicated staff to help us with the work involved with broadcasting so if you are a budding cameraman or director please drop us a line over at the GPO forum. In the meantime do check out simrace over at their website. A great day for GPO so lets get stuck in and show the world the awesome racing here at Grand Prix Online.

GPO are proud to announce that their partnership with Machinima is now bearing fruits as we have out first video ready for viewing on their site.

Click the machinima banner below to go to the video and check out this amazing hotlap with an incredible commentary track by Jack Nicholls.

Can all drivers registered to drive in either Challenge or Sprint series events please remember to complete your driver allocation for the upcoming race. This is an important part of the preparation for a grand prix weekend and we would appreciate your co operation on this matter. Thank you.

After a bit more work we can now bring you the finished, revised format GPO news articles in their intended double page spread format. With luck you can click the thumbnail below and the full article will load in a larger screen for viewing and reading. We hope you enjoy this as it has taken a lot of preparation and hard work to produce an article of this nature and to be able to bring you a much improved news section. Many thanks. The GPO admin.

Please leave us your feedback and comments. Thank you.

As part of the GPO website facelift currently going on we have updated the links for the free practise screen and the live timing application. You will see these located at the top left of the website and a simple click will take you to either of these applications.

This has been done to allow us to free up some of the tabs at the top of the website for further new content as it is developed. The old links still work for the time being and we will update you all when this is changed. For now though we hope you enjoy the continued updates to your GPO website.

Do you have a team or driver website that you would like to have featured on Grand Prix Online? If so contact the league admin and we will add you to the new team websites bar located at the lower left of this website.

We very much look forward to adding new content and helping your teams and drivers reach whole new audiences.

This weekend GrandPrix-Online will host it’s very first practice session. Two days long, the server will be open to practice for the upcoming Grand Prix of Turkey.

As a bonus to the practice sessions, parts of it will be live broadcasted on XFIRE !

Read more about this on our forum

It is with great pleasure that I announce GPO’s new partnership with Machinima.

As some of you may know, Machinima is the premier online gaming network, receiving over 108 million video views each month across the Machinima network. Videos will also be uploaded onto the Machinima YouTube channels which hold well over 1 million subscribers.

The deal will see Grand Prix Online having exclusive sole rights within the sim-racing community to upload race highlights, reviews and track guides to the Machinima network that will ultimately see GPO gain huge exposure with the online gaming community.

This partnership is a great coup not only for GPO, but for the teams of GPO both now and in the future, both league and team sponsors can look forward to huge exposure via this newly formed partnership.

We will begin submitting videos to Machinima shortly. We look forward to seeing you at the Spanish GP held on 8th/9th May in order to give us some great new footage to use.

As usual, if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact either myself or one of my fellow admins.

The Grand Prix-Online administration is proud to present the possibility to get your Team-logo or sponsor outing into the actual races this season. Do you want everyone to know your team is participating, or give extra attention to your teams sponsor?  Head over to the  forum and read all about it, or make your enquiry to promotions@grandprix-online.com.

At GPO we are constantly searching for new ways to improve the service we can provide, thanks to one of the latest applications developed for the iPhone by Oscar Martin we are now able to provide live timing direct to your iPhone.

To access the new service you must go to the App Store on your device and search for “LiveFactor”. The App costs just £0.59, all proceeds go to the developer in order to fund the LiveFactor servers.

Once you have the application installed on your device simply open the application. In the search bar at the top, input “Grand Prix Online”. Our server is the only one on the list at this time, simply select our server and you will be presented with a box asking for a password, unfortunately we are required to use a password so we have set it as “gpo”; something that is easy to remember for everyone. The application will then connect and you can enjoy GPO live timing on your iPhone.

The application provides session data, driver names and split times aswell as a lot of other information as you can see in the screenshots attached to this post. The best part about this application is that it means the live timing can be accessed anywhere, even when you are out and about.

Round 01 of Grand Prix Online kicks off this weekend in the desert with two races around the Sakhir Circuit in Bahrain.

GPO Challenge kicks off on Saturday evening with a 49 lap event followed by the GPO Sprint Series on Sunday morning with a 25 lap race.

Grand Prix Online has managed to secure the rights to run the 2010 F1 configuration of Bahrain so be sure to tune into PSRTV on Saturday evening for the opening race of the 2010 Season.

Following the creation of GPO back in January we never considered the option of having live broadcasts of our races so early on in our existence.

Fortunately, everything we have done so far has gone ahead incredibly smoothly. Everything has turned out to be much better than we expected, however the biggest coup is that we have managed to gain access to the PSRTV beta program.

This fantastic opportunity to participate in this beta program enables us to be able to broadcast the opening round of the GPO Challenge Championship in Bahrain Live on PSRTV next Saturday. At this point in time the Bahrain event is the only confirmed broadcast but we are busy in negotiations with PSRTV in order to extend this to a whole season of racing.

Following this great news, we have worked towards gaining a team of commentators to provide an enjoyable commentary. We have been fortunate enough to have secured the services of three of the best commentators in the sim-racing community.

You will all be familiar with Michael Lam; he is one of the most experienced sim-racing commentators around. Michael has commentated on a number of series including FSR, GRC, SSCA and the Simtona 500. More recently Michael has been focusing his commentary skills on the many iRacing events that PSRTV cover.

Phil Roberts will be working alongside Michael in the booth, Phil began his commentary career as a pit reporter during the FSR 2009 season, he made the move into the booth at the Spanish Grand Prix when he was promoted to work alongside Michael. As with Michael, Phil has commentated on GRC events in the past and has taken a leading role on many occasions.

Finally, we have secured the services of Nick Rowland. Nick is the most experienced racer of the trio and will bring a racers view to the booth. Nick, as with Michael and Phil, commentated on FSR 2009. He was the lead commentator in a number of the broadcasts as well as working alongside Michael and Phil on a number of occasions.

We are all raring to go at Bahrain for the first round of the Championship in just under a week. With a high quality broadcast alongside a trio of the best commentators in sim-racing we are all in for a treat.

Make sure you tune into PSRTV next Saturday to catch the opening round of the GPO Challenge 2010 Championship.