So you’ve done a couple of races on Le Mans Ultimate now, but you still don’t understand how the online racing system operates, what all the rankings mean, how they change, how you can check yours or why some races are still locked for you.
Well, you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, we will give you the low down for online racing so you can get your rankings up and fully understand the competition system in Le Mans Ultimate.
Online Racing
The online racing competition system in Le Mans Ultimate is made up of three categories: daily racing, weekly racing and special events. All races in each category are updated on a weekly basis and provide you with plenty of options to hit the track. However, daily racing will be your bread and butter.
Daily Racing
Daily racing is made up of three subcategories: beginner, intermediate & advanced. These races are accessible based on your rankings.
To start, everyone new to Le Mans Ultimate will be able to access the beginner daily races. To access the intermediate races, you will need a safety rank of silver, whilst access to the advanced races requires a gold safety rank. These rankings are explained further down the guide, so don’t go anywhere!
If you’d like to know what times the races are so you can plan and register for events, you can click on the schedule tab in daily racing where you can see what time slots are available for each race combination.
Weekly Racing
In the weekly races, you will see a display for the next three upcoming events on the calendar. You will usually get three races every seven days before the cycle updates.
If you click on a weekly race you will find the track and car combinations, event lengths, weather and the rankings required to enter, so you can at least practice for these events offline.
Special Events
The same applies to the special events, which will show you what time and day the special event of that week will open for registration, what combinations are being used and what settings are going to be run on the server, so you can go away and practice ahead of the big event.
How Your Ranking Works
In your driver profile, you will find your driver rank and safety rank which are the key attributes that determine what online racing you can partake in. In your profile and event history, you can see how your driver rank and safety rank is fluctuating from race to race and it’s important to pay attention to this.
Your driver ranking and safety ranking both have progress bars built into them and you can see these increase or decrease every time you race. You can view the actual % of the bars in your race summary sections after a race to see how close or far away you are to ranking up.
By default, everyone begins Le Mans Ultimate with both of their rankings set to bronze* so you will need to hit the track to unlock some of the more complex events that are on offer, such as multi-class racing.
There are four ranking levels to achieve: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum, which reflect how drivers are divided in the real World Endurance Championship.
Within each rank, there are three sub-levels to obtain before progressing to the next, starting at level one, progressing to level two and finishing at level three. Once you hit 100% of sub-level three, your main rank will level up to the next one. This applies to both your driver and safety rankings.
Safety Rankings
Your safety rank is the most important aspect of Le Mans Ultimate’s rating system because it is what helps you unlock new races in the online competition system. Remember that you are being tracked from your very first online race so make sure every session counts.
The safety rank is calculated in a variety of ways as follows:
- Your contact with other cars on track
- Your contact with walls and barriers
- The severity of the contact
- Cutting the race track and getting track limit violations
- Speeding in the pitlanes
- Gettings DNFs and DSQs
- Losing control of your car
The safety ranking uses a three-arrow system in a positive and negative direction. One arrow is a small gain or loss, two arrows are a medium gain or loss and three arrows represent the maximum gain or loss after each race. You can also have races where you neither lose nor gain any safety rating.
Driver Rankings
The driver ranking is what creates the simulator’s match-making algorithms which put you in the most competitive lobbies possible. Your driver rank is based entirely on the strength of the field you are facing each race and your performance in relation to everyone in your split.
If you have a low rank but beat higher-ranked drivers, you will gain more each race. Likewise, if you are ranked highly in your lobby but you lose to people who are lower ranked, you will lose more each race. Each lobby will also have a different strength which will affect how much ranking you can gain or lose.
We touched on how event history was important earlier on and we are back here again to explain in more detail. When you check your event history, you can view your rank breakdown through your race summary. Here, the game will tell you where it expected you to qualify and expected you to finish in the race and if you finished in the top half of the grid in either of those sessions with positive or negative ranking changes.
Other Things To Know
There are a few little tips and things you should know when racing on Le Mans Ultimate.
- *If you have a driver rank in rFactor 2 Online, you share this rank across both titles, so you won’t necessarily begin your Le Mans Ultimate career at bronze driver rank. However, your safety rank is per title so you will still need to work on that.
- You will notice that you can only access the LMP2 and GTE cars through the online competition systems to begin with. If you want to progress to the Hypercar class, you will need roughly 7-10 clean races to unlock the silver ranks that are required.
- Changes to your rankings have much more of an impact when you partake in the weekly and special events on Le Mans Ultimate. This is because they are longer in length, more sporadic and more prestigious. Race clean and get great results here as it will affect your rankings both much more.
- In the Online Daily Racing schedule there is a handy little widget available for you to change the time slots to your time zones so you never miss a race.
